First day at Savong's School

Yesterday was my first full day in Siem Reap.  My intention in the morning was to just take a day to recover from jetlag and get myself settled in.  That was my intention.  I went out in the morning and walked to over to the Pub Street area (about 15 minutes away), which is kind of the central hub of activity for foreigners.  On the way, I passed the Angkor Hospital for Children and made a mental note of where it was.  After I found Pub Street, I just wandered around aimlessly and let myself get lost.  While doing this, I found a pharmacy called U-Care.  It's a high quality Cambodian chain pharmacy that has a reputation for carrying only real medication.  When you walk in, at first glance, it seems to carry mostly cosmetic stuff.  In the back were all the medical/first aid supplies and behind the counter with a real live pharmacist were the drugs.  Prices weren't listed so I decided to ask about meds that I had gotten in the U.S.  I brought two Z-packs (azithromycin - 250 mg pills x 5) with me.  With medical insurance covering most of it, I paid US$10 per Z-pack.  Not a bad price in my opinion.  U-care also happened to stock azithromycin.  It came in blister packs of 10 with 500 mg tablets.  Cost?  US$4.70.  Wow.  Need to do a little more investigating, but if that price is representative of all the others, the pricing here is good.  And U-care is supposed to be the expensive pharmacy in the area.

After the pharmacy, I bought myself a cheap mobile phone.  $35 buys you a slim Nokia phone and includes 40 minutes of international calls and 80 minutes of local calls.  No contract or calling plan. I don't think the pay-as-you-go plans in the U.S. are even this cheap.  I didn't bargain or do any comparison shopping so I might've been ripped off, but at that price, I can't complain.   Then I walked down the street to the Old Market (Psar Chas) to find some socks for the blisters I could feel forming.  I'll have to take some photos of the Old Market at some point, but it's really quite something.  Old Market is mostly indoors and is a labyrinth of closely packed stalls that sell just about anything.  There are sections for jewelry, meat, produce, cosmetics, souvenirs, electronics, etc, etc.  So I finally found the clothing section.  It's hard to stop to look at stuff.  When you do, the owner of the stall becomes very eager to ask you to buy their things.  I've learned from my travels how to say a polite but firm "no".  But it's still difficult to feel like you're letting someone down especially at the prices they're asking for.  After walking through the clothing area twice, I couldn't find any socks for sale which was surprising since that seemed to be the only thing missing.  Finally, I stopped at a shoe stall to ask for socks.  I gestured at my feet and the woman smiled and pointed to all the shoes.  I shook my head and said "socks", and took off my shoes.  "Aaaahh", she said, still smiling.  She turned around, and reached down behind her stool and brought out a plastic bag with socks.  Gucci, Calvin Klein, Lacoste.  No Hanes.  Too bad, guess I'll have to settle for Calvin Klein.

With my relieved feet feeling comfortable again, I walked back to my guesthouse.  Along the way, I stopped in a little store called Angkor Photo.  It wasn't really a store as much as an exhibit for social and documentary photography.  They still had promotional posters up for the annual Angkor Photo Festival which was held Nov 20-27, 2010.  Will have to try and keep this in mind if I come back.  Anyhow, this store also showed the works produced in association with the Anjali House.  Very impressive body of work.  But what really caught my eye were the photos of A.K. Kimoto, a Japanese American photographer who tragically died very suddenly at the age of 32 earlier this year in Australia of an undisclosed cause.  Here is a link to a photo essay showing some of his works: link.  The large prints in the store are from his series showing the problem of heroin addiction in Afghanistan and many of those photos are in that link.

It was only 11 AM at this point and I really didn't feel like wandering Siem Reap with the temps getting well into the 80's.  After returning to my room, I gave Savong a call to see what was going on with the school today.  He sounded very happy to hear me and asked if I'd like to come to the school that day.  Since I had already finished my morning errands, I said sure.  So he sent a driver (Hong, I think he said was his name) to pick me up in the early afternoon.  My ride turned out to be on the back of a motorbike/scooter.  Hong offered a helmet midway through the trip, but I wasn't positive he was going to pull over while I put it on, so I declined.

Being on the road in Cambodia on ANY kind of vehicle (tuk tuk, motorbike, bicycle, or car) is an... interesting experience.  The road out to Savong's School is paved and yes, there are painted lines.  But I'm not sure why, because nobody really seems to pay much attention to the lines.  As far as I can tell, they are there merely as a suggestion.  Or perhaps even just decorative accents to break up the monotony of all that boring black asphalt.  If a Cambodian's destination is on the left side of the road, he/she is not going to let something so pedantic as a painted line stop him from driving up the left side of the road.  As a result, very frequently you find yourself in a live game of chicken.  Being on a motorbike and not holding the handlebars, the odds feel like they're stacked against you unless you're going up against a 12 year old girl on a bicycle.  But then you feel guilty for feeling safer.

