Liberty time!

On Sunday night, I got back from the 5 day MEDCAP and went straight to the showers. We had been bathing with baby wipes for 5 days, so I’m sure you can imagine my urgency for a hot shower! That night I relaxed and caught up with the rest of the pharmacy staff who had been onboard the whole time I was gone. On Monday and Wednesday I was on duty in the pharmacy. These days are pretty relaxing because there is plenty of staff on duty, and not a great deal of work to do. I usually catch up on my laundry, assignments, and blog during this time. I put all of our leftover supplies from Ang Sophy back into the stock for the other MEDCAPs and helped the other techs out with their duties. The military will not allow us to have access to the computer system, so I can’t actually complete any orders, but I do help in any other ways that I can. I made a batch of cefazolin 1g bags in the IV room since that is the antibiotic most often prescribed for our surgery patients. It was good practice and we can store it in the refrigerator for 14 days, so that will cover the rest of the surgeries in Cambodia. The pharmacists also ask me to research clinical scenarios and come up with possible explanations and solutions to them. This is probably the most helpful thing they can do for me. I have learned so much by trying to figure things out on my own, presenting my answers, and waiting to be corrected and instructed on key points that I missed. A few of the pharmacists are very recent graduates, so they have a lot of knowledge to share with me about clinical rotations and boards. One of them asks me a random board-type question every day, so I have started a list to help me study in the spring. Some of the other pharmacists have many years of experience under their belts and they are eager to teach me lessons that they have learned in their very respectable careers. Also, the technicians have been giving me advice and helpful hints in the IV room. I am really learning a lot from the entire pharmacy staff, and everyone is very knowledgeable and helpful in every situation that I have encountered. On Tuesday and Thursday I actually had liberty days! This means that I had the day off and I could take the liberty boat to the pier and do some sightseeing in the town of Sihanoukville. These days were exciting cultural adventures! When we arrived at the pier, we were bombarded with Cambodian men who all wanted to be our taxi driver for the day. They drove “tuk tuks,” which are large 4-seater carts that are pulled by a moped. They have a roof and side panels that can be put down if it is raining, or rolled up in nice weather. Most of the drivers spoke enough English so they could figure out where you wanted to go, but few spoke well enough to carry on a conversation. The town is a pretty nice place and we got to see a lot of different sights, plus the tuk tuk ride itself was a really cool experience. We went to a huge market, the beach, several restaurants, an area with wild monkeys, and an exhibit with a variety of reptiles and birds. Of course, my favorite place was the beach. It had such an awesome atmosphere, and it was unlike any beach I had ever been to. There were a hundred restaurants along the water and they all had reclining lounge beds and deep circular basket chairs with big round cushions lining them. The chairs were set out in front of the restaurant and they were so close to the ocean that when a big wave came the water would touch the first row of chairs. Each restaurant had its own BBQ buffet where they grilled up almost every kind of meat or seafood that you can imagine, as well as a full menu of traditional Cambodian food. And unlike restaurants in the states, you can order breakfast all day long! I loved this because the breakfast food here is so unique, and it usually isn’t something that we would consider breakfast anyways. The pharmacist with me tried some grilled squid, and someone else had fried shrimp which they said was amazing. The seafood is delicious because it is usually cooked the same day that it is caught. The market was also a really neat place. It was kind of like Walmart, except that each department was owned by a different family. It literally had everything you could ever need and they accepted American dollars. In fact, I think they would rather take American dollars over Riel. We spent a lot of time here because there was so much to see! There was an entire food section where the women sold fresh everything! There were all sorts of fruits, vegetables, meat, bread, rice, noodles, and many other things that were unrecognizable. I saw one woman cutting up the guts of some kind of animal and selling it at her stand. There were also sections for clothes, electronics, and souvenirs. It is crazy how much more they tried to charge us for a product just because we are westerners. Although the prices are still so low that it doesn’t matter much. A dollar means so much to them and so little to me, so I was ok with paying a little bit extra. The tuk tuk also took us to area where we could feed monkeys! It was a small strip of woods with a fence around it, not that a fence can stop them. We fed bananas and peanuts to almost a dozen monkeys! I was surprised how much they love peanuts! They wouldn’t even eat the bananas when they knew that someone else had peanuts in their hand. Two of the monkeys even had babies clinging to them! It was so cute! Then we went to the Snake House, which is a nice restaurant that also had exhibits of very diverse reptiles and birds. There were snakes, iguanas, lizards, crocodiles, and many colorful birds! We had a good time looking at all of the exotic animals and taking pictures of them. My liberty time was very fun, but I was glad to be helping with the mission again on Friday. I had a long day at the local MEDCAP in the outskirts of Sihanoukville, and I will write about it soon!