Wheelchairs at last!

A few of you have asked about the wheelchairs, and yes I finally got them. And yes, it was as nightmarish as my first attempt, maybe even more so, knowing how corrupt the system was this time. This time I went to the customs office with Mony, the Khmer man who has been acting director of TTLC. I had written a letter on his behalf with all the required information, checked that he had his Khmer ID and the registration documents for TTLC. We handed over the documents and the official took his time going over them. Then he asked "Who is Mony"? I pointed to him and the official said "no he's not, he is Kosal" and showed me his ID card. Sure enough that was his name. Frustrated I explained that he failed to mention his REAL name and he demanded that we go away and re-write the letter (this would be the fourth), with his actual name, his date of birth, his postal address and ID number at the top. Frick! We spent 40 minutes driving around the busy streets of Phnom Penh, ducking and weaving people, bicycles, motos and dogs to find an internet cafe where I could re-type and print the letter. I added the necessary details, and wrote the address shown on Mony's ID card, rather than his current address, just in case the official would complain because it doesn't match. 


So off we trotted back to the customs office. He fluffed around a bit more, stamped each page, told us we had to go downstairs to have someone stamp it again. By the time we got upstairs again it was 4:30, and he said he would give the documents to the right channels and to come back at 11am the next day.


So dutifully at 11am we came back to the office, only to be told that the official was not there and was busy in a meeting. Not knowing whether to wait, our translator explained that it would be best to come back at 2:30pm after lunch break, as it was unlikely we would be able to see him before then. When we came back at 2:30, he eventually arrived at 3pm, saying that he had everything ready that morning and when he came back to the office we were not there. Well perhaps the message could have been passed on to us, so we don't have to guess his every move?! Once the documents were handed back to us, we rushed out to the dry port. Once there, we were informed that I had not yet paid the leg of the shipping from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh. Oh the irony, considering if I had know it would have gone there first I wouldn't have shipped it to Phnom Penh, as Sihanoukville is significantly closer to where I live! So we had to go back to that shipping office and fork out over $200. By this time the port was closed. Another day with no results.


So onto day three, we took a tuk tuk out to the port early in the morning. We were shuffled from office to office for over 2 hours, waiting for databases to be pulled up on computers, admin and processing fees were requested at every stop along the way "you need to pay for the typing", and documents checked over and over. There was absolutely no rhyme or reason to the way they operated, we went upstairs to a room on the left, then across to a room on the right, then downstairs to a room on the right, then back upstairs to a room on the left, then right, then left...more money requested $3 here, $10 there. No one used a telephone or email for communication, everything was done face to face and I felt like a piece of driftwood, alone and awash in a sea of excommunication, being pulled on an unpredictable current, destination unknown. 

Eventually, bewildered and very near ready to call it quits and just put it down to a big mistake and count my losses, we were ushered to the  nearly empty warehouse. More fluffing around, showed packages that clearly were not wheelchair shaped as they ummed and ahhed over whether they were the cargo or not. Finally we set eyes upon the actual boxes and the process of storing them on the tuk tuk began. 5 boxes got strapped to the roof and 1 in the actual tuk tuk. Now to work out how to get them them back to Kampot, a 3 hour journey. We managed to fit 4 in a van and 2 in a car. Steve is currently helping me adapt on wheelchair for Sok, a boy I am working with and I hope to give another to a little girl with an intellectual disability. 

Siem Reap Silk Farm and Acoda Orphanage

In early July, Jed and I went to Siem Reap. We caught a bus from Phnom Penh which took about 5 hours. Siem Reap was nothing like any other place in Cambodia I had seen. It was very westernised, jam packed with pubs and cafes and restaurants and massage parlours. There is even a street for westerners called "pub street". There are little laneways leading off pub street with quaint Italian cafes, icecream parlours and garden bars, much like Melbourne. Felt nothing like Cambodia, except for the tell tale tuk tuk drivers bugging you every step ("tuk tuk Miss", or "Sir" sometimes!) and the notorious Dr Fish Massage tanks on every corner! Jed was offered heavy drugs several times, must be his suspect shady facial hair. We soon found the markets; the markets along the riverside selling colourful pants and dresses, mostly from Thailand, silver jewellery, shoes, wooden souvenirs and oil paintings of the temples and the Night Markets, with much of the same, but with slightly higher prices for tourists. 


