Home.

So recently I have found myself saying to friends that Battambang feels like my home now. It’s a slightly funny thing to say, as I know I can’t stay here forever, I know that I will run out of money and outlive any usefulness I might have at the hospital. I will have to go home and work and train more at some point if  I want to become a more capable and useful nurse, and to see all the friends and family whose lives are flowing along in a parallel vein somewhere.

But for now it is true, I try to put a date on my departure but it just dosen’t feel right. I love Battambang, I love it’s dusty streets, its slow meandering river, which seems almost to flow as lazily as I feel myself being with the dry season heat. I love the animals that wander the streets, fields and my house, and I love my hang outs, my friends, the hospital and the fond and hilarious memories that I now have attached to so many places here.

I love riding my bike by the river on the weekend, going to Kinyei and always meeting someone I know, talking shit with my friends, having each over for BYO cutlery dinners, making grand plans about our future adventures together, having weekend moto trips and inventing things to do with the hot dusty afternoons.

I like my slowly increasing level of Khmer, the slowly revealed secrets to what people are saying and what is is going on around me, my increasing ability to make jokes and be friendly and playful with my words.

I like my increased ability to talk to the nurses and patients and to be a more involved part of the ICU, to be able to follow more of what’s going on and add suggestions and systems to try to increase the standard of nursing care and of nursing management skills.

When I think of leaving Battambang it dosen’t feel like going home, it feels like the daunting process of creating a new life somewhere else, without the river, the familiar resteraunts, roads, meandering cow’s, happy looking skinny dogs and baby chickens following hens around, without these friends, and khmer culture and language, and khmer being spoken, and without the aim of working together to give patients the best care we can manage with the resources we have.

I know I will leave, and create a new life, and that I will find a new home and friends and purpose, and a love for that place too, but for now, Battambang is my home and I love it.

What's the difference between me and a missionary?

So generally the idea of missionaries makes me feel very uncomfortable. The religion and converting dosen’t appeal, and the style of coming to a poor country, being able to provide resources, skills, and knowledge to people, with a side of Jesus, has been something that I found a bit uncool. I feel like people in those situations don’t necessarily have a choice, and I feel like culture and religion are here in abundance, and replacing it with Christianity is disrespectful of the culture that already exists.

Recently though I’v realised though that perhaps I am not so different.

I have come to Cambodia with skills and resources acquired through the luck of being born somewhere with a good education system and good infrastructure. And I too have an agenda. In the last few months I’v slowly realised that I believe in challenging and changing parts of Khmer culture. It was a weird realisation for me because I find the connotations of colonialism, imperialism and general white person ignorant doo-goodering difficult to deal with, but I do think there is a link between aspects of Khmer culture and inequality, abuse and poor treatment of women and queers. And that shit is not ok. I’m not saying that in the west we don’t have these problems, but we don’t have them in the same way, and we don’t have some of the problems that exist here. And I think it’s due at least in part to long held beliefs that men are like gold and can be washed clean of 'sin' but women are like cloth, and their misdemeanours will show on them forever.

The double standards for men and women are intense, and can easily ruin a woman or young girl life. Cambodia is also a country struggling to get back on it’s feet after a war that has left legacies everywhere, from the landmines that have left many amputee’s, and are still injuring people today, to the lack of infrastructure, the rife corruption and of course poverty.

While I want to respect Khmer culture, learn the language and about some of the customs and the things that are important to my friends and colleagues here, I also want to challenge the parts of the culture that I think can harm people, especially young women and queers.

Books I read in 2013.

