Flood relief clinic

So after the floods in Cambodia some of the doctors who knew people in certain communities around Battambang decided it would be good to do clinics with people who had been displaced from their homes by floodwater. The first of these clinics was in a wat near Phnom Sampov.

We arrived on a Saturday morning and set up desks with nurses taking vital signs and names, then sending the patient to the doctor who would give a diagnosis and prescription and then to the makeshift pharmacy who would fill the prescription and explain to the person what to do with the medication.

I was with the nurses taking vital signs all day, there was a constant stream of people (I think we saw almost 200 that day!) and so I felt I hardly stopped or got to really interact (although my Khmer is so poor I couldn’t have said much anyway). At one point I was presented with a teary baby and realised that apart from the fact that we don’t have any BP cuffs small enough, in my work as an adult nurse I have never had to assess kids or baby’s (not even in english!) so I looked at the now crying baby and tried to get a heart rate or resp rate but wasn’t having much luck… I asked my colleague (and generally awesome dude) Tum if he could help me, he replied ‘sure’ and calmly asked the mother to walk into the shade with the baby and to point up into the sky and watch the leaves from the tree’s above… by doing this he distracted the child and also got it to stretch out it’s abdomen making it easy to count the resp rate, humbled, I said thank’s to Tum and went to see the next patient.

At lunch I saw a big hole in the ground with a web on the inside like an Australian funnel-web but much larger, I assumed something lived in it and thought I should tell people, as the hole was just behind one of our doctors desk’s. I pointed this out to people and asked what it was, thinking that they would tell me what animal it was and sensibly leave it alone….  That was my first mistake… Vichet (one of the doctors) happily told me it was a king spider, (about the size of my outstretched hand, highly poisonous, and apparently quite tasty). He then started pouring water into its hole and poking a stick down trying to make the giant poisonous scary hairy spider come out to kill us all! By this point of course there are a crowd of interested barefoot onlookers crowding round the hole, and I am standing well back having a little whitey conniption about the whole situation. Eventually when everyone had seen the big spider and Vichet had noticed that I was paling a bit, people lost interest and left it alone, went back to seeing patients etc. Meanwhile a pig about the size of four of me wanders out of the jungle and past the nurses desks and off into the camp J

We treated a lot of people for general illnesses, colds, boils, a broken arm that had been wrapped in leaves, dog bite, gastro issues etc, although sometimes I feel the diagnosis and prescription leave a little to be desired… It was an interesting day. Afterwards we went to Kamping Pouy where the people in the camp were from to see what had happened. Kamping pouy is a huge man made dam built by khmer people in atrocious conditions under the khmer rouge. During the flood it had been dangerously full and so the area had been evacuated and the gates opened to let some water out, as the pressure of the water was so high however the water ripped the gates out of the walls of the dam and surged through where the town had been. The damage was scary, I’v never seen water do so much damage, having been to kamping pouy weeks before to go swimming, the changes were drastic and almost unbelievable.

Flooding

So there has been extensive flooding across South East Asia due to typhoon. 80 people have died in Cambodia. Crops and homes have been damaged, and the large amounts of residual dirty floodwater will make it easy for outbreaks of disease to spread (both from infection and mosquito's breeding).

These are some pictures from Battambang.

 'Old Battambang' where I live is in the city and wasn't as badly affected.

From the top of Phnom sampeu - Usually you can see fields of rice paddies from here.

 The highway close to the hospital.

 

 Fishing on the highway.

 The highway towards the hospital.

 So glad the medical centre was built on high ground.

 

So lucky to have these pumps and an awesome team of people helping to keep the hospital functioning and open. Admin and the Dr's were out the front filling sandbags, maintenance made bridges, lifted massive amounts of equipment of the floor, sandbagged the hospital entrances and rigged up pumps, and the nurses and admin staff all came in to work despite most of their homes being flooded.

 

The road on my walk/wade to the hospital.

I love you but your homophobia breaks my heart.

So this post is about two different things. One is about vulnerability, friendship and homophobia, and the other is about what I understand so far of being gay in Cambodia.

The first thing;

This is a feeling I get from time to time, with particular friends or places. Friends I would love to feel wholly comfortable with, but there is something, like an edge, a topic I feel I have to avoid because to talk about it brings up this huge gap between us, and reminds me that there are things that feel to me like a part of the core of me, that my friend cannot understand or does not respect.

This occurs about a few different things, my politics, my views in things like racism and abuse and respect, that are things I don’t feel I can compromise.

 And inevitably it occurs with being queer. I love the people that I love in my life who are queer, trans*, and wonderfully uniquely their brilliant selves. I feel that all of the things I associate with queers can create so much joy and celebration and sparkles and growth and challenge and love. And I know that there is also difficulty and often pain involved in being outside the status quo, In being who you are when people don’t understand it and are threatened, disrespectful, angry or many other reactions. I love the understanding I find with many queers, and I feel love and care for the people who are experiencing difficulty and abuse because of it.

It tears at my heart a little to love something or someone but know that we can’t be friends in the way I wish we could be friends. Because there are differences in our lives and experiences that give us different takes on the world, and trying to explain is gruelling and painful and involves being so vulnerable, sometimes for so little pay off. I sometimes try to explain it all, to help someone understand how my life has shaped me into the person I am, and why comments and ways of treating people that seem fine to them are so hurtful to me… but the process of baring yourself to someone you care about things you deeply believe in and can’t change, and them having them not understand or not care is so painful and demoralising that most often I don’t attempt it.

Cambodia too of course has a certain homophobia, It is not something that really makes me feel personally uncomfortable or threatened. I fit into Cambodia as an expat ‘baraang’. Different expectations and understanding apply to me as opposed to someone who is khmer and was raised here. But for Khmer people who are gay, queer, trans*, I can’t imagine how difficult it would be.

Cambodia is a place I am still getting to know, and as far as I understand (which probably isn’t very far) Homosexuality sort of “dosen’t exist”, It’s understood that people might do a bit of ‘searching’ but that eventually they will settle down and get married. Talking to a distressed Khmer friend the other night I realised how good I have it back home, I can hold another girls hand most places, kiss where I want to, live somewhere where there are lots of other queers, live with my partner and probably have kids if I ever wanted to. Here I think that would be a very hard option if you could do it at all.

I’m aware that I don’t know much about Cambodia, I’v only been here a few months, so maybe this is not the way it is, I don’t have much of an understanding of Khmer culture and I think it differs in the cities and rurally and maybe province to province a bit as well. So this is just what I’v heard (and mostly from other foreigners).

Mainly I feel sad for my friend who is having such a hard time here, and I felt shocked to try and imagine how hard it would be to know I was queer if I was growing up in Cambodia as opposed to how it has been the past few years living in Newtown.

And I feel sad when that point comes as it sometimes does when someone I care for and trust says something out of left field that just makes me feel uncomfortable and shocked, and like I can’t be honest and that they don’t understand me at all.

** Also, I know this sounds a bit whingey and I feel weird writing about myself like this, I am sure I have misunderstood people and made them feel uncomfortable and I feel sorry about that. I also think a lot of people feel like this about differen things so… yea…. Disclaimer ! : )