Get your ears checked!

Since I've been working on a report of the Health Equity Fund in Kep Province, my routine here is pretty boring. I'm in the work eat sleep cycle that strongly resembles my final year of college, so any chance that I get to go out into the field is an adventure for me! This week, I followed Kunthy on two health education trips. On the first day, we visited Phnom Leuv village in Pong Teuk commune. It is about a 30 min tuktuk ride away from the Seaside guesthouse (where I am living). The topic was "healthy ears." All Ears is an NGO that conducts ear clinics around the country, they have visited Kep 3 times before, and they are back again (after 3 months) to find new patients and follow-up with more complicated cases.

The second time, we went to Okrasa village in Okrasa commune, but it was rainy and windy like no other. We rode ther on the back of a motorcycle, our ponchos flapping noisily in the wind, and rain hitting my face like pellets. When we got there, the roads were too muddy to ride through, so we had to get off and walk. To my surprise-in this horrid horrid weather where my sandals were getting stuck in the mud, I was slipping and sliding on the dirt path, dodging cow dung every couple of meters, and trying to ignore the sandy slippery feeling on the soles of my feet and thinking about all the bacteria and parasites that I now had lodged in my footwear and on the bottoms of my now drenched pants-there were people out, happily and calmly planting their rice seedlings. They seemed so happy and many of them were not wearing ponchos. You would have thought that it was like any other day.

The old woman who had offered her home up for the health education gathering this morning even stopped her rice planting, and walked the several hundred meters bare foot in the slippery sliding madness to lead us to her house. When we got there however, we realized that nobody had bothered to show up. Number 1 it is difficult to get villagers to gather together during the rainy season, because this is when they do a lot of their rice planting, and many people often only have enough land to secure enough rice for half of the year or less. Number 2 it was raining and very windy - 'nough said.

On our way back, to get the mud off of my shoes, I approached a relatively "clear" looking puddle and washed my sandals in them. As I was doing so, an image of a little boy that I had seen the other day, peeing right next to our favourite restaurant on the cement floor popped into my head. In this rainy environment it is impossible to tell what is urine and what is not...I told Kunthy before I mounted her moto "Somebody has probably peed in that water, but I just had to get that mud off of my feet." To which she replied, "Pee is probably not the only thing in that water..."

Picture Album (Coming Soon!)
Preview:

Water Filter Distribution Photos

Preview:



Photos Day 1, Day 2 courtesy of Diana Wu.

Water Filter Distribution to Most Vulnerable Families in Kep.

The last two days, we distributed 250 filters to most vulnerable families in two communes of Kep province, Okrosa (of DomnakchangAeuk district) and Prey Thom (of Kep district). The cool thing was many of the families had been interviewed by Centre for International health (CIH) volunteers in June.

We held two water filter distribution "ceremonies," because one of the district governors refused to go to another district governor's ceremony. (The pagoda's where we held the ceremonies were less than 20 minutes apart...I thought it was a pretty lame excuse.) While Kunthy, our CIH program manager and organizer of the water filter distribution ceremony, rode her motorbike to the pagoda, the 6 of us volunteers took a tuktuk. In about 15 minutes we arrived at a beautifully carved stone arch, that lead us to a large open sandy area, where the pagoda was located. The pagodas in Cambodia are very open, with colourfully painted balconies (red, yellow, blue, pink...) beautiful frescos detailing the life of Buddha lining the top of the walls, and lines hanging from one end to the other, criss-crossing each other, with cute little shapes (flowers and triangles) cut from patterned shirt fabrics of all the colours you can imagine hanging from them in series. Some of them also have a wall where they record major donations and contributions from the community.

We were met with curious stares, and when we walked up the steps to the pagoda, and removed our shoes, a little boy with a buzzcut grabbed some straw mattresses, placed them on the ground and motioned us to sit on them. All of the villagers had arrived already, and were sitting patiently on the tiled floor. At first they look like a sea of darkened faces from the rice planting and the hot Cambodian sun, amid a multicoloured palette of dusty pink, purple, yellow, and grey blouses. Most of them were women, most middle aged or older, and some men. Slowly though, we began to recognize faces. In Prey Thom, we realized that two of them were our dessert ladies, others had charmed us with their hospitality and kindness when we interviewed them regarding safe drinking water in June. Suddenly the faces seemed friendlier, I even noticed one of my interviewees falling asleep during the district governor's talk (they are known to be long-winded...we asked them to speak for 15 minutes, but neither were able to stick to their time limits. They say it may be a Cambodian habit, of zoning out when you are being lectured at, because that is what they used to do during the Khmer Rouge regime.)