January

Life of Pi – Yann Martel(read it and then watched the movie)

The Heaven Shop – Deborah Ellis (found it and read it at crowdy)

Flight Behaviour – Barbara Kingsolver (loved this one, recommended it around)

February

The forgotten garden – Kate Morten

Memoirs of an imaginary friend – Mathew Green (Tinks’s book, Love the concept)

March

The heather blazing – Colm Tobin (Christmas present from Keda)

April

Alive in the killing fields – Nawuth Keat & Martha E. Kenda

May

The graveyard book – Neil Gamon

June

Wildwood Dancing – Juliet Marillier

July

August

The long earth – Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (Keda read it and left it in Cambodia for me, good read)

You Suck – Chris Moore (Keda read it and left it in Cambodia for me)

September

Just Kids – Patti Smith (Nat had it, I realised part way through I was re-reading it, pretty sure Patch recommended it the first time, love this one too)

The girl with the dragon tattoo – Steig Larsson (Bought it from Kinyei)

The girl who played with Fire – Steig Larsson (Second hand bookshop on Rd 3)

October

The girl who kicked the hornets’ nest – Steig Larsson (I liked this trilogy, read it quickly, and I like the characters)

World war Z – Max Brooks (Sent to Cambodia from Tim & Jen J , got a bit obsessed with Zombies for a while)

November

Never let me go – Kazuo Ishiguro (realised part way this one is also a re-read)

White Oleander – Janet  Fitch (Recommended by Alexa, good one.)

?First do no harm - ? (Found it on the Island Liz and I stayed on, read it in a night cause we were leaving the next morning at 06.00, partially just from stubborness)

Life isn't fair, especially not here.

Today it feels like Cambodia stuck its little claws in and said, 'So you think you've got this sorted!?'.

I went in to see a patient that Noni was worried about, young and only 10 weeks post partum, she had come in from another hospital where she had had 15 units of blood (Hb 5) and TB treatment, when she arrived she was GCS 6/15 and in shock, lungs full of fluid saturating 50% on 15L.
Her prognosis at this point was very poor, and when she stopped breathing we administered a brief amount of poorly organised and probably, had it been good quality, still futile, resuscitation. As I completed a couple of rounds of CPR I pushed into her chest and felt her small rib crack under my hand. I was so shocked I lifted my hands off and then put them straight back on and continued.

After this we went to a ribbon cutting ceremony and listened to the in-country director of our supposedly non-religious organisation talk about how blessed we were etc. which did nothing to improve my mood.

I went to Kinyei after work, whinged to Liz a bit and tried to do some work that I'v been stressed about not being able to complete and then I came home. I went out to get some beer to write this with and turned around to be face to face with one of the poor homeless kids who hangs around Battambang, I was so wrapped up in my head that his grinning face scared the shit out of me more than it would have normally, When I got back he was still hanging around and I told him to go away. I feel like its wrong to tell a hungry kid to go away, but at the same time he scares me often when he is hanging out there in the dark, and I don't want him to be there a lot. There are a lot of kids addicted to glue and I don't want them to know where I live and to hang out in the alley there.

I don't really know what the point of this post is, maybe just to vent about the fact that life's not fair, things are far from perfect,  especially if you happen to be born in a war ravaged country with poor infrastructure, health care, and social support.

Ethics, emotions, money and mortality.

The universality of nursing experience became apparent to me today. I worked with five of the D ward nurses and an American and a Khmer doctor for three hours trying to keep a patient alive. Despite the language and cultural differences that can often make things so difficult we worked well together, and differences between an Australian hospital and one in Cambodia aside, the arrest was well run. We were organised, we documented, we didn’t get in each other’s way, we were calm and focused.

Unfortunately the patient deteriorated, we couldn’t keep a blood pressure, we defibrillated her heart 6 times but couldn’t keep it in a sinus rhythm, her kidneys weren’t making urine, she was fluid overloaded and eventually she stopped breathing and her heart rate fell. After we decided not to continue I tried to tell the nurses how well they had done. I was having trouble dealing with feeling sad for the family, sad that we couldn’t save her and adrenaline and shock at having expected to save her and having her die. When I said you worked really well together today and you did a good job they said ‘ot sabai jet’ we are not happy because we could not save her. I felt so impressed with the way that had handled the situation, so proud of them integrating new knowledge and skills so well, and still, I know the feeling, of putting in the work to save someone, starting out expecting that we will and then having them pass away. That switch of focus from focusing and concentrating on how to save a person’s life to taking everything off and letting them go and trying to support a grieving family has always been hard for me, I think it is for everyone in that situation. I felt immense respect for our team, and understanding of the fact that you can try your best and still fail to save a life, and yet trying to reassure them I was close to tears myself.

