Route From Manila Ran Through Libya, Sudan, Tanzania

Dr Anita Traun’s route to Phnom Penh has been remarkably circuitous.

On graduating from the University of Santa Tomas in Manila, in 1975, Dr Traun had already been bitten by the travel bug during two years as an exchange student in Libya. 

She took her family medicine specialty skills off to Iraq for six years, then to the Sudan for a further year, working as a company physician and accumulating further interests in obstetrics, internal medicine, pediatrics, surgery and occupational medicine.

Next, she bounced off to Tanzania where she spent six years in the late 1980s and early ’90s working for a Danish-funded organization helping villagers learn about home-based care for AIDS patients. 

“There was such stigma attached to the disease that people wanted nothing to do with their relatives when they got sick,” she remembers. “Often, they would just take them out into the country and leave them to die.”

Village by village, Dr Traun and her co-workers talked to people and told them about methods of transmission of HIV and the need for families to take care of their sick relatives. 

“We were able to make a big difference and the program was very successful in changing community attitudes,” she says. “It was a time when AIDS was not well understood by many people and the education role was very important because the government could not afford to hospitalize those people.”

Her next stop was Cambodia and in 1996 she set up the Phnom Penh Medical Services practice on Norodom Boulevard in partnership with a Cambodian physician, Dr Ouk Chan Phoat. 

At the clinic, the areas of service include internal medicine, infectious diseases, pediatrics, ob/gyn, STD, dermatology, maternal and child care, immunization and laboratory analysis.
The basic consultation fee at PPMS is $30. 

—Elizabeth Wright