Winnipeg Free Press
Winnipeg nurse helps restore a shattered nation
By: Rick Friedlander

SIEM REAP, Cambodia — David Shoemaker, a nurse from Winnipeg, stumbled upon Siem Reap during a volunteer trip to Southeast Asia in January 2000 and decided to return to continue his efforts. He’s still there.

Siem Reap, site of the architectural wonder of the world, Angkor Wat, shows Cambodia’s tentative steps toward economic growth. When I first saw it in 2004, Siem Reap seemed to be another dusty town with a great attraction, slowly emerging in the global tourism market. When I revisited it a year ago, billboards were promoting new shopping malls and cellphones, and hotels were competing with aid groups for real estate.

It has helped that a decade has passed since Pol Pot died quietly in the jungles of northern Cambodia. Brother No. 1 and his radical form of agrarian communism, enforced by the dreaded Khmer Rouge, brought the country to its knees. No one is doing more than Shoemaker to get it back on its feet.

“What has kept me here for so long? Quite simply, it is the people, the doctors, nurses, housekeepers and the rest of the staff at AHC (Angkor Hospital for Children),” Shoemaker said. “I have never experienced a country where the people want so desperately to learn and improve.”

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Five weeks passed very quickly at the Angkor Hospital for Children in Siem Reap, Cambodia. We were tasked with producing a report on malnutrition, and thus sifted through about 150 patients’ charts to gather data. Our supervisor, David Shoemaker, also dispatched us often to follow-up on patients and, in the process, to see the ‘real Cambodia’: a conservative society revolving around the family and the field. It was a world apart from our native Canada; when we reported that a child, admitted to AHC in 2007 for malnutrition, had since been crushed to death by a cow, we were told that this happens frequently in Cambodia.

The chart review itself was equally fascinating. Written into the charts were family trees as large as they were complicated. The notes described murder, incomes below one dollar a month, fluctuating family sizes, appalling malnutrition, abandonment, and cases of HIV transmission via wet-nurses’ breast milk. And so, over five weeks, we were introduced to the private life of Cambodia.

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