We discovered a gem of a place, The Blue Pumpkin, a bakery and icecreamery with a upstairs floor with wall to wall couches and folding lap tables, menthol infused cold refresher towels and crisp air conditioning. It was a welcome sanctuary from the outside bustle. 

We found out about a free trip to a silk farm, with Artisans d'Angkor which was an eye opening experience. Here, mulberry trees are grown and the leaves are picked and fed to silk worms which reside in trays in the nursery, where they are fattened up to produce silk. They eat for 26 days continuously and when they are fat enough, they make cocoons, expecting to turn into silk moths. Unfortunately for them, this will not be the case as the cocoons are boiled to kill the pupa and make it easier to extract the thread. 

Coocoon shells in the sun

Raw silk thread being extracted from boiled cocoons

Getting thread straight from the cocoons

Working at the loom on intricate patterns

The raw silk thread is rough and thick, and dyed using natural dyes from herbs, plants and even rusty nails. The silk is thinned further then hand weaved on primitive looms by women who earn less than $90 a month. The work is intricate, repetitive and time consuming. I was fascinated by how these women have the art down so precisely. The silk thread is actually dyed at intervals along the strand, in order to create the pattern when it is woven on the loom. So the colours on the threads all need to line up to reveal the pattern - talk about tedious! I have much admiration and respect for this craft, but also great sadness for the quality of these women's lives, holed up in a warm shed doing back breaking, finger numbing craft for such little pay. As tourists we feast upon purchases of silk scarves in the market, without a thought for the person who crafted it.

Check out all the threads she has to keep track of!

The same evening we visited Acoda Orphanage for a free Apsara dance performance as recommended by Trip Advisor. The children put on a musical dance performance every evening and afterwards tourists are asked to give a  donation for their education. 

TTLC

As you may remember, I was volunteering at TTLC, a therapy centre for children with cerebral palsy. Last February, I had my doubts about the types of methodologies they used which are based on the Doman-Delacato philosophy of cross patterning, however I thought I would go with it for the time being and do my own research. I soon discovered that it is not evidence based practice, has been banned by some paediatric boards and was actually created in the 1960's and not reviewed! The more I read about it, the more my suspicions arose that this was not ethically sound practice and the more I saw at the centre, the more I felt very uncomfortable. 


The straw that broke the camel's back was the day I saw the staff workers neglect to engage with a 4 year old blind girl, except to administer the passive movement of her limbs on a table (the cross patterning), and to push her head first down a wooden slide on a river of talcum powder, in order to induce a "crawling reflex". She was so traumatised, she went from crying and screaming to completely shutting off. It was only when I rocked her in my arms for half an hour that she calmed down. I was torn between the opportunity of modelling care giving and contemporary practice to the Cambodian workers and taking a stronger stand by withdrawing my support altogether. 

Da and Ly play with the new alphabet puzzle I bought

Feeing Sophanna (the 4 year old girl mentioned in previous post) pumpkin soup from Veronica 

 It was numerous lengthy emails back and forth between myself and one of the TTLC directors in America that eventually confirmed my decision. I had been told that I has to do the cross patterning for 2 weeks and then I could very slowly introduce some new treatment techniques, but the Doman Delacato method had to stay. Despite arguing the lack of evidence, providing 6 control trials and articles and citing contemporary neuroscience, there was no room for leeway. It was a heart breaking decision for me as the children are simply gorgeous and I fear for their well being. However I know I couldn't remain in a situation that was going to compromise me professionally, ethically and not to mention psychologically! Thankfully, I have been able to drop in every now and then to check on the kids and have been delighted to see the malnourished children look stronger and healthier. 

