Meet David Abrams, president of the CWHO board

David Abrams is a healer. A nurse who works with the Seattle school district, Abrams works with many Cambodian children from time to time. “I understand the baggage they deal with as a result of their country’s suffering.”

“I’m very intuitive medically as a provider,” he says. “My intuition led me to go to Cambodia. The more I learn about it, the more I see there is a need for the remediation CWHO offers.

“When I first went to Cambodia in 2003, I wanted to bring healing to that country,” he says. “Part of my own family didn’t make it out of Warsaw and the Nazi holocaust during World War II.” Abrams has visited Cambodia six times, and met his wife, Tewan, there.

He seems always to have had a kinship with Cambodia. As a youngster, he gave himself the name “Dary”, which he later found out means “shining star” in the Cambodian language.

Most of the Cambodian expatriates in the Puget Sound region – which boasts the third largest Cambodian immigrant group in America – are refugees. Most of the educated people in Cambodia were executed during the Pol Pot regime, or died during the civil war. Many of the people who come here are illiterate both in their home language and in English, Abrams says.

“There aren’t that many projects here in the United States helping Cambodia,” he says. “I had been looking for a chance to use my expertise to help Cambodians, so I was really excited to hear about CWHO. I made an immediate connection with them and offered to serve on their board of directors.” He then became vice president of the board, and in 2008, president.

Abrams also serves on the board of directors of the Seattle Education Association, and is former president of the Seattle School Nurses Association. “As a nurse, I have professional skills to identify problems and solutions. Coupled with my construction background, and exposure to different communities in my many travels, these are organizational skills that I bring to the group.”

How do we respond?

Abrams feels America owes a great debt to Cambodia for the suffering this country has inflicted on the Southeast Asia nation.

“How do we, as Americans, respond to events that our government was involved with for 20 years? Thirty nine years ago, our country bombed Cambodia illegally for four years. Our bombs made 2 million Cambodians refugees. We replaced a government with a puppet regime, and let Pol Pot kill nearly 2 million Cambodians with torture and the Killing Fields. Today there are still 6 million unexploded landmines in Cambodia.

“So what do we do, as educated people? Can we really say, ‘Oh well, too bad’? No, I think it’s time for us to say we’re going to do what’s right.”

Abrams says that conservative estimates are that the United States policies in the 1970s set Cambodia back hundreds of years in its development. “While repopulation is taking place, a lot of that is immigrants from Vietnam, China, and other neighboring nations. So the original Khmer segment of the population is much smaller percentage of that population than we might think.”

Abrams is especially concerned about maternal health issues.

“Out of 100 women, 38 get to see a doctor during their pregnancy. That’s compared to 55 or 56 women per 100 in Somalia.”

We need to stop so many mothers from dying

He has seen the lack of medical resources Cambodia faces firsthand. During one trip, he walked around Cambodia with a principal from an elementary school out in the bush, with a little satchel of medications, going from house to house. They would try to figure out how to treat the people with medicine from his bag. They didn’t have many medicines or much knowledge to go on. “It’s a mess,” Abrams says.

“This country is trying to pull itself up from being pretty much wiped out. How’s that going to happen? It’s going to happen from the families repopulating, and that needs to be a healthy process. We need the offspring to be healthy, and we need to stop so many mothers from dying. If we can build the clinics, that can make a big difference,” he says. “Our plan with CWHO is to train the traditional provider, the birthing attendants, beyond the training they normally would receive. We’re going to try to give them what they would have had if the country’s educational system hadn’t been destroyed. We’re going to try to bring that back to them while still honoring their traditional ways.”

“I’m hoping other educated people like me will feel the call to assist Cambodia, and work with me directly to walk part of their spiritual quest to touch their inner self and work to heal the injury Cambodia suffered as a casualty of the Western World’s military-industrial complex,” he says. “We have our game plan, we know what we want to do, now we need the money and the experts to help make it all happen. “