Dr. Sarath Chhim is AHF’s Asia Bureau Chief. His story is next in our “I Am AHF” series featuring remarkable staff, clients, and partners who are doing what’s right to save lives everyday. Interviewed by Diana Shpak, Knowledge Management Focal Point, AHF Europe.
When I was seven or eight years old, the civil war reached my hometown. Bombs fell nearby. To stay alive, my family dug holes in the ground where we slept and ate. Food was scarce. Sometimes, we ate only rice with salt or fish sauce—just enough to have some taste. That was my childhood. I only completed the first grade of primary school before the country fell under the Khmer Rouge regime.
I was born on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, into a poor family with seven children. I was the sixth, and life was full of challenges from the very beginning. My parents worked extremely hard, often leaving my older sister to care for the younger children. My earliest memories are not of play or school, but of running, hiding, and surviving.
In the areas where I lived, medical care barely existed. One nurse acted as a doctor for the entire area, giving everyone the same painful injection—penicillin. Years later, when I became a doctor, I finally understood what that injection was.
One night, burning with fever, my mother and brother carried me to a clinic, but it was closed. They knocked, but no one answered. They went to an ice store, but it was also empty. Desperate, they searched until they found a small piece of ice to place on my forehead. That night changed my brother’s life. He promised to become a doctor—and he did. He later became one of Cambodia’s most respected gynecologists, known for serving the poor with compassion, and eventually worked with the World Health Organization. Although he passed away six years ago, his kindness lives on. His example inspired me to follow the same path.
When the Khmer Rouge took over, life changed overnight. People were told to leave the city for just a few days for safety. Families took almost nothing, believing they would return. They never did. My family was forced to march for months into the countryside. I was separated from them and sent deep into the forest to herd cows. Because we came from the city, I was labeled the “child of a capitalist family” and treated harshly, while local children were favored as “children of socialism.”
I lived barefoot with one torn set of clothes—no blanket, no pillow—caring for around 120 cows each day. Among them was always one leader: strong, wearing a large bell around its neck. Wherever it went, the others followed, except a few that escaped to eat rice in forbidden paddies. When that happened, I was punished.
The forest was freezing at night. I made fires to stay warm and used smoke to keep mosquitoes away. Food was scarce. I survived on watery rice, wild leaves, and fruit from the forest. Many people died of starvation. I survived because I was able to find food in nature. That was the beginning of a very dark chapter.
Two adults who lived with me in the forest knew traditional healing methods using plants. They taught me how to recognize bark for fever and leaves for diarrhea or dysentery. We boiled them and prayed they would work. Some trees even provided water—if cut just right, a few drops would fall. That was all we had. We couldn’t bathe for months. During the rainy season, we sometimes found ponds or streams to wash, but the rest of the year our skin cracked and itched, full of infection from the mud. At night, we wiped our legs with grass and slept like that.
One time, I nearly drowned. What looked like shallow water swallowed me whole. For a moment, I felt life slipping away—until my foot touched a rock and I pulled myself out, trembling and breathless. During those years, life and death were always that close—just one step apart.
Sometimes, when water was nowhere to be found, I drank from muddy puddles mixed with cow urine. It was survival. Nothing more.
The Khmer Rouge regime lasted three years, eight months, and twenty days. In 1978, families were relocated again. My aunt’s family was told to move, and my parents begged to join them, but were told there was “no space” on the ox carts. Days later, we learned the truth: those people were taken away and killed. To this day, we don’t know whether there truly was no space—or if someone secretly saved us. Later, my parents recognized the clothes of their relatives being worn by others in the village.
Fear ruled everything. You could die for saying one wrong word. When the regime finally collapsed in January 1979, with support from the Vietnamese military, my family walked back to Phnom Penh. The journey took nearly three months. We were barefoot and hungry, pushing the sick on a makeshift wooden cart. Each day, we walked a few kilometers, cooked a little rice, and slept wherever we felt safe.
My family and I were luckier than the two million people who died under the regime due to violence, starvation, and disease.
Near Phnom Penh, survival continued. Only my two sisters and I were strong enough to search for food. The Vietnamese military controlled the city and did not allow entry, but we found ways to sneak through.
When schools reopened in late 1979, I studied for about a year before leaving to help support my family. In 1982, I resumed my education through part-time night classes in Phnom Penh. Often, there were no teachers or electricity. Sometimes, we simply stood in the dark and talked. But my desire to learn never faded.
After two years, I qualified for a medical assistant program—part of a government effort to quickly train health workers after so many doctors had been killed. I passed the exam and began working at Prey Veng Provincial Hospital. There were very few of us. I treated emergencies, pediatric cases, assisted in surgeries, and slowly learned English from American surgeons supporting the hospital.
The Mennonite Central Committee later sent me to India for six months of medical training. I learned by standing beside doctors, observing patients, and discussing cases. That was where I truly learned medicine.
After returning, I continued working at the provincial hospital and eventually completed my Medical Doctor degree. In early 1998, I joined my first HIV/AIDS organization—the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, later localized as KHANA—as a Care and Support Officer and Team Leader.
In 2002, I received a scholarship to Belgium to earn a Master of Science in Disease Control in Antwerp. Upon returning, I was promoted to Program Manager, supporting one of Cambodia’s strongest HIV alliances. We strengthened local NGOs, funded small projects, and built community-based networks.
I was not familiar with AHF at first. At an international HIV conference, I met a doctor from India who later became AHF’s Southeast Asia Bureau Chief. Years later, he contacted me for help organizing meetings in Cambodia. Eventually, he asked me to join AHF.
There was no AHF office, no team, no Memorandum of Understanding with the government. But I realized the time had come to focus on treatment. AHF’s mission—cutting-edge medicine and advocacy regardless of ability to pay—reflected exactly what inspired me.
I signed the contract in 2005. I remember sitting there thinking, where do I even begin?
I spent months convincing ministries to allow AHF to register. Finally, the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Dermatology, and STIs gave permission to begin in two remote provinces—the ones no one wanted. The roads were terrible, but I went. I gathered local people living with HIV—barely twenty at first—and promised I would help. Some cried when they heard treatment might finally come. They told me, “If you come, you will be respected like a god.”
The first site opened in a small room inside a provincial hospital. Then another opened. Then the national military hospital in Phnom Penh joined. Trust began to grow.
Within months, patient numbers soared. Where other clinics served only small numbers, AHF sites reached hundreds. We built partnerships with local NGOs and peer networks, creating a system rooted in community trust.
The turning point came when AHF Cambodia won Global Fund Round 8, competing against six large international organizations. They had high costs and many foreign staff. We proved it could be done with local resources—cheaper, stronger, and sustainable.
Today, about 75% of people on ART in Cambodia are covered through AHF’s cooperative programs.
I later became Asia Bureau Chief and now oversee programs across India, China, Nepal, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Indonesia, and most recently Bangladesh. I am deeply proud and grateful for AHF’s ongoing support.
Leadership, to me, is about building teams. I don’t want to be seen as a boss. We cook together. We celebrate together. Everyone matters—from staff to patients. When people are happy, I am happy.
We come from different countries and cultures, but we share one mission. Policies and guidelines keep us moving in the same direction.
I am also a proud father of two daughters. My eldest, 24, studied in Boston and is exploring public health. My youngest, 17, will soon study civil engineering. They have their own dreams, but I just want them to be kind and strong.
Sometimes, memories of the war still return—the cold nights, certain smells, a song from the past. The hunger. The fear. But also the strength.
I started with nothing. Now I see a vast team saving lives.
Everything I do is for life—for people to live.