Sophanna plays with gloop (corn flour and water) for the first time

Warning: The video below is a bit distressing, but I wanted to share what I witnessed. 

Wheelchair woes

On the second day in Phnom Penh, I received a message to report that the wheelchairs I had shipped over from Wheelchairs for Kids had arrived in Phnom Penh port. So exciting, as I hadn't expected them for another week. I looked up the address of the port office, which was near to where we were staying and they spoke to my tuk tuk driver about how to get to the port. It was going to be an hour round trip, so we would have to come back another time. 


So this brought us to our second trip to Phnom Penh a couple of weeks later, for the sole purpose of sorting out the wheelchairs. We drove for 40 minutes from the city in a tuk on highway 3, past the airport out to Tec Srun Dry Port, arriving about midday, armed with the shipping documents. The guards at the gate turned us away as it was lunch time and said to come back at 2pm, as of course government officials need a verrrrry long siesta. At the suggestion of our driver we headed back to the airport to wait, as at least it had air conditioning. 


After some terrible and over priced coffee, and an impromptu Khmer lesson we were back at the port after the obligatory rest. Moved from office to office, I was sat down on a chair whilst the documents were whisked away elsewhere before being told that we had to have the documents stamped by a government minister back in Phnom Penh. Argggggh! 


So back to the Pehn, jiggegy jig, presented my documents and a timid woman told I need to write a letter stating what the product is and its weight and show a copy of my passport. Never mind that the shipping notice I presented has all this information! So we went back to the hotel, I whipped up a letter, printed a copy of the passport, back in the tuk and away we went. We were handed a manilla folder to house our documents and sat and waited....and waited. People came, people went. 


Eventually a man ushered us to his desk. He looked at my letter and laughed, saying it was very short and needs to not be written to this "Whom It may Concern" but to some minister's name. He then brings out some one else's letter as a template, saying it needs to be on letterhead and contain all this other information. Plus we need the registration documents for TTLC and  the letter and the passport need to be in the name of the person who is the manager/director of the centre. My heart sank. They are in America. I fought back tears as my ears buzzed and things flipped out of focus. I was so disappointed that it was so difficult to help these children in their home country due to their own country's red tape! I had paid for the shipping, the chairs were not being resold....it just didn't seem fair. If only I had shipped the goods in my name and not TTLC's I would have the authority to pick them up. Big mistake. 


Heavy hearted we stumbled back into the tuk. A whole day gone wading through bureaucratic bullshit for no result. Sigh. 


To top things off, back in Kampot, 3 hours away, I receive a garbled phone call in broken English from the shipping agency and freight company, Straights International in Phnom Penh asking why I hadn't collected the authority to release goods customs document from them and paid them $150. Oh, maybe because no-one told me to?

Kampot

After a few days in the Penh it was time to head down south to Kampot, which takes 3 hours by car taxi. Stayed the first night at Les Manguieurs for $10 in an airy hut on stilts with cracks in the walls that opened to the great outdoors and the ground below. Concerned about mozzie born illnesses as we were right on the river, we packed up and stayed at Veronica's. When she had visitors, we found a new home at Natural Bungalows. with a little private beach. This was our residence for the next 2 weeks. 

Ordering pepper crab at Crab Market at Kep

Fishing boat- they go out to sea at 5pm and fish all night ready early in the morning for the market

Tek Chou zoo, 8 km from Kampot town was well worth the visit. We were the only visitors and our Tuk Tuk driver took on the role of tour guide. He had about 3 words of English. He proceeded to lead us around the cages, which were not were not fenced off at all. He tried to get a rise out of every animal by banging on the enclosures; snake, lizard, vulture, you name it.  He threw a stick in at a sleepy looking croc, whose eyes just poked above the slimy green film of it's pool, and then jumped a mile clutching his chest when it launched in his direction, jaws snapping!

