We are Nancy Post and Chris Jacobs, who recently spent time in Siem Reap, Cambodia. There, we met and spent time with a wonderful, generous family with a teenage daughter (nicknamed Ning) who dreams of being one of the very few fully-trained women doctors in Cambodia, a country still reeling from the killing of doctors and other professionals during the Khmer Rouge period.

Our goal is to raise the $24,000 required to send Ning through 8 years of training to become a doctor.

Here is Ning's father's story:

My name is CHUOP Sarorn. CHUOP is my family name. In Cambodia, it is written before the given name.

I was born in 1985 to Sarun, my father, and Samrim, my mother; both are farmers. I am one of seven children in the family. One passed away a long time ago, 3 weeks after he was born. I remember that most baby deliveries were made at home because there was no health care in the village. I am the second after my older sister. Now my parents have three sons and three daughters. Everyone is married and has two children except my youngest sister, who doesn't want to have a child because of her family's financial problems.

I have two children. Sarun Sanitalent (Ning) is 17 years old, and Sarorn Sokhalay (Jane) is 13. Ning has, for a long time, had a dream to become a doctor. Doctor is mostly a man's job in Cambodia. My wife told Ning a story when she was very young about my wife's younger brother, who died in 2005 at the age of 17 after eating preserved meat in a sandwich. Because of the Khmer Rouge regime, most doctors had been killed, and many of them had never been trained or studied to become good ones. This is why he died from receiving the wrong or overdosed medicine. That story has made Ning want to be a good doctor to help people and improve health care in Cambodia.

She studies hard because she wants to make her dream come true. As her father, I did not encourage her, and I sometimes tell her to forget it because it is so expensive to study to become a doctor in Cambodia. In my job as a tour guide, I work several months during the high tourist season only and can only afford the food and bills of electricity and water. I plan to sell the land that my father gave me in a village in Kampot province. It probably can help her a few years in school. I can't sleep very well at night when I think about her dream.