Jim Cousins'75, M.D. at work in the Phnom Penh clinic he established for SOS International in 1998.Overcompensation? Perhaps. But in any case, the Colby years, not just the language requirement, were difficult for Cousins. To begin with, he didn't get into Colby when he applied. But with friends there, he wanted nothing more than to go to Colby, too. So after a year at Southern Methodist University he transferred.
Because of a housing shortage, he was put into a fraternity house, which proved disastrous to his academic focus. Then he moved off campus, which didn't help. Cousins was young and undisciplined, he realizes now, but he had a great social life--until the dark day when notice came saying Cousins had to leave Colby.
"I worked really hard in high school to get into Colby," he remembers, "and I didn't get in. I worked really hard to get into Colby in Texas. Then I got to Colby and I had my dream, and I sat there looking over Johnson Pond from this beautiful room I had in this frat house. And everything just fell apart."
He went south again, to the University of Miami, where he earned straight A's. Before returning to Colby he also earned his commercial pilot's license, took the exam for his real estate license, got his study habits in order, took a class in France and worked as an orderly in a Waterville operating room (under Richard Hornberger, M.D., who, incidentally, wrote M.A.S.H.).
With encouragement from then-Dean of Students Earl Smith, Cousins returned to Colby, on track to finish only a semester late. This time, he took a keen interest
in French and in his French teacher, a
young woman from Paris. This seemed
to be the key he needed to unlock the language: l'amour.Cousins graduated in 1975 with a degree in psychology and plans to follow his French tutor to Paris, where he hoped to get a degree in biology from the University of Paris, with an eye toward medical school.
The relationship didn't work out, but his former instructor did introduce him to Catherine, who had recently returned from a year in Seattle.
When Cousins finished his biology degree, he and Catherine, by then his wife, moved to Miami, where he enrolled in medical school. They now have three children. Tim '02 graduated from Colby last summer, Kim '04 is a junior at Colby, and Jerome, who is 11, lives with his parents in Cambodia.
The clinic's exterior. Sandbags and barricades form the perimeter of the adjacent U.S. Embassy.Around the time Cousins was finishing at Colby, the name of the Angkor Kingdom rose again in Southeast Asia. This time it was Angkar, a shadowy entity also known as the "organization." It was formed in 1960 and for years, even after it had taken control of the country, even after tens of thousands of people had died for opposing it, no one knew quite what the Angkar was.
In 1977, two years after he'd led one of the most brutal social reorganizations in human history, Pol Pot revealed to the world that the Angkar was in fact the Cambodian Communist Party, comprising high-ranking members of the Khmer Rouge. Eventually Cambodia lost 1.7 million lives to the barbarity of this new Angkar, before Vietnam invaded in 1979, chased the Khmer Rouge into the mountains and installed its own government.
Today the hole left in Cambodian society from that time still gapes, and that is partly why Cousins is there. The Angkar orchestrated the elimination of nearly the entire educated class, along with thousands of others. Teachers, intellectuals, engineers, farmers, diplomats and anyone who spoke French were killed as enemies of the Angkar. Of 530 practicing physicians in Cambodia in the early 1970s, only 32 survived. When the Khmer Rouge fell, 20 of those survivors fled the country.
That left 12.
Now Cousins, who seems to be here for the long haul, adds another.
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