Local family returns from eye-opening trip to Cambodia

Julie Kirkwood

Between 1975 and 1979, Khmer Rouge guerillas in Cambodia set out to relocate the entire population into agricultural labor camps. In less than four years, roughly 30 percent of the nation's population was killed, either through starvation, torture or execution.

An entire generation of teachers, police officers and doctors was wiped out -- targeted along with foreigners, Christians and Muslims, and anybody who resisted.

Andover doctors Tom and Rebecca Hoerner knew this history when they arrived in Cambodia last month on a medical volunteer trip.

But it didn't hit home until they spent time in Phnom Penh hospitals.

"You don't see any 45-year-old doctors," said Tom Hoerner, an orthopedic surgeon with Essex Orthopaedics in Andover. "They don't have a core of mid-life experienced physicians to educate anybody else."

Rebecca Hoerner, a pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Cambridge Health Alliance, said she noticed the same thing.

"There are very few people my age in the hospital," she said.

The couple used two weeks of vacation time to travel to Cambodia through an organization called Health Volunteers Overseas, just returning this month.

Tom Hoerner spent his days doing rounds and operating on broken arms and legs at a free charity hospital in Phnom Penh and at a nearby state-run hospital. His wife visited hospital laboratories and gave the local doctors much needed advice on safety and techniques. Unlike the automated, highly efficient laboratories in the United States, these laboratories are operating at the level of an American lab in the 1950s, with a lot of the tests done by hand, she said.

"There are only five pathologists in the country for a population of 13 million people," she said. "They're starting from scratch. ... Their equipment is quite old. A lot of it is borrowed and donated."

The Hoerners brought their youngest daughter, 17-year-old Hannah. She volunteered at a nearby school, helping a class of third grade students practice English. She also helped her mother inventory laboratory materials and toured a pediatric hospital with her father.

Hannah said she found the Cambodian children to be curious, welcoming and giddy over small pleasures, such as blowing bubbles and singing songs.

She also found the medical conditions sobering, especially in the pediatric hospital where young children were fighting cases of dengue fever and HIV/AIDS.

"I didn't know what to expect going into it," Hannah said. "I'd never been to Asia, let alone to a developing country. ... It just impressed me how gracious the people were. They welcomed me so much."

Cambodia has been politically stable for nine years now, and it shows, Tom Hoerner said. Though the health care system is rebuilding from virtually nothing, he said he left with a great sense of hope and a feeling that he had seen a nation on the path to recovery.

"I think the Cambodians are going to be OK," he said.

Rebecca Hoerner said she went to Cambodia not sure if there would be anything for a pathologist to do, so it was eye-opening to realize how much the people in her profession could contribute.

She said it also made her appreciate her life at home.

"We take a lot for granted in this country," Rebecca said.

And though he was exhausted when he got back, he said the trip was rewarding, just like his trip three years ago with Health Volunteers Overseas to Vietnam.

"Any time you're not doing your usual job, it's reinvigorating," Hoerner said.