The other difficulty here is that when deciding how much to give the patient and how long to try and save them is that the family (of our medical patients) have to pay for those drugs, and I never know what their financial situation is. It can be an emotionally charged decision to decide to stop trying to save someone, but there is a point where it becomes futile, their heart can no longer beat, no matter what drugs you give or how many times you defibrillate, if they have spent long enough without oxygen going to the brain the chances of surviving with viable brain tissue are reduced. To continue trying last ditch attempts in these situations can make you feel sure that you have done your best, but in cases that are futile can cost the poor and grieving family money that they could have been saved. I have no answers to this dilemma, I wish we could treat everyone, that we could give free care, which we had guaranteed funds and resources but that isn’t the case here.  I am going to try and get the hospital agree that patients and their families don’t have to pay for the cost of care given during life threatening situations. While this might help for the acute situation the reality is that many many people are going without treatment for their medical issues because they cannot afford it.

How to win friends and influence people; A lesson in cake fights and kitchen flood

My first dinner party went off with a literal bang, Jason was the first to arrive and within about 5 mintues he had bumped a pan which fell and knocked the attachment for an old tap of the wall causing a torrent of water to us to start jetting out of the wall, spraying us with water and making the water level in the kitchen quickly rise. He apologised and we laughed and he rode to our local café to ask the guy who works there and who I pay rent to, to come look at the house. Jason came back a little later and took over holding a pot against the flow to try and redirect some of the water into the sink. In the mean time I called Noni and go the phone number of Buff, out local hero and fixer of everything, and also the smiliest guy in Cambodia, and maybe the world.

My phone ran out of credit half way through the conversation and I decided not to bother Buff anymore, and then Yong rocked up and turned the water off (which is way easier to do than I thought). Yong then tried to shove a kitchen sponge in the hole in the wall with a knife and talking about maybe calling someone to fix it tomorrow. I wasn’t convinced about the kitchen sponge, but was happy for the plan to fix it the next day (probably needless to say when Yong turned the water back on the kitchen sponge went flying and the water spout re-started).

After Yong left Buff rocked up (somehow, I don’t know how he found out where I was or what they problem was…) with a bunch of tools and looked at the hole in the wall, then took a few screw drivers to the hole and chipped out the rest of the metal pipe. He turned the old fitting around, put it back in the wall and it was fixed (He really is the coolest dude ever). I offered him a beer or dinner, but he just happily headed off to do whatever it is that Buff does when he’s not fixing all of our problems.

Then Alexa Noni and Allison arrived with take away Indian Jason swept out most of the small flood,  and I proceeded to be the most unorganised host ever, not having any plates or cutlery or anything, and feeling so happily amused seeing all my bongs in my house J

It was a lovely dinner, and we talked about all the things and teased each other and gave Allison the mug that we got made for her birthday with a picture of Us and all the Kinyei staff on it, and eventually it was time for cake. Khmer cake is an interesting conglomeration of oil slick like puffy cream and spongey cake… It is often thought to be better for throwing than for eating, and so, in a moment that I feel really christened my new home, I took a chunk of it and smooshed it into Noni’s face…  It was Cake-on from then and we quickly deceminated the cake, re-homing it to each others, faces, hair clothes and my entire house, It was one of those moments where you realise your friends are real friends because your can smooth oily cake all over each other and then stand together on the balcony in the rain trying to wash it clean and laughing. Not long after that everyone went home and I bemusedly removed cake from some surprising places, washed it out from behind my earsand went to bed. J

 

Pailin Adventure

On Saturday we rented motorbikes and rode to Pailin. After a 5 minute lesson at the abandoned airport on Alexa’s bike and a trip to Kamping pouy last weekend on an automatic bike I decided to hire a semiautomatic bike (gears, no clutch).