After the district governor and commune chief made their speeches, Allison and I with Kuthy's help, made a small presentation on the importance of drinking clean water (you can avoid getting stomach ache, diarrhea, and malnutrition if you remove the bacteria and worms from your water), and how to prepare, use, and maintain the filter in their homes. I was impressed with Kunthy's ability to connect with the audience. While we were up there, I noticed that every single face was turned towards us - not only was the material more interesting, and not only were we standing up and being more animated, I think Kunthy was doing a good job of using real life examples and cracking jokes here and there (e.g. the ceramic pot that filters your water is not a flower pot like you have at home, though it may look like it). She got the audience to participate, and she got them to ask questions when they were confused. From what I had been told by villagers during water filter interviews, it sounded like a lot of villagers missed a lot of information (particularly the woman that went back to drinking dirty pond water after her water filter broke!), and I thought that it was perhaps because of the boringness of the health education meetings. But now that I'd seen what Kunthy does, I think it has more to do with the fact that many of these villagers are illiterate.

In Canada, say if you wanted to know more about diabetes, you can ask your friends, family, relatives for answers. Ultimately though you will end up relying and trusting what you will have read, because you either look online for information, or ask your doctor because you have easy access to him/her. If you don't though, you end up relying on word of mouth for all of your information. You can imagine how confused you can get at the end of the day.

After the education about the water filters, we went to our stations to distribute them. That was another headache all together. Each volunteer was paired up with either a village chief ("mey poom") or village volunteer (each of them are paid $2 for helping out). They did not speak English, so Kunthy quickly taught us a few Khmer words "Ot Mow" for absent, "niak poom" for villager, and the relevant respectful titles. It seemed as though they were not well briefed on the distribution procedures because everyone seemed to be doing it differently. We were to collect 2,000 riel (US$0.50) for each filter (each filter costs US$10, but we ask for a small contribution from each villager to encourage them to value it, take care of it, and not sell it), and make sure that all of them are accounted for (somebody was caught stealing 8 filters last summer.)

Some of the village volunteers though were rushing through the process, calling villagers' names and handing out filters without marking things down, other volunteers were collecting money and stuffing it into their pockets without counting the money, still others collected money from everyone before the ceremony started without noting down who had paid what, and still others did not even ask for the villagers' Most Vulnerable Families List (MVFL) cards before they handed out the filters. It was a reflection of what both groups of volunteers were used to (doing things by memory and trusting villagers rather than keeping detailed records to avoid liability). In the end, out of all of the villagers in category 2 ("very poor" who lived on US$0.25 per member of the family per day), almost all of them were able to pay. For category 1 ("extremely poor" who lived on US$0.13 per member of the family per day) a little more than half were able to pay (sometimes they would give what they had, maybe about a fourth or 2/3 the asking price).

Since many of the villagers who had come to pick up the filter were old, we worried about them having to bring the filters back home. After all it was a pretty fragile and heavy giant ceramic pot inside a sturdy but still breakable plastic bucket and cover. Some villagers carried them home on their bikes, others had their 5 year old daughter carry them home with them, but for many of the elderly, their only option was to carry it themselves. And we're not talking about a simple 5 minute walk around the block, we're talking 30-40 minutes in the blazing hot sun of early afternoon in tropical, having to walk across very narrow rice field paths, over bushes, sometimes between trees, avoiding cow poop and trying not to fall into the ponds. It is HARD, and I have no idea how to describe it in words, or with pictures. You just have to come to Cambodia and try it yourself.

Anyways, that's all the time I have right now to blog, so I will be back with pictures. Stay tuned.

Dog Bite - Happy Canada Day!

It happened during lunch, and fortunately, it wasn't me. My fellow volunteers, Kathleen and Allison, and I were eating lunch at our regular Khmer place, when we stood up to return to the guesthouse, and it happened. The restaurant's dog was sleeping under the table, and Kathleen accidentally stood up right on its back. The dog squirmed loudly and bit her in the heel. Not a big bite. If you didn't see it happen, you would have mistaken it for a scratch. But we were nervous, knowing that bites from rabid dogs are deadly. The virus spreading through and attacking the body's nervous system.

There is a pre-immunization for rabies, which consists of three shots over a few weeks. It's called a pre-immunization though because even with it, you are not immune to rabies. What it does is it buys you time. Without the pre-immunization you only have 24 hours to get to a hospital and have the first vaccination dose, one of 5 vaccinations you must receive over a period of 28 days, including immunoglobin, which apparently many hospitals in developing countries do not carry. Before coming to Cambodia, our supervisor warned us that if we got bitten by a dog, there was a high chance you would have to be emergency evacuated to Bangkok, in Thailand in order to find the vaccine.

Unfortunately, Kathleen did not receive the pre-immunization. It is a gamble, and usually doctors will not pressure their patients into getting it because it is expensive (about US$300), and the chances of being bitten are not extremely high. And if you receive the pre-immunization, you still have to be shipped to a hospital to receive the post-vaccinations.

