Caring for Cambodia’s Mothers

A mother with her newborn at a health center for post-partum care. (Credit: RHAC-ToGoH/USAID)

A health center midwife performs a check-up on an expectant mother. (credit: RHAC-ToGoH/USAID)

May/June 2012
Robin Mardeusz and Sopheanarith Sek
USAID

When Sok Na, from the village of Smach Kek in rural Cambodia, gave birth to her baby at the Ream Health Center in Sihanouk province earlier this year, life looked very promising. However, three hours after her delivery, Sok began to bleed excessively.

Fortunately, she had the support of midwife Hoy Ny. Hoy suppressed the bleeding—and knew further care was needed. Trained in emergency procedures, Hoy contacted the referral hospital, requested an ambulance, and asked the doctors to prepare for the patient. Thanks to coordination and a rapid response, Sok was rushed to the hospital, where doctors were able to save her life.

Sok’s story is more common in Cambodia now than it was 10 or even five years ago. Hoy was able to apply the midwife skills that she learned through the USAID-funded Together for Good Health (ToGoH) project implemented by the Reproductive Health Association of Cambodia (RHAC), a Cambodian NGO providing health services since 1996.

Widow Rescues Cambodian Orphans

Marie Ens

At 73 years of age, a former pastor’s wife wants her life to continue to count. She launched a mission in Phnom Penh to help widows and orphans.

By Emily Wierenga

Many of us dream of retirement as a time when we’ll no longer need to lift a finger. Not Saskatchewan native Marie Ens. When asked to retire from The Christian and Missionary Alliance in 2000, the widow decided to start an organization in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, called Rescue, which would allow her to keep on working.

“I didn’t want my life to consist of just sitting there, waiting to die,” says the 73-year-old author who spoke at MissionFest 2008 in Toronto. “I still wanted my life to count. Even after my husband passed away in ’91, I felt God say my missionary career wasn’t over.”

The former pastor’s wife and mother of four joined the Alliance in 1961. Along with her husband and children, she worked in Cambodia on and off until the country’s collapse in 1975, when they returned to Canada for a short while to plant a church, then headed to France where they worked with Cambodian refugees.

Whereas before she trained pastors and started churches, Rescue allows Ens to work with hundreds of orphans and AIDS victims at an orphanage called Place of Rescue.

“The work I’m doing now is more natural,” she says. “Now that I’m an older woman I want to be a grandmother.” With 12 grandbabies of her own and 140 at Place of Rescue, her desire has been more than realized.

When asked about her vision for the children, Ens replies: “That they soar like a kite. We [she works with a Cambodian director and houseparents] want them to reach their full potential. Whatever God has in mind for them we want to see fulfilled.”

Only four years old, the organization already consists of an orphanage, two large homes called “granny houses” for elderly women, another building for young pregnant factory workers and a transition house that assists the orphans with obtaining life skills and a job.

Following MissionFest Toronto, where Ens taught seminars on Third World countries and AIDS, she is returning to the land and people she has fallen in love with. “I hope to keep doing this for the rest of my life,” she says.

Emily Wierenga is a writer and artist based in Blyth, Ontario.
Originally published in Faith Today, April/May 2008.

WFP to grant $64 mln in aid for Cambodian in 2008-2010

PHNOM PENH, Dec. 6 (Xinhua) -- The World Food Program (WFP) will provide more than 64 million U.S. dollars in aid to Cambodia from 2008-2010, local media reported on Thursday.

The WFP executive board has approved the grant, which will focus on two projects over the next three years, Cambodian-language newspaper the Koh Santepheap quoted Thomas J. Keusters, country director of the United Nations humanitarian agency, as telling Cambodian Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Hor Namhong during their recent meeting.

The first project, livelihood improvement cooperation restoration, will receive nearly 57 million U.S. dollars to achieve four main goals including providing food to school-age children, and helping people living with AIDS or tuberculosis as well as victims of natural disasters, said the WFP country director.

Under the project, TB patients will receive medicine and 30 kilograms of milled rice per month, said Keusters, adding poor primary school children will receive food to support their family.

The second project, worth more than 7 million U.S. dollars, will help reduce maternal mortality rates and promote maternal and infant health.

According to Keusters, four-month pregnant women will receive food until they give birth and their children will inherit the aid until they reach two years of age through the Ministry of Health and local authorities.