5-day overnight

Whewww! What an amazing experience! Cambodia is a beautiful country with even more beautiful people! The helicopter ride was awesome! We left the morning of Wednesday June 16th by helicopter and stayed along the coast for a while and then made our way inland. The landscape started off really flat with sand, grass, and some palm trees, but suddenly there were mountainous rock formations that looked like they didn’t belong there. The land was totally flat, and then the rock faces came out of nowhere like someone just dropped them out of the sky! The rocks were covered with moss and vines at first and the farther central we travelled the more they were covered with lush green jungle. It really was a gorgeous sight to see from the air. We arrived at Ang Sophy school by 11am and the students were taking final exams, but they ran outside whenever they heard the helicopters coming and the whole community gathered around to watch us land. We quickly unloaded our gear and had some time to walk around the school grounds and talk to a few students before the rest of our team came in the next two helos. We were not scheduled to see patients on this day, so we mostly just set up the MEDCAP and did “COMREL” activities, or community relations. I traded in one American dollar and got 4,000 Riel (sp?). And for 100 Riels, or 2.5 cents, we could buy food at the vendors on the side of the road. It is crazy how far a dollar can get you in Cambodia! Take that dollar menu! When our entire team was safely on the ground, we had a meeting and planned out the next 4 days. For the rest of the afternoon, we explored the community and got to know some of the people we would be working with. We went to a Buddhist pagoda that was right next to the school, and ended up having tea with a monk. One of the students came with us and translated our conversation with the monk. He was really happy to spend time with us, and it was an interesting cultural experience. Then we met a member of the Peace Corps who teaches English at Ang Sophy school. He taught us how to say some basic phrases in Khmer (said “kmy”), and introduced us to all of his students. These kids were awesome! They were so eager to talk to Americans, and they really wanted to practice their language skills and learn more. We talked one-on-one to a lot of the students for a few hours, and their English was really good! The Khmer language is fascinating and very difficult to write and speak. To me, it just looks like a bunch of squiggly symbols in a row, and I have no idea how they write it so beautifully. I learned how to say hello, goodbye, and thank you, and that is the extent of my Khmer knowledge. Later, we played basketball and soccer with some Cambodian kids for the rest of the evening. Sports are a fun way to socialize and get to know someone when there is a huge language barrier in the way. You can create a friendship and a bond without ever having to say a word, so it was a good icebreaker to begin the mission. There is no daylight savings time in Cambodia, so it got dark around 6:30 and we sat around and ate our wonderful dinner of MREs. Every day, there were 3 MREs allotted to each of us, so I will be happy if I never see one of those things again. The MEDCAP team set up sleeping quarters in two of the classrooms, but it was really crowded with so many people in one room. So, the pharmacy team got permission to sleep in the pharmacy classroom so that we could keep an eye on the medicine throughout the night. So we set up the pharmacy supplies and our “tent cots”, and this would be our home for the next 5 days. The cots each had a tent attached to the top of it with mosquito netting in the windows to keep out the dangerous Malaria vectors. That night we played cards and watched a concert that was taking place on the school grounds. It was a pretty relaxing night to prepare for the busy days that were ahead of us. We accepted patients for 8 hours on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and 4 hours on Sunday. As a 32 person MEDCAP team, we treated over 3,000 patients and filled almost 6,000 prescriptions. Overall, it was a huge success and we helped a lot of people! I will be posting more stories from each day soon! (Sorry about the postings being a few days late. The internet rarely works on the ship for obvious reasons...)