For some of the villagers in Cambodia, she was the first Westerner they had ever seen. Everywhere she went, curious eyes followed her. Her pale skin, curly blonde hair and the language she spoke sparked curiosity.
“Now they have a stereotype about what Westerners look like,” she said. “My actions represented a whole country as opposed to me, Elizabeth Fields.”
A graduate student in public health, Fields worked in Cambodia last summer for a nonprofit organization called World Relief.
Fields recalls a meeting with a Cambodian woman as one of the most unusual experiences during her two-and-a-half-month stay. When she visited one of the small rural villages, people started gathering around her. A woman approached Fields and said something to her in Khmer while holding up her baby.
Soon Fields realized the woman wanted to offer Fields her baby. The woman thought Fields would be able to take better care of her baby, and thought it would be better for her and the child because of their poverty. When Fields explained she didn’t have any means to raise the baby, the woman got mad as if saying, “Why didn’t she take my child?”
In contrast to its beautiful scenery surrounded by fertile lowland and tropical forest, Cambodia has endured decades of war and genocide by the Pol Pot regime. The country is still struggling to rescue peace and stability from the violence.
Much like the woman who offered her baby to Fields, many people in Cambodia are suffering from poverty. Because of the continuous strife, women and children account for large percentages of the population structure in the country. Women are the major workforce as manual laborers and older children take care of babies and younger children.
Fields said the image of a poor, undernourished girl holding a younger sibling who is also malnourished is a very common sight in the impoverished squatter slums. The children who care for siblings are often sick themselves and do not have the opportunity to be adequately educated in childcare, nutrition, or first aid, she said.
Many Cambodian children do not know how to protect themselves from diarrhea, dengue fever, HIV, AIDS and other infectious diseases. The educational system in Cambodia does not focus on health care, and many children don’t even have the opportunity to attend school. One of the only ways children learn about health care is through outside organizations like the one that Fields worked for in Cambodia.
World Relief, located in Chicago, has conducted a program called Hope for Cambodia’s Children for several years. The program aims to improve the impoverished country through basic health education as well as to share the faith of Christianity.
Visiting rural villages in Cambodia, program staff teach children simple health care through skits and biblical spiritual lessons. Fields assessed the actual effects of the health education through a comparison study among 19 villages. Fields designed and executed an evaluation of this program under the supervision of Dr. Cathy Heaney of Ohio State.
Working for the program fulfilled the practicum requirement for her degree at OSU. She said, however, the desire to work internationally originally stems from her own Christian faith. “I was deeply challenged by the life of Christ, and I realized that this would have an impact on my future plans – giving to others because Christ first gave to me,” she said.
Fields, who grew up in Jackson, Mich., and finished her bachelor’s degree at Taylor University in Indiana, had been to Mexico, Haiti and Albania before working in Cambodia. Every time she traveled in Third World nations, she could not avert her eyes from the poverty that the nations suffered from and the disparity between those nations and America.
Two-and-a-half months in Cambodia was enough for Fields to get a taste of real life there and to get past the “honeymoon stage” of being in a new culture. In addition to the mental difficulties of being the only American, she also experienced physical difficulties: Throbbing back pains from riding on “motos” (mini motorcycles) for four hours some days, no public restrooms, dehydration and sunburns, and the most difficult, getting amoebic dysentery.
Despite all the difficulties, she said she could not stop thinking of people that she met in Cambodia – People she worked with all the summer, all the children she saw in the program and people who welcomed her warmly. “I think they are very gracious people despite what they’ve gone through in their history,” Fields said. “I came away with the higher respect for the people and deeper appreciation of the type of poverty that they are in, type of issues that they are dealing with.”
Fields said by working primarily with Cambodians, she was able to further develop cross-cultural skills and to observe many public health and medical programs. “It further confirmed my desire to work in the developing world,” she said.
While overseas, Fields often encountered the situation in which people approached her, asking her for specific treatments for their health problems, she said. In addition to her public health training, she wants to gain further experience in medicine. She wants to pursue the Graduate Entry Program in the College of Nursing this fall.
“I think I was still in a novelty stage when I left (Cambodia), but I definitely did have some wake up calls,” she said. “As a result of these experiences, I developed a deep desire to share the knowledge and education that is so basic in more developed nations such as the United States. My trip to Cambodia was life changing,” she said.