We walked past an aviary like cage of monkeys and it took us a while to realise they were exiting from a hole in the roof and coming down to greet us outside of the cage. Suffice to say I started running in the opposite direction! One great scorched orang-utan held out an empty drink bottle, which we filled and he gulped down the water gratefully in the most human like way possible. 

The zoo was not complete without some photos of some very creepy statues and abandoned merry go rounds. 

  

The Tuk Tuk driver actually turned these two figures like this and spent 10 minutes getting to line their hands up in a hand shake!

Face Your Fears and Eat Them

After a sombre day of reflection we wanted a nice dinner to cheer us up. TripAdvisor suggester Romdeng so we thought we would give it a go. Friends and Romdeng are sister restaurants and are part of Friends International – an organization that assists urban children and youth by providing a safe environment to learn skills for becoming productive members of society - bonus! Plus we were curious about the fact that they had tarantulas on the menu. We had already committed to giving the arachnids a go, and chose a Lotus bud chicken salad and a fish amok as our mains. 

The 3 crisp spiders were brought out on a pristine white plate, resting on salad like they were perched on foliage about to scuttle away. It was mighty strange seeing big fat spiders immobilised like that, like it was some freakish trick and they would soon be released from their frozen state and come alive again just as you pick them up. Just the mere sight of them turned the stomach a little. 

Bravely we ripped off a leg, tentatively dipped it in the lime pepper sauce and had a nibble. Totally fine if you keep your eyes closed. Tasted like deep fried nothing, crisp, almost hollow airy tubes. So far bearable. Meanwhile, Jed had ventured to the body and encouraged me to give it a go to get my opinion. It took quite a few mouthfuls of fish amok to pluck up the courage. I bit into the bulbous sac and a squishy nutty texture oozed into my mouth. Nasty! Didn't warrant spitting out, but still, not exactly a desirable flavour/texture combo that I need again. We ate through the rest of our meal, feeling a little ill sharing our table with the remainder of the spider carcasses, but proud we had a story to tell and for our culinary bravery on our second day!

The Killing Fields (warning- some details may be graphic)

The following day we took a tuk tuk to the central market and after an obligatory thongs purchase, we were off to, Choeung Ek, the Killing Fields near Phnom Penh which were mostly used for prisoners from Tuol Sleng (see earlier post from February). The tuk tuk driver had picked up his kids from school whilst we were at the market and dropped them home on the way. They were so polite, giving us a sompiah (Khmer greeting with hands together like prayer) on greeting and farewell (with a little nudge from their dad!)

The tuk tuk driver's children who shared part of the ride with us

Pagoda that houses the exhumed bones

I had imagined the killing fields to be acres of sparse, treeless fields surrounded by rice paddies. In reality, Choeung Ek is actually an eerily peaceful and small tree-filled glade that has sinister undertones. The area used to be a Chinese cemetery, before the Khmer Rouge dug it up to create mass graves for prisoners and enemies of the state (intellectuals, the educated and anyone who was a threat to the new regime of creating a purely agrarian based communist society). We paid our $4 entry and recruited a couple of other tourist for a tour so that it was more affordable.  We were led around some shallow ditches which had been exhumed in 1980. There had been a total of 89 mass graves interred out of 129 in the area and 8,985 skeletons removed. One grave had been entirely full of decapitated men, another naked woman with their children, and another filled with victims who were still bound and blindfolded.

As we walked around the maze of graves, the guide pointed out half exposed pieces of human bone, teeth and cloth fragments beneath our feet which get washed up to the surface in the rains. A central pagoda, built in 1989 now houses the skulls, femurs and pelvis' in a tiered display. The lowest tier is a pile of their clothes, and the bones are sorted into gender and age of the victims. Often the skulls are cracked or pierced, as the Khmer Rouge saved on bullets by clubbing people to death, piercing their skulls with bamboo spears or sawing off their heads with sharp palm fronds. 

