Week Three!

It’s been a while since the last posting! Time is flying!!!

-I got accepted to Case Western Reserve Med School (!!!!!)… but as of now, and unless Case offers us a huge scholarship, we’ll still be going to Penn State. Anyway, that’s enough of non-Cambodia things J

-Dr. Peterson was able to perform seven surgeries last week, and Andrew and I were allowed to observe all of them. The docs allowed me to scrub up on the last surgery and assist some! It was a great experience and Dr. Peterson even took the time to teach me how to put some sutures in… it felt like I was all thumbs, but it was really exciting. Unfortunately, Andrew left the OR before I started suturing, so he didn’t get a picture of it.
On Thursday night the director took all of us and the hospital staff out to a restaurant for a goodbye dinner for Dr. Peterson. The food was amazing! I really think I could live off of [most of] Cambodian food for the rest of my life… except for Kwat/Quat. One day the girls brought this fruit that they kept calling “Food Fruit,” or Kwat over for me to try. I can’t even begin to explain what it was like… it was round, about the size of an orange, and the outside was scaly like peeling sunburn, with a greyish-green color. The outside, which is inedible, has to be hacked off, leaving only the solid, dry, white inside. It’s a little crunchy, and the taste is somewhat reminiscent of a grapefruit, but what you notice as soon as you put it in your mouth is that it makes all of the moisture in you mouth and throat instantaneously disappear. It took half a glass of water for me to swallow every bite. Even the girls started coughing like they were going to choke after a while, and had to drink a lot of water to recover… but for some reason they still like it. Explanation???

-I didn’t mention about our trip to Thailand in the last post… Hubert was going to put Heather and Tricia on the bus to Bangkok, where they were flying out to the States from. He was then going to go to Chantebury to pick up some stuff for the hamburger shop and purchase a water filter that a friend in Phnom Penh asked for. He asked if Andrew and I wanted to tag along, and we agreed to- the only catch is that we had to be back by 5:30 for the English class that Hubert teaches. We left the house at about 8AM and expected to get through the border quickly to catch the van on the Thai side that leaves for Trat every 40-50 minutes or so, but there was a huge crowd of people at the border waiting to get through. It took us a lot longer than we had expected to finally get into Thailand. Needless to say, we missed the early van to Trat and had to wait for the next one to leave. When we finally got to Trat, Hubert made sure that Heather and Tricia had tickets for the bus going to the airport, and we headed off on a bus to Chantebury… to make a long story short, everything took longer than was expected, so even though we were rushing the whole time, we got back to Koh Kong too late for Hubert to make it to his English class, and we didn’t get to see much in Thailand. We hope to be able to go back for a day or two to visit Eva, my old housemate, who’s studying abroad in Thailand this semester.


- We’re back in Phnom Penh with the Freezes right now. Mary, the Petersons, Andrew and I left Koh Kong yesterday morning (leaving poor Hubert all alone)- Mary’s heading to Thailand for a two-week long medical conference, and the Petersons are heading to Bangladesh for 10 weeks to work in another hospital. Andrew and I will be teaching English at a local private school for the next two weeks. When Mary’s done with her conference, she’ll swing by through here and we’ll all head back to Koh Kong together.

- Life in Koh Kong is somewhat slow for Andrew and me (no complaints there). We wake up at about 6 o’clock, get ready, eat breakfast, and leave for the hospital at 8. At 11 or 12ish, we head back home with Mary for lunch (pretty much all the staff in the hospital leaves for lunch around this time. A lot of the time, the only staff left in the entire hospital from 11 till about 2 is a cleaning lady and one doctor or nurse). We help get lunch ready, eat, and nap during this time. At 2:30 I have a language lesson, and at 3:00 Andrew has his language lesson. After our lessons we usually head back to the hospital ‘till ~5 o’clock, but sometimes I just spend time with the girls (our teachers and some of the other typing students that Hubert has in the afternoon). Everything stops at the hospital between 4 and 5 o’clock, when the staff head off to work in their private clinics. Every other day, Andrew or I go to Hubert’s English class with him, which runs from 5:30-6:30. After that, we eat dinner, and the day winds down from there.