Owens House
The Owens House is a guest home and education center in Phnom Penh for pregnant, HIV-infected women who come in from the countryside to deliver their infants at Calmette Hospital, in a program mentored by Maryknoll.
The house is funded through The Sharing Foundation by the generosity of the family of Martha Ives Owens, who with her husband Bob and two daughters, perished in the Lockerbie disaster.
The pregnant women stay at Owens House and attend classes about HIV, infant care, and clean water preparation for bottle-feeding, prior to delivery. They receive antiretrovirals before delivery, and their infants receive niviripine right after birth, which cuts the transmission of HIV from the mother to child from about 25 percent to about 5 percent. After the birth, the mothers return to Owens House for variable periods. When they go home, they receive a TSF basket with formula, baby clothes, blankets, and cleaning essentials. All babies and mothers are scheduled for follow up in a Maryknoll program.
Safe Water Projects
Water supplies in the Phnom Penh region are frequently contaminated by arsenic, parasites, and bacteria. To supply pure drinking water, the Foundation has donated numerous filtered rainwater collection systems in Roteang Village and at multiple schools in the area along the Mekong River.
Other Health-Related Projects
All of the children of Roteang village have been immunized, full series, by TSF, in a project organized by Elephant and our orphanage doctor. Volunteer Cambodian medical students helped administer over 7,000 individual shots, for Hepatitis B, and for Tetanus or DPT. College students get typhoid immunization as well.
Multiple families with seriously handicapped children are supplied with rice, dried fish, oil, and soy sauce monthly at their homes, so that the mothers can stay home and care for these children, instead of considering abandonment.
In the summer of 2007, TSF enlisted local students to work with the Foundation to fill a huge stagnant water trench. Extra dirt arranged by Elephant finished the project. It turned out to be a serious summer for Dengue Fever, and this preventive action was extremely timely.
A new, ongoing dental program for fillings and preventive care was instituted for the orphanage children in 2007 by a volunteer Canadian group, who are in country regularly and able to follow-up with our children.