Skulls displayed in the pagoda

Remainder of a human humerus revealed in the rains

It is so hard in this day and age to fully comprehend the atrocities of genocide, yet this only happened 30 years ago, just before I was born! Inundated with graphic war images through our televisions, newspapers and magazines, I’m sure we protect our psyches by disassociating from human tragedy. I believe we cannot even come close to understanding the capacity for evil (or even good for that matter) in human beings. How can one justify being responsible for extinguishing the lives (the personalities, the hopes, the dreams, the futures, the potentials, the possibilities) of 1.5 million people? And what is truly terrifying is the power people have in influencing other people’s psychology, the capacity for brainwashing others to stand for corruption, supremacy and victimization. How is it that we are never content with our heterogeneous composition of the human race? Prejudice thrives no matter which part of the world we live in, the type of victim just varies from people with a different skin colour, to Jews, to Americans , to  people who wear glasses in the case of the Khmer Rouge. 

What is this seed inside human beings that sprouts suspicion, jealousy and discontentment with who we are, that pollinates the very fear centres of society? The simple truth is that we collapse the stories that we create about ourselves and our relationship to other people with the actuality, until we believe in our own version of reality. This how we develop factions in society, whether simple social exclusion or full on graphic war and genocide. 

Back in the Kingdom

The colourful plane interior

So I’ve been back in the kingdom of Cambodia for 22 days, arriving on the 1^st of June, International Children’s Day, which I thought was very apt, being the main reason for this journey.  This time I have a travelling companion, Jed, which has meant I’ve been able to do more touristy things. We flew from Sydney at 9:30 at night to KL, arriving at 4am. We then had a 5 hour layover. As most of the food on the plane was ridden with gluten, we stopped at one of the cafes so I could eat breakfast (lunch? dinner?) before the next flight at 9:00am. We found a couch to crash on for a few hours in front of a giant TV blaring the BBC news and some repetitive story about E Coli in Spanish cucumbers, but we found out after 4 hours that it wasn't actually the cause after all….phew! Strange being in an almost deserted airport when fatigued and lugging bags. Jed didn't sleep much on the flight or in the airport but I got in a few zzzz's on the couch. We caught our flight to Phnom Penh at 9:30am and got in 11ish. The hotel wasn't quite ready for us and I think we needed a rest to prepare for carrying our 50kg of luggage up 6 flights of stairs to our room.


I got a bit over having to keep reattaching the strap of my birkenstocks every 3 steps (it's been broken about 5 years and I wore them every day when I was in Cambodia last, yet never got around to getting them fixed), so we popped over to the shoe making district and a lovely guy attached some black leather with a stud to both buckles and asked me for $1 for 15 minutes work. So I gave him $2. 


Saw one little boy about 2 years old near the shoe making district playing in the gutter filling a miniature tip truck with dirt with a teaspoon. Children will always find a way to play!

That evening we went to Khmer Surin, a restaurant for tourists that sells traditional khmer food, topping off the day with a massage at  Champei Spa

Fried rice served in a  pineapple shell
 and beef lok lak

Ready to return

The last few days I decided to get motivated and organised for the trip back to Cambodia. I've ordered a few cerebral palsy therapy books on Amazon, contacted companies to get angled spoons, emailed a ball shop for donations and inquired into ways to get equipment back to Cambodia without ridiculous excess baggage fees. Today I stumbled across this site http://www.global-help.org/ which has a free downloadable PDF book on cerebral palsy for parents and care givers written in Khmer! I was very excited to find it. I've also looked at the Toys and Me website in Phnom Penh and realised much of what the children need in terms of fine motor and manipulation toys can be purchased there when I get back. I have also contacted Wheelchairs for Kids after a tip off from Michelle at work, which led me to come across the organisation Focus Cambodia which may have some answers on shipping over equipment. Ideally I'd love to find someone who is making therapy equipment locally in Cambodia. 

Check this out.

Please check out this blog of my friend Hayley who is volunteering in Phnom Penh with AFESIP Cambodia, an NGO that works with women and girls who have been trafficked for sexual exploitation. 


http://ellesenva.wordpress.com/

Be with life. Just the way it is and just the way it isn't.

