Unshakeable Activism

One Woman Brings Hope to Cambodian Kids
By Elizabeth Eidlitz

While her mother was listening to FDR’s Fireside Chats on the radio, Nancy Woodward was ministering to baby dolls in the pretend hospital she set up in the sunroom of the family’s Hanover, New Hampshire, home.

Almost sixty years later, while some retired classmates from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School were playing golf and booking cruises, Nancy Woodward Hendrie ’54, MD, was repeatedly flying 8,713 miles to build Roteang Orphanage, a cornerstone project of The Sharing Foundation (TSF). It aims to improve conditions for Cambodian children, an estimated 45,000 of whom die each year from preventable starvation and treatable diseases.

Today, Roteang Orphanage, where permanent nannies (rather than rotating caregivers) are assigned to children in a 1:2 ratio, is home to seventy-one infants and children. All have been admitted without regard for medical diagnosis. Nearly half the orphans will remain in TSF’s care indefinitely.

Hendrie, who practiced pediatrics in Massachusetts for thirty years and was elected the first female medical staff chief at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts, finds running a nongovernmental organization challenging: “There’s no template. You need constantly to come up with original solutions.” But her experiences in an era when it was uncommon for women to become doctors taught her “to be feisty and to refuse to give up, even when the odds seem long.

“In 1960, married with two small children, I interviewed for a residency in pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital,” she recalls. “The distinguished Dr. R. Cannon Ely told me, ‘if you were the Virgin Mary maybe we would consider you, but, obviously, you aren’t.’”

Reading that the new Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study was enabling married women with PhDs and young families to go forward in their chosen fields, Hendrie wrote to Radcliffe College president Mary I. Bunting, “Have you thought about women doctors who are stalled in the same way?”

Awarded Bunting Fellowships for 1961–62 and 1963–64, Hendrie became the first half-time resident at Boston Children’s Hospital, working in the outpatient clinics and emergency room three full days each week for two and a half years. Granted one full-year residency credit, she then completed the required inpatient residency year and became board certified in pediatrics in 1969.

“Intent and focused, a diagnostician and problem-solver for friends as well as patients,” according to longtime friend Carolyn Bell Eastman ’52, Hendrie is energized by challenges, whether imposed or chosen, and by a sense of outrage. In “our fabulous land of too much, where we nauseate the rest of the world as we wallow in it,” she is appalled at American sprinklers soaking lawns while 70 percent of Cambodians drink contaminated water, and by the price of Wal-Mart’s dancing Santa ($39.95), which could instead buy full immunization coverage for two Cambodian children.

After closing her office in 1994, feeling that HMO regulations and inundating paperwork were increasingly taking time away from patients, Hendrie redirected her skills. Assisting American adopters by evaluating children and providing medical care in China, she recognized that thousands of children in developing countries were a more important issue than the relatively few adoptees. Desperately poor Cambodia, where she launched The Sharing Foundation in 1998, seemed much more compelling in its needs.

Ten years later, sixteen TSF initiatives serve more than 1,500 children daily. Vocational training at the self-sustaining sewing school qualifies village girls for skilled jobs in Cambodia’s garment industry. A medical intervention program has reduced transmission of HIV from mother to newborn from 25 percent to about 5 percent. Farm-outreach-project workers earn home-improvement credits, exchangeable for roofs, outhouses, and tanks to hold rainwater for drinking and cooking. Students in multiple educational programs can envision a future beyond fishing, selling noodles, or prostitution.

Hendrie says her proudest moment came when ten students sponsored by TSF through high school were accepted by universities in Phnom Penh. These college students, now joined by seventeen more, are the first in their families, and the first from their rural village.

“For a long time, various Cambodians, not used to having people show up who didn’t want something, asked what religion we wanted them to convert to, or who to vote for,” Hendrie explains. “But we have no political or religious agenda; we work directly with village chiefs and school principals to target their communities’ most pressing needs. Gradually, we’ve hired and mentored fifty-seven Cambodians who’ve assumed all leadership positions.”

In-country director Chan Kim Leng, known as “Elephant,” grew up in the jungle and saw his five-year-old brother killed by the Khmer Rouge. Today, Elephant oversees the work of managers for the orphanage, cooperative farm, sewing school, and English, computer, and Khmer literacy schools. He personally manages outreach programs such as monthly provision of rice, dried fish, oil, and  soy sauce to families with handicapped children at home.

At seventy-five, Hendrie flies to Cambodia every third month—despite year-round dust, heat, and humidity—to work with Elephant, oversee the projects onsite, plan new ones, and review, line by line, the monthly expense reports submitted by every program manager. “She’s an autocrat,” says Fred Watson of New Hampshire, a TSF supporter, “but Nancy’s constant attention to detail and economy is her secret to success, especially in a country noted for corruption and waste.”

What makes TSF work? A talented board of professionals in their own fields; sponsors of orphanage children, high school, and college students; individual donors (including a 105-year-old woman who sends her monthly bingo winnings); and volunteers who “come out of the woodwork with skills we need.” (A family of five constructed a playground funded by a Florida Lutheran school; a longtime Montessori teacher made three trips to help set up TSF’s preschool; two Seattle college ESL professors spent four weeks training bilingual teachers at TSF’s English school.) Since neither Hendrie nor any other American is paid, TSF keeps its overhead at 9 percent or less.

“With so much need in places like Cambodia, you feel your time and money are well spent,” Hendrie says. “It’s like very tarnished silverware. You can see the results of some elbow grease very quickly.

“The endowment we’re building will ensure that, unlike many nongovernmental organizations, The Sharing Foundation will not be guilty of starting projects, raising hopes, and then abandoning them.”

Learn More: There are more photos of The Sharing Foundation’s work in the Photo Albums. Click the first photo to start the slide show. More information on TSF can be found at their web site.

Photo of Nancy Hendrie by Ruth Armknecht; other photos by Nancy Hendrie