The Angkor Hospital for Children, founded by renowned Japanese photographer Kenro Izu in 1999, supported by Friends Without A Border, provides comprehensive medical care to children in the Siem Reap area. On average, 400 children and their families arrive at the hospital each day. Recognized by Cambodia’s Ministry of Health as an official teaching hospital, it serves as a training site for health professionals throughout Cambodia through its Medical Education Center. The Capacity Building and Health Education Program works to both strengthen the capacity and improves the quality of local health centers and works with community members to teach good public health practices. 

Charity Navigator, America’s leading independent charity evaluator, endorses Friends Without A Border with four stars.

www.angkorhospital.org | www.fwab.org

Helping Change the World for Children in Rural Cambodia

Dr. John and Nina Cassils are co-founders of the Cassils Wettstein Asia Fund that advocates for clean water, healthcare, education and income generation in South East Asia. Having traveled extensively throughout South East Asia since the mid 1980’s the Cassils formally co-founded the Cassils Wettstein Asia Fund with Wieland and Susan Wettstein in 2005. Together with the Wettsteins, the Cassils are committed to projects in SE Asia including the Angkor Hospital for Children. Their philosophy is to work directly with those in the field. In 2003 Nina learned about a Canadian involved at Angkor Hospital for Children and their unwavering commitment to work with AHC began. The Cassils continue to visit all their projects in SE Asia annually.

“We are honoured to be part of the 10th anniversary of AHC and witness the groundbreaking ceremony for the new satellite program. We have great admiration for the personal achievements and sacrifices made by Kenro Izu, David Shoemaker and the 28 recipients working at AHC since its inception to make AHC a center of excellence in pediatrics. AHC has played a key role in rebuilding Cambodia’s health and medical educational system and is a model hospital for all of SE Asia.

The new satellite program in Sot Nikum is of great importance allowing swift access to medical treatment without the exhorbitant cost of transportation thus encouraging families to seek treatment before their child is seriously ill. With 30% of AHC patients coming from this area, the new facility will take some of the pressure off the already heavily tasked AHC in Siem Reap. We congratulate the staff of AHC, the volunteers and donors for making Kenro’s dream a reality.”

Dr. John and Nina Cassils on behalf of The Cassils Wettstein Asia Fund

Download a PDF describing the 10 year history of AHC (11mb)

Helping Change the World for Children in Rural Cambodia

Children are the innocent victims of the most drastic consequences of poverty. In Cambodia, thousands of children die each year of preventable and treatable disease and it is not uncommon for a child to die of complications from respiratory infections, diarrhea, and diseases which are practically eradicated in the more developed countries.

In this impoverished and battered country, the mortality statistics are earthshaking:

• 15% of Cambodian children die before the age of 5
• 35% of Cambodian children are not immunized for polio, measles, or diphtheria
• 45% of Cambodian children under 5 are moderately to severely underweight
• 12,000 Cambodian children under the age of 15 live with HIV/AIDS

Angkor Hospital for Children (AHC) will replicate the quality pediatric treatment and teaching programs that have earned its acclaim by building a new pediatric wing which will be a part of the government-operated Sot Nikum Referral Hospital. The presence of this new pediatric center will relieve families from taking the arduous journey to AHC to get proper care for their children thereby reducing the morbidity and mortality of delayed treatment and saving time, saving resources, and saving precious lives.

In the long term, the success of this model pediatric health care facility may lead to additional such centers, allowing AHC to extend its successful health care programs throughout the country, especially into poor rural farming regions. It is conceivable that this project may be the start of a dramatic improvement in Cambodian healthcare.

The AHC Satellite Program has been designed in collaboration with the staff at AHC to maximize efficiency of operation. It will include all the necessary accoutrements of a modern hospital. And, recognizing that properly trained, quality health professionals can mean the difference between life and death for many children in Cambodia, the Satellite will effïciently and effectively combine resources with AHC staff to provide the best training for all doctors, nurses, lab technicians and pharmacy staff.

In addition to basic treatment, healthcare education and medical training objectives, the pediatric center will:

• encourage admissions for emergency treatment for children referred from health centers and other referral hospitals
• engage relevant existing health agencies and NGOs to improve links within the community
• bring health education directly to communities in Siem Reap Province while working to strengthen the quality of services available at local government-run health center

The new Angkor Hospital for Children Satellite Program is ready to begin transforming the face of health-care in Cambodia! And, who knows, in the words of former President of the United States, William J. Clinton: “There is hope that Cambodia can be a model for the rest of Asia and perhaps the world… ”

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.

For volunteers though, life in Siem Reap has few hardships, as the city boasts a tourist infrastructure capable of handling the Angkor Wat crowds. Only during working hours do volunteers see the ‘real Cambodia’, whose families travel from all over the country to take their desperately sick children to AHC. The hospital staff are charming, and the lingua franca is English (which, owing to great differences in sound and structure from the Khmer language, led to delightful phrases in the charts such as, “the road was very pumpy” and “some food was lost because of dog biting”). In short, AHC is a wonderful place to volunteer. The only risk is that, as some have found, you won’t be able to tear yourself away. (By Rebecca and Nicholas Canadian Volunteers Summer 2008)