Today  is my 30th birthday and I'm awake early while the house sleeps. I thought it may be a fitting time to reflect upon the musings I have had whilst being back in Adelaide the last week and a bit. It's strange how you can live in the same city all your life and not actually really see it. I have lived near Burnside Village for 9 years, yet never really was attuned to what people told me they saw...the gold shoes, the bouffant hair, the makeup cladding, the yummy mummies with catalogue kids in tow. They are currently doing a ONE HUNDRED MILLION redevelopment of Burnside village and it turns my stomach. 


All around me, I see image more clearly than ever before. I see human beings who project a certain visual or attitudinal persona, yet in doing so become so unapproachable. I see the way in which our highly affluent society uses wealth and influence to enshroud ourselves in cloaks for our insecurities. We hide and protect and become more isolated in our fear of what other people may dare think of us. It speaks to me so poignantly because I know I am a victim of our culture no less than anyone else and for the first time I feel convicted by my foolishness. 


I think of Cambodia. I think of the Khmer people. I think of how they wear cartoon character pyjamas as everyday wear. I think of their openness. I think of the kids on the side of the road when I ride my bike past to work, yelling out "hello, hello, hello" because they want to connect with an allusive westerner. I think of the people who walk their cows home up our road at 4pm, how connected they are with their animal and their surroundings. I think of the integration of life and death. One merely a continuation of the other. I recall the intermingling of cow poo, moto fumes, fish sauce, burning fires and frangipanis. I see dynamism, I see techniolour, I see the intensity of human existence. I see perseverance, I see strength, I see courage. 


Oh how comfortable are our lives here. How we complain. How we complain. How we self indulge in our boredom. I am ashamed. Ashamed of how I have neglected to listen to the heartbeat of humanity.  We think we are so needy. All we need is a reality check. 


Oh and remember about Burnside village refurb costing 100 mil? Australian development aid for Cambodia 2010/2011 is....................$64 million

Update on the girls.

Well the night in hospital did not afford much sleep. Chantee kept saying something and pointing to the floor until 2am, when I called the nurse to translate. Apparently she had seen a friend fall out of bed and since then always slept on the floor. So we moved her and the mattress down. Finally I thought it was sleep time. Chantee woke me up at 4:30, 6:30, 7:30 and 8:30 for more 'Junome' incidents. 


Later that day I found out that Chantee has typhoid and stomach amoebas as well as the throat infection and oral thrush and malnourishment. Sophanna has an infection under her skin and Guardia as well as the malnourishment. We are still waiting on the TB tests. 

Woman vs. Poverty (Saturday Night)

Right now I am sitting in a Cambodian hospital bed to look after Jente/Chantee (sp?) overnight. It’s stinking hot, there is sweat dripping down my face, there are a bazillion little freaky flies everywhere and I feel as though it’s only me and her in this ghostly building. I’m waiting for the night nurse to turn on her second drip at 11pm. In Cambodia they will not let patients stay overnight in a hospital unless a caregiver stays as well, as they only check on the patients once at night. Chantee is a 20 year old girl who has been at the therapy centre for 4 weeks. She was brought in severely malnourished and thin as her mother had given up on caring for her severe physical disabilities and just wanted to get on with her funeral. Chantee has upper and lower limb spasticity, cannot speak clearly, her eyes don’t focus, has feet that curl up and therefore cannot walk or do anything independently except slowly scratch her head.

Jennifer and I spent today going to several medical clinics to get both Chantee and Sophanna (the 4 year old the size of a baby) assessed. The first doctor was a thin older woman with long grey-blonde hair who was having a smoke outside when we neared the clinic with Chantee, a bundle of stiff limbs in our arms. She had worked for 30 years in Ethiopia with malnourished children and that is why we had hunted her down. She stared at the girls for ages, slightly shaking her head and in her thick accent said there was no hope for the brain damage, they will be like this forever and it was just a matter of ‘supportive therapy’, whatever that euphemism meant. She put both girls on antibiotics and vitamins, diagnosed Chantee with strep throat and agreed that the neurological damage was most likely caused by childhood vaccines as the girl’s mothers had both stated that they were typically developing before their vaccinations. She warned us not to talk about vaccines as cause of brain damage in the public sector unless we wanted to get persecuted and that the conversation must stay in the room. The government is that corrupt that large pharmaceutical corporations with the big bucks control public health (or ill-health) in an ironic twist of fate.