So we finally get to the school and I guess I must have looked pretty pale because Hong asked, "You scared? Not scared?".  I shook my head and weakly insisted, "NOT scared" which produced a reaction suggesting that I just told the world's funniest joke.  First things first, I stopped by the medical clinic which was at the orphanage center.  Kids everywhere immediately greeted me with a chorus of "Hello!  Where are you from?  What is your name?"  Really, it was quite impressive for the lack of accents.  I met Dr. Sokunthea and her assistant who were in the middle of examining a child with pneumonia.  She seemed pretty busy so I said I would go see the school and come back to talk with her later.  The next stop was the school itself.

At the school, there was a library that had quite a few books in it ranging from basic picture books up to books for young adults.  There was a small section of Japanese books as well, from the Japanese volunteers who had been here previously.  I met a couple of the staff members (whose names I will have to write down for me to remember).  I could see two classrooms.  In one classroom there was a group of about fifteen kids who looked about 8-15 years old.  There were two women volunteers in there teaching the class.  A British man - John - was standing outside the other classroom and waiting for students to come to class.  He came over to chat and ended up inviting me to come over and teach a class with him.  Long story short, I had a great time and will definitely be teaching some more classes.  Our class only had five students, but they were older with ages between 18-23.  Sok, Somol, Touer, Sochun, and Salat (I think I got the last one wrong).  Their experience with English ranged from less than a year to two and a half years.  In any case, I was quite impressed with how well we were able to communicate with our limited shared vocabulary.  They are obviously eager and very motivated to learn.  One of the women from the other classroom stopped by to introduce herself.  It turns out that she was from Poland.  The other woman was from Holland.  To our Cambodian students, they sounded very similar.  Then on top of that,  here I was, from...Portland.  It made for a very lively discussion of geography and phonetics.

I discovered a few interesting things yesterday.  On the one hand, the students had some fairly advanced grammar questions - like why you use "a" instead of "an" in front of "university" since it starts with a vowel.   On the other hand, they had a hard time answering basic things about the English language like how many letters there were in the alphabet.  This might be the intrinsic result of the turnover of volunteer teachers.  However, this is probably not a reflection of any real problem since I think the priorities in learning English here are just different - the emphasis being more on becoming conversational over learning linguistics.  But I wonder if it might not help their English learning to be more efficient if some of the basics were covered first.  I'll have to play it by ear, but I'm excited for the upcoming weeks.  I'm open to suggestions, so please, feel free to add your teaching thoughts, ideas, or comments.

After the class was over, I went back to the clinic and chatted with Dr. Sokunthea.  She is a young Cambodian who started off as a nurse and then went to medical school from which she just graduated last year in Phnom Penh.  Her English is very good which was a big relief for me because I don't think any of her patients' parents could speak five words of English to say nothing of having to describe their child's illness or pain.  I am further encouraged by the fact that she is now working at the clinic four days out of the week, Mon through Thurs, rather than the two days I heard she was originally working.  We went over the inventory and the following are what I noted or what Dr. Sokunthea told me: decent supply of antibiotics, but are running low on mebendazole (anti-parasitic) and no azithromycin (but erythromycin is stocked).  Low on antibiotic ointment - preferably find bacitracin.  Need to find large bottles of sterile saline for rinsing skin and wounds.  No sutures.  Accu-check monitor for sugar available, but no strips.  Urinalysis dipsticks running low.  Lancets available for finger pricks, but no needles or syringes.  Gloves available but brittle from old age (and probably heat).  Plenty of gauze, bandages, and tape.  No otoscope, but I brought one with an LED bulb that should last pretty much forever.  Ibuprofen and aspirin looked plentiful.  There is a water pump outside the clinic but the water is pumped from an underground well and filtered.  I don't know anything about what filtration system is used or how effective it is.  Will look at the water under the scope next week after my luggage has arrived.  Anything else any of you would consider?

I asked Dr. Sokunthea about pharmacies and she said I should have Savong take me since he can find the best deals at reliable places.  I asked about U-care and she said that they were high quality, but at least twice expensive as other places which I found ironic since I found their azithromycin prices to be so cheap.  Shows how much I have to learn.  Still, at least I know where to go when I need guaranteed authentic meds.  I have much more to ask Dr. Sokunthea in the next week, but I think we're off to a good start.

One thing that Duncan had discussed with me was setting up some sort of record keeping system.  I noticed that Dr. Sokunthea kept her notes on blank white paper in a binder.  I don't know much yet about how she tracks the patients but that will be something for me to investigate on Monday.  The immediate problem with setting up a medical records system will be to set something up that will continue to be useful to them when I have left.  I would LOVE to be able to set up an electronic medical record with photo identification.  However, that is impractical for here since there's no computer (or enough electricity to run one) to use.  Also, Dr. Sokunthea will be writing in Khmer and I'll be writing in English, so we need something that can be useful to both of us and any future medical volunteers.

Whew.  Okay, that's a lot for one day.  But I needed to write some of the stuff down for myself before I forget.  I must remember to bring a notebook with me next time but I had intended just to make it a brief visit and didn't expect to get so involved so quickly.  I did bring a camera out to the clinic, so here's the first photo of my trip.  Click on the photo for the larger version.