Former Louisvillians find needs of Cambodian kids outweigh financial rewards

A child being treated for malnutrition after being given a donated American toy.
(Photo courtesy of Bill and Lori Housworth)

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By Laura Ungar • lungar@courier-journal.com
June 22, 2009

One mother after another carried weak, dehydrated babies across an arid landscape in rural Cambodia to a tent where Drs. Lori and Bill Housworth were treating patients.

The babies had been sickened by polluted water after their families were displaced and left to live in tarp-covered shacks without toilets or running water.

The Housworths did what they could as volunteers, doctoring and helping build outdoor sanitation facilities. But this visit in 2002, and others, convinced them that they needed to do more.

"It was an experience that really impassioned me for the needs of the Cambodian people and the desperation many of them face," Lori Housworth, 39 said during a visit to Louisville.

The couple's calling eventually led them to leave two jobs in Louisville, move to Cambodia with their three small children and devote themselves to easing the suffering of children on the other side of the globe. Today, Lori, who used to work at Family Health Centers, volunteers her time holding medical clinics. And Bill, 41, directs the Angkor Hospital for Children in Siem Reap, where he earns less than a quarter of what he did as an emergency room physician at Norton Audubon Hospital.

The experience has been difficult, even harrowing. They sleep beneath mosquito nets, and one of their daughters was once almost snatched by a zoo elephant. But the Housworths say they've gotten as much as they have given in their new lives.

In Cambodia, children are more than 10 times more likely to die before age 5 than in the United States. About two-thirds of Cambodians live on less than a dollar a day, and 45 percent of children show moderate or severe stunting in growth because of malnutrition. And there are only two doctors per 10,000 people, compared with about 26 per 10,000 in the United States.

"Thousands of children suffer and often die from preventable and treatable diseases: malnutrition, malaria, respiratory infections, diarrhea and diseases practically eradicated in the more-developed countries," said Danielle Hilson, chief executive officer of the non-profit Friends Without A Border, which runs the Angkor hospital.

While the Housworths can't fix every problem, they can ease some children's pain, said Steven Hester, a friend and chief medical officer for Norton Healthcare.

"We don't realize how many people we touch. I think impacting people one at a time is what Bill and Lori do," he said If they help save a kid, you never know what that kid is going to do, how they are going to improve their country."

The Housworths, who have been married almost nine years, met as medical residents at the University of Louisville. Rotations abroad reinforced for them the vast health-care disparities between the developing and the developed worlds.

After their residencies, they continued international volunteerism in various countries, sometimes in missions through Springdale Community Church.

"As we worked in more places, we had a growing interest in this type of work," Bill said.

Back in Louisville, both treated the uninsured and felt they were doing good. But they realized they could easily be replaced because there are so many other doctors. As they began thinking about full-time work abroad, they also built an international family, adopting two babies from Russia, Rachel and Will, in 2003. About two years later, Lori gave birth to Caroline.

Around the same time, they briefly moved to Massachusetts to earn master's degrees in public health from Harvard University.

All the while, Cambodia came into sharper focus, partly because they connected with the late Dr. Mickey Sampson, a Louisville native who created Resource Development International, a non-profit supporting water treatment and health initiatives.

"We fell in love with the people and the place, Lori said.

One day, Bill turned to Lori and expressed a wish that predicted the future: "I would like to run a pediatric hospital in Cambodia."

The opportunity soon arrived.

A job came open through Friends Without A Border, a secular, global non-governmental organization. Its 50-bed hospital, which operates on a budget of $3 million a year, treated more than 107,000 children in 2007, including nearly 4,000 inpatients.

Bill interviewed in New York, visited the hospital in Siem Reap and loved it. Lori realized they had good friends in the area and that their children could get a good education. It seemed a perfect fit.

So in February 2008, they moved halfway around the world — surprising none who knew them.

"It's completely in character," said Tammy Ackerson, a nurse at Audubon who worked with Bill.

Living and working in Cambodia, the Housworths are reminded each day of why they are there.

The terrible legacy of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime remains. According to Friends Without a Border, 1.5 million people were executed, starved or died as the result of forced labor at their hands in the 1970s. "The genocide left the country's infrastructure decimated and her people orphaned," the organization wrote. "Today, many Cambodians still struggle to reconstruct their lives, while battling abject poverty."

Children suffering everything from dengue fever to heart defects come to Angkor from 60-190 miles away, often coming by ox-cart and motor scooters and selling belongings or borrowing money for travel expenses.

Bill recalled a girl who fell out of a tree. As her chest filled with blood, her family traveled 60 miles down a bumpy dirt road to the hospital, where she spent a week, but survived.

Bill said the hospital sees 400 children a day, and every evening the staff must make hard decisions about who is sickest and can stay. Many families set up camp on the grounds while children are treated, cooking food rations the hospital gives them.

Bill spends about a fifth of his time doctoring and the rest teaching residents and overseeing a mostly-Cambodian staff of 240, including 30 doctors and 100 nurses. Under his leadership, the hospital recently launched a heart surgery program in which donors pay for congenital defect repairs costing about $6,000. Six surgeries have been done so far, one on a little girl named Mey who had a hole in the wall between the two upper chambers of her heart.

"Through a one-time surgery, she's fixed," Bill said.

Angkor is now building a satellite clinic about an hour away, where Lori plans to work In the meantime, she volunteers at mobile clinics throughout the area, often seeing 40 people in three hours.

Outside of work, family life has been an adventure. The Housworths live in a Cambodian neighborhood, where they have befriended local families. They have a three-bedroom house, which is extravagant by local standards but still lets in bugs. The family jokes that it's like camping all the time.

In the past year, their house was burglarized and 6-year-old Rachel was grabbed by an elephant as she tried to feed it through a zoo cage with widely-spaced bars. As the trunk began to reel her in, two family friends saved her.

Their life has been much tamer since early June, when they returned to the United States for a month-long visit. On a recent afternoon, they stopped by Audubon, where Bill's former colleagues shrieked with delight and offered hugs.

Bill and Lori said they miss family and friends in Louisville. But for now, Cambodia is home — and living there is no sacrifice.

"When you give yourself away, you really do get so much back," Lori said. "You have so much joy."

Reporter Laura Ungar can be reached at (502) 582-7190.