Indelible Roots

This morning I went to work on a moto taxi same as yesterday. But today the driver (a different one than the day before) wanted 3000 riel, or $.75 for the five minute ride to work. I told him the other guy who was sitting next to him on the corner only charged me 2500 riel yesterday. He didn’t care. I’m beginning to think a lot of these guys suck as prices fluctuate so much between drivers. I do like one guy on a Suzuki Shogun. He sits near the New Market and I’ve ridden with him twice after dinner with Lyna. He’s fast, doesn’t smell, and charges a reasonable rate.

That brings up the subject of Lyna. She’s pretty cool, has a great pout, and is damned feisty. She’s thinner than I prefer, but her personality is a 9. Now I’m not all that interested in dating her, not with girls throwing themselves at me here, and she is technically married (to a surgeon at the clinic no less.) But we hang out a lot, text all the time, and she helps me out with things, like finding a laundry place today. I think she’s pretty lonely as the other people at work are hesitant to hang out with her for fear of reprisal from the doc/estranged husband. I’m only getting one side of the story though and that was it.

Because of the heat and humidity you can only wear your clothes once here before washing. That’s even though we wear scrubs all day at work. So I asked Lyna to help me find a laundry place to get my pants and shirts washed and pressed. The land lady here will wash my socks and underwear for a couple of dollars, but my pants came back wrinkled last time. She does have quite a temper like many Asian women I know, so I actually hid the clothing in my computer backpack that she always sees me with when I came home to pick them up.

But instead of taking me to a laundry Lyna tells me she’ll just take it to a place close to her home and pick it up when it’s done. That way I won’t have to pay for a taxi to go pick it up which would cost half the price of the laundering. You can’t go against that kind of logic. So we go to Soraya market, near uncle Chheang’s home instead and wander around looking for a belt for my cousin’s wedding next week.

I checked out some nice belts, but they were expensive and a little too flashy for my tastes. Lyna tells me things are five to ten dollars more here because you’re paying for the air conditioning as opposed to the open air New Market two blocks away. We went up to the top floor where the theater, roller rink, arcade, and a balloon popping game station is. Lyna plays the balloon game which is the typical pop balloons with darts game. If you pop a balloon with all twelve of your darts you get one of the stuffed animals. If you miss even one you settle for two pieces of candy. Lyna ends up with four pieces of candy.

Then we walk by the arcade and Lyna seemed perplexed by it. She says she’s never been in one before, so we go in. After walking around a bit she gets a dollar’s worth of coins and we play the basketball game. Then I try the sledge hammer game like you see at the fair. Then Lyna tries her hand at getting a Hello Kitty doll using the claw (has anyone ever gotten one of those?) Except for the claw doll, there didn’t seem to be any reward for any of the games.

We then go to get something to eat, but I don’t want to eat at the mall, so we go to the MN Café from yesterday. The small meals there worked out pretty well as Lyna tells me later that she has to go home and eat there too or otherwise her parents will start asking questions. Hmmm… This is all getting more complicated by the minute.

Yesterday afternoon Samath and I were summoned next door to the bedside of my burn lady who had the neck contracture release (which looks horrible.) Dr. Jim and a newly arrived French surgeon are there with the nurses and they want me to splint her neck for scar compression. Then they notice the splint on her hand and start tinkering with it. In no time at all she is scheduled for MCP capulectomies to allow her to bend her fingers forward again.

Later that day Dr. Jim tells me he wants me to work on getting improved MCP flexion on her and any other patient that is tight there. I go through the patient rooms and find only one other patient who may need it, but this teenager still has pins keeping his fingers in extension.

This morning Samath and I splint the woman’s neck without much difficulty, but I didn’t use a large enough piece of material so it doesn’t sit on her shoulder like it should. The problem is the lack of paper towels here which I use to form to the body part, draw on, cut out, and recheck on the body part. You just can’t do that with a regular 8X11 sheet of copier paper.

Later I turn her wrist extension splint (which is at near neutral) into a dynamic splint to work on MCP flexion. I scrounge up a screw and secure it to the splint with some old splinting material. I then use strapping material for finger loops, going to the office to find a hole punch and to find rubber bands. After it was all I done fit it on her and send her off to come back in an hour.

