Former Louisvillians find needs of Cambodian kids outweigh financial rewards

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.
Advertisement

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, chie