So, when Kathleen was bitten, we immediately notified everyone in the program, we called Kunthy, our Kep program manager who was a qualified nurse, midwife, and accountant, and Buntheon who was our Phom Penh program manager and driver. We also notified our supervisor in Canada, as well as the one in Kep, who was replacing her for this week only. There was a hospital in Kampot (about 30 minutes away), and Kunthy was sure that she saw a private clinic that carried the vaccine. but after seeing the hospitals and health centres in Kep province, Kathleen was a little nervous about the cleanliness and sterility of their medical equipment. The other and more reliable option was to go straight to Phnom Penh (about 3 hours away) to the International SOS hospital, that was open 24/7.

While Allison rushed to look up information about the vaccination process post-bite, I hurried to e-mail our supervisor in Canada, and Danielle, a second year medical student that had just arrived from Phnom Penh, helped to reassure Kathleen that she had some time (24 hours), all we had to do was take her somewhere to get a vaccination. Danielle also insisted that she come with Kathleen to get the vaccination, to accompany her, help ask the doctors the right questions, and notify the travel insurance company about the incident. They arranged for the taxi who had just dropped the two girls off from Phnom Penh to wait for them while they packed their things to go to the hospital. Stephanie, who was good friends with Kathleen, also made sure to remind Kathleen about what she should bring (passport, insurance policy, money, clothing, etc.) and comforted her as well. Buntheon and I were dispatched to the Khmer place where Kathleen had been bitten to inquire about the dog, his age, normal temperament, and whether or not people knew if the dog had bitten anyone else before.

Within an hour of the bite, Kathleen was on her way to Phnom Penh with Danielle to accompany her.

Luckily, the hospital did have the vaccine, and Kathleen received the first dose in 5-8 shots from shoulder to foot. She arrived back in Kep within 24 hours vaccinated, and much calmer. The travel insurance company even promised to cover the entire cost of the vaccine. She will have to return to Phnom Penh to receive the remaining 4 doses in 3, 7, 14, and 28 days from Canada Day the day she got bitten. What a way to celebrate!

When I think back on this incident, I admire the way in which our entire team of volunteers and staff helped to make sure that Kathleen was ok. It is amazing to think that within 24 hours, she went to the hospital in Phnom Penh and back and received the right vaccination. It seems like such an amazing feat when I think about the dozens of families that I personally interviewed that I knew would very likely die from rabies, if they were bitten by a rabid dog. If you are living on less than 25 cents per day, there is no way you are going to be able to search the internet for vaccination procedures, or have access to people who have nursing or even medical knowledge, or health insurance. The whole trip to Phnom Penh for Kathleen would have cost a maximum of perhaps US$71 (US$45 taxi, $6 for hotel, $5 get to the hospital and back to the hotel, $5 to come back to Kep on the bus, $10 for food) and then another couple hundred for the vaccine, which she will get re-imbursed. You could also count the opportunity cost of having 2 of our volunteers away from work for 1 day.

As a villager among the most vulnerable families in kep, the situation would probably have run more like this. Most people know that when you get bitten by a dog, you have the potential of dying from rabies. If the family happened to have a neighbour or relative who had gone to the health centre before, then the neighbour or relative may or may not say very positive things about it. As recently as 2001, full-time health centre and hospital health staff were being paid as low as US$15/month. This extremely meager salary contributed to very low staff motivation to deliver quality health care. Often times there would be NO health staff even present, because they would be busy operating from their own private practices, or doing another job. The health centres are often not well equipped, and at best, they would have chlorinated water, and some drugs, but no electricity (which didn't arrive in Kep until 2007). Because of the lack of staff motivation, you probably wouldn't be referred to the hospital.

If by chance you WERE successfully referred to the hospital, in order to pay the admission fee and transportation and food to get there, you would need to either sell your assets (at worst your productive assets/land), or get a loan, for which interest rates are 10-20%. If you are even near-poor (not extremely poor, but poor) you will likely fall into deeper poverty through this process, which is exactly what has happened to a lot of families in Cambodia.

On the other hand, if none of your neighbours or relatives had been admitted to hospital (which is very likely, b/c the cost of getting admitted is on average about US$54 per admission, including treatment - which is WAY above what any of the families on the Most Vulnerable Families List can afford - they have US$0.25 or less to spend per person per day), you would end up consulting a traditional healer or private practitioner, who would A, not have the vaccine, and B, charge you anyway for a different drug because they want to make a profit. And remember if you don't get vaccinated within 24 hours...the virus will spread through your body, and as the doctor at the International SOS hospital explained "you will experience symptoms after a couple of weeks, and you will die."

Luckily with the Most Vulnerable Families List and with the Health Equity Funds (HEFs) being