Holding Chantee up in the tuk tuk

Sixty-seven dollars later and big bag of medicine (zyrtec for a weeping scalp condition?) we lifted Chantee back into the tuk tuk (no mean feat) and drove to a another nearby clinic in the hope of getting an ultrasound on Chantee’s stomach as it has been rigid and extended for weeks and she had refused to eat at times. Once again we carried her into the clinic, plopped her down on a plastic chair and were told the doctor would not be able to see her for another hour and a half. So we went to lunch. Determined not to give up, Jennifer and I went to a third clinic after lunch to see a doctor recommended by a woman who finds families to adopt children from orphanages. This time as soon as we put Chantee down in a chair, a male nurse came immediately and scooped her up and took her upstairs to a consulting room. Finally someone was taking notice! Jennifer said late it was probably because she looked half dead and no Cambodian wants someone to die in their own home/building lest the spirit hangs around.

The doctor this time was really caring, actually interacting with Chantee and spoke at long lengths with Jennifer in Khmer about her history and recommended testing for hepatitis, malaria, AIDS, chromosomal abnormalities, dengue fever, typhoid, blood cell count, and the list went on. He claimed her throat infection was oral thrush, something we had suspected. As this doctor was so thorough and holistic, Jennifer left to get Sophanna from the guest house to be checked as well. Meanwhile I held Chantee’s hand as she got bloods taken and an IV drip inserted. The poor thing was terrified as she had no idea what it was and couldn’t even brush away the tears that streamed down her cheeks. I then spent the next 2 hours tickling her legs and arms to pass the time as we waited in the room on our own, trying to communicate with her weak body language. Finally in the evening she was brought up to her room and I left to go have some food and grab my stuff, leaving Jennifer in charge of the situation.

I grabbed some clothes, phone charger and laptop from the hotel, piled into the tuk tuk once again and sped through the balmy night streets. Stumbling out of the tuk tuk I dropped my tweezers and underwear on the road and tripped up the 3 flights of stairs to the room. After Jennifer left I was only armed with a ridiculously minimal collection of Khmer words, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘thank you’ which I knew already, and the words for ‘toilet’ and ‘water’. I switched off the light and sure enough I hear some unintelligible rasps come from Chantee. I offered her water as she was looking in that vague direction. I switch off the light, and go to wash the one single T shirt I brought to Phnom Penh.

The dreaded bathroom

Soon after I hear a word that could be Junome, ‘toilet’. Hell, now what do I do? It’s hard enough carrying her on her own, let alone attached to a prehistoric IV stand, but foolishly I thought I would persevere. So I scooped her up under her head and legs like a baby, hooked my foot in the IV stand and dragged it across the floor in a staggered fashion, probably thumping her head against the IV pole with every movement. I got to the bathroom step and realised it was ridiculous. I could not in a million years lift the IV stand up a step with my foot whilst struggling with a heavy and awkward bundle of stiff flailing limbs and maintain enough slack in the line as to not rip the drip out of her arm altogether. I lay her on the floor and assessed the situation.  I had to get her back on the bed. I looked around the room. A plastic cup and a bunch of tissues. This was survival mode. Bear Gryllis eat your heart out. “Woman versus Poverty”, here I come. 

Chantee kept pointing to the floor until 2am when I called the nurse and he worked out that she was scared she was going to fall off the bed, so we put her mattress on the floor. 

