The Other Side

Hey everyone

Looks like i am making up for lost time with a few quick fire posts.

On Thursday/Friday I headed out to food distributions in Kandal Province for TB patients (nothing says hello like coughing up a gollie). Anyhoo i always thought this province was just an extension of Phnom Penh cos i always end up in this town called Tawkhmao (which has this big statue of this black guy holding a club which no one seems to be able to tell me who he is). But we went to the other half near the border with Vietnam and it is quite beautiful lots of rivers and lush trees.

I guess this trip kinda brought back the other side of working in this field, when you have to say no to people. One of the health centres had forecast the patient list wrong and we didnt have enough rations for 35 people. Unfortunately these people were inpatients (so the ones that were still symptomatic) and probably needed the food the most. Balancing that with the patients who had completed treatment and still entitled to their ration and had been waiting 8 months for other reasons is hard. I guess its easy to say yes but hard to say no

We managed to squeeze one ration to one lady in the inpatient who was so ridiculously thin whose arms were as thick as maybe two pencils next to eachother (TB greatly increases your metabolic rate meaning you lose a large amount of weight).

We also had to turn away some people who because of a technicality were not entitled to a ration. When we ran out of food in the first quarter of this year, those who completed their treatment then missed out and we didnt have enough food for retroactive rations.

On the drive back on Friday we passed the wackiest pagoda I have ever seen. It has this ridiculously tall steeple with Bayon style heads up the top. The entrance is 5 giant demon heads and the stairs coming out of their mouths like tongues. Am so heading back to take photos at some point. As we passed Sokhom, the driver, said the crazy monks had spent 10 years building it and it will have to be torn down if they ever expand the road to more lanes. Then realising he just called the monks crazy he put his hands together in prayer and said 'som doh' (please excuse me).

So exhausted from standing up for about 6 hours in the hot sun i retired to the speu for a quiet weekend. One thing i did get done was cycling up to the water resevoir at Kombol about 40 minutes up the road. We always pass it driving between Phnom Penh and it has been an ambition to cycle up there. So i finally did, very sa-at (beautiful).

Oh i love this photo, the sign is for the Kampong Speu Tourism Department (methinks that one went outta business a while ago!)