Ten minutes later she comes to find me and tells me the screw blew off the splint under the tension of the rubber bands. Looking at the splint it appears that the old splinting material I used to secure the screw was brittle and just cracked under the pressure. So I ask Sophal, one of the nurses, if she knew of any thin rods or a coat hanger I could cut and bend. She had no idea what I was talking about. I then found Samath and asked him about it. After some rummaging through the closets he pulls out an old, bent coat hanger. I take this to the utility room and find some pliers to bend and then cut it to shape.

Next I rummaged through the box of old splinting material for a small sheet of still flexible material to secure the coat hanger to the splint. After breaking six pieces of material I find one of the right size and flexibility. Samath didn’t think it would stick, but I assured him it would. I then showed him that you had to scrape off the top layers to get them to bond together and discussed dynamic splinting with him.

However, after heating it up and pressing them together with the coat hanger in between, I wasn’t so sure how well they would hold together. I worked the edges extra diligently and tried to mold the splint over each other on the bottom edge. I then cut out the thumb and added a thumb strap also. As long as it doesn’t fall apart, I think it turned out pretty well.

Samath then brings in the man who had his hand amputated and his radius and ulna split. It looked pretty alien, but he had him moving the two bones together and apart using a combination of elbow flexion and extension, and pronation and supination.

After work I went with Sitha, the Smile Train coordinator and speech therapy interpreter, to his second job, teaching English. On the way we passed three motor scooters with a single huge hog on the back of each. Traffic was backed up and all the motor scooters were riding in the dirt. The three fellows with the hogs had quite a hard time as having a huge pig strapped down across the back of your little motor scooter makes for some poor balance.

At the school I found myself facing two dozen noisy young kids. Sitha introduces me and tells me to start teaching. Huh. I thought I was just there for some input, but I ended up teaching the ABCs for an hour. The kids had trouble with Rs and Ts. Now that I know teaching English is so easy here, I can keep that possibility in mind should I want some extra spending money.

On the way back home we encounter the same traffic jam, but worse, over the Japanese Bridge, so I have Sitha just drop me off at a café I saw on the way. I’m met by a guard on the street and then a young woman on the steps who leads me inside. Inside is a nicely decorated lounge/dining room with comfortable couches and a very modern and cozy feel. Dinner was $2.75, the typical rate, but at half the portions you usually get. The presentation was a hundred times nicer though. It reminds me of what Sopheap said the first day I met him, that people here are more interested in quantity than quality at this point in time. Time and time again I’ve found that to be true. This café has to be one of my favorite spots in town and I’ll definitely be back.

Well, so much for living cheaply. Today we went to the Olympic Market to buy fabric. Uncle Chheang, Samrith, and I both bought enough for two long sleeve dress shirts and I also bought enough for 2 dress pants. The ... [Continue reading this entry]

I was invited to a party by Samnang last night. He had been mentioning it for a week now and it seemed like fun at first. He had mentioned that it was some type of get together concerning sports, so ... [Continue reading this entry]

I awoke to the sounds of roosters and howling dogs again today. All from this yard I believe. I don’t know why they have so many dogs. There must be a dozen of them and they like to howl late ... [Continue reading this entry]

I went to dinner last night with Lyna, Dr. Long, Sophos (nurse), and Bolle, a gal from the Chenda clinic. Our server was quite openly gay and the gals appeared to be trying to get me drunk. It was a ... [Continue reading this entry]

11/05/2007

Last night we I sat down with some aunts who wanted to know why I was here. Kong was there to translate for me fortunately. They had a hard time understanding why I was working for free. Why was ... [Continue reading this entry]

11/04/2007

This weekend I met my cousin Kong and his dad from Battambang. Kong actually is here visiting from California where he’s been living for the past decade. He works seven days a week, but hopes to go to ... [Continue reading this entry]

It’s been a week since I arrived yet I feel like I’ve been here for months. While I’m definitely reconnecting with the language and culture, my identity is more in question now more than ever. I had hoped or expected ... [Continue reading this entry]

As I was leaving work yesterday, Mr. Sitha asked me to look at a baby out in the waiting area outside. I did a quick assessment and found a baby boy at three years of age who wasn’t walking, talking, ... [Continue reading this entry]