I soon realised a plastic cup for a tiny reclined female was just plain wishful thinking and the thin 2 ply wouldn’t absorb more than a raindrop. Something has to be sacrificed. The only other absorbent item was my bed blanket which looked suspiciously like an oversized towel. It had to do. I folded it under Chantee, pointed to the towel and told her to ‘Junome’ right there. She cracked up laughing, and then looked shocked. I told her again. It took about 5 minutes holding her upright on this damn towel before she got up the courage to comply with this crazy white woman’s insistence to let loose the Niagara on the bed. Ok, so it didn’t absorb the whole stream, but it was better than nothing. I then folded up her bed blanket and placed it over the wet spots on her bed. Oh did we laugh after that! Some things language just transcends. Later when ‘Junome’ time arose again I had the stroke of genius of making the rubbish bin a makeshift commode. Worked brilliantly.

The night nurse has just arrived to change the drip, so I’m on my own. Just me and Chantee and the hand written phone number for ‘any problems’ scribbled above the light switch. It will be an interesting night. To be continued...

Therapy Time

I have now been here exactly one month and I am utterly brain fried. I've reached a point where my sensory system is threatening shutdown as I consider where I am and what I am doing. I feel like one of Dali's clocks, dripping toxic plastic, a neurological meltdown, neuro-plasticity literally. Right now I'm sitting in Bokor lodge cafe stuffing myself with some kettle chips I've found in a store, trying to come to grips with this whole situation. The therapy centre has been hard work. Firstly I am not a specialist in cerebral palsy and I'm on the net every night trying to learn really quickly. Secondly all the employed workers are cambodian and I can't speak Khmer. Thirdly I feel terribly disrespectful not being able to speak to the children, as their voice, their opinion, their rights are what little human dignity and choice they have left. Fourthly, the disabilities I am seeing are out of this world. 

Fine motor crafts after lunch. Note the pet monkey chilling in the background

The photo here is Sim. He is the cheekiest,  most joyous and kind spirited guy around. His resilience and determination amaze me. He is just starting to crawl with so much effort and yet to weight bear and walk. He knows quite a bit of English just from picking it up from people around him and he teaches me Cambodian when I can understand. We have a lot of fun together and I really love his cheeky beaming smile. 

This is Jeante (?sp). She has been starved by her mother who felt it would just be easier for everyone to organise her funeral and get it over and done with due to her severe physical disabilities.Jeante is beginning to eat more at the centre and we are trying to facilitate her with the will to live. 

The real shocker is this. A four year old girl came to us 2 days ago. Severely malnourished with upper and lower limb spasticity. FOUR YEARS OLD. This little darling is looked after by her grandmother who is very poor, She has a weeping fungal infection on her scalp and scabies scars over her tiny body. We are starting her on baby formula and vitamins and hope to pump her full of nourishment so she can catch up on some developmental milestones. She is such a little fighter with an iron will to survive. 

Colonial Cambodia

Ok, so I've been getting quite slack in the blog writing department, but I was just afraid that I would be condemned by Claire if I didn't write anything exceptionally interesting :)


So, to recap on the last 2 weeks...My aunt Sally came to visit from Hong Kong for a few days and we went on a day tour to Bokor Mountain. Usually this tour is a 2 1/2 hour hike and then a truck ride up the mountain, but thankfully it was Chinese New Year and there was transportation all the way! At the top of the mountain is a ruined 1900's French Colonial Settlement including houses, a hotel, a catholic church and a casino (all the essentials). The settlement was created for the wealthy French to escape the heat and indulge in a little luxury. 

The Palace (Hotel)

Catholic Church steps

Mist over the Pagoda on Bokor Mountain

It is interesting how dilapidated the buildings have become from the Khmer rouge hiding out in the church in 1970, (one of the last places to be relinquished) to bullet holes in the casino walls and now the workers who squat there create their own bit of history. The buildings eerily speak of a generation we do not know and stand tall, silent and all knowing. 

Back of The Palace

The day was ended with a sunset cruise on the Kampot River which gave me a much better geographical understanding of the town and the discovery of some very cool river side bungalows for future reference!