The ride to Pailin is about 2 hours, so after waiting around from 8am to 09:30 for everyone to turn up we got on the road and headed out to Pailin. The landscape changes a fair bit between Battambang and Pailin and it was so beautiful, I kept wanting to stop and take pictures but didn’t want to slow everyone down. We had a few stops on the way down for snacks and flat tyres and just to let our assess get some blood in them, and then we made it to Pailin. The idea was to ride out to the waterfall so we headed down a dirt road that turned into more of a mud puddle than a road. A couple of people fell, and Jason got splashed all over with mud by some amused locals riding by. When we got to the waterfall the bridge was out and we were pretty hungry, so Mark and I jumped in for a quick swim, but we didn’t walk up to the top of the waterfall, and we decided to head out and get some lunch. We rode out to this beautiful spot with a little lake with a swan boat on it and an orchard between these hills but the place was eerily deserted and so we headed off to somewhere else. On the way back from the waterfall Mark slipped out in a particularly muddy area and ended up in the bushes with a 3^rd degree burn on his leg. We didn’t have any cold water so at Untac’s suggestion he covered it in toothpaste J “khmer traditional medicine”. I offered him some codeine I had in my bag but he seemed to want to keep his wits about him while riding so he just toughed it out.

Sitting at the new lunch place in a grass hut I was super hungry and tasted the tasty beef with lime and pepper… so tasty! (sorry cows) then I wanted to eat all the lime and pepper beef, and we ate food there for a few hours and generally talked crap as usual. Afterwards we were going to head to another waterfall but it was getting late and some people wanted to go home, so they headed back and we decided to head back by a back road that had some other waterfall on it, with Untac as our trusty guide we turned around and headed through the most stunning rural areas of Cambodia, I am so desperate to go back and see it all again slower. It was the kind of riding I like where you have to pay a lot of attention because the road is mostly potholes with the odd excited dog or flock of cows. There are lots of plantations out here which I hadn’t seen before and I am so keen to go back and spend some more time out there. Eventually we reached a little gate around a puddle, we followed Untac through it and soon the road disappeared and we were just riding through grass… which quickly gave way to a track which fairly resembeled a mudslide and eventually we had to stop and just walk. As we walked away from the bikes we heard a big thump and turned around to see a monkey pushing over a bike. Mark was concerned that they would steal the keys to the bikes so he went back, armed with a stick, to get the keys, but got ganged up on by a bunch of monkeys and had to turn tail (Untac later informed him that these are all the wrong things to do with monkeys).

When we got down to the waterfall it was beautiful, and we jumped in and it was so amazing, so refreshingly cool and nice and we swam under the waterfall and got waterfall massages. Then tried to drown each other a bit… just for fun J  I could tell people were starting to get antsy about the (at least 2 hour) ride back, so soon enough we started the ride back. Riding in Cambodia at dusk is never fun, it is very hard to see, people often have no lights or the lights don’t work on their vehicles, there are fires everywhere burning off the day’s rubbish, releasing toxic smells and reducing visibility further…  riding on an unknown dirt road full of significant potholes was no easier, luckily for me Jason soon ran out of petrol so I stopped with him and we spent the rest of that dusk time trying to figure out what to do. We decided I should ride off and get petrol and bring it back, by this time it was dark and the visibility for me much easier. I went and bought two coke bottles of petrol (spilt it all over my hands) and rode back with it in a plastic bag… As I rode I noticed an odd thumping happening with my bike and realised I had a completely flat tyre. By this time the rest of the gang had heard what was going on, and when I asked Untac what to do about the tyre they all decided to come back. We rode slowly up the road looking for anyone who could help us (tricky, especially in the countryside). Eventually we found some lovely nine-year olds outside a little wooden shack who replaced my inner tube somehow without removing the wheel and then asked for 50c for their troubles. The rest of the ride back was long, dark, involved getting a lot of bugs in the eye, had a few more stops for petrol etc, and eventually got us into Battambang around 09:30pm.

Over the next few days 8/10 of us also contracted a lovely pink eye conjunctivitis!

All in all I had a great time, I love adventures and being potentially stuck in the countryside, and waterfalls and mud and being a little unsure of what’s going to happen. In fact I think I may have had more fun than anyone else …

The bikes before the monkeys started pushing them over.

Waterfall no. 2 (In Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitts nature reserve place)

Riding through a flock of Cows.

Waiting to get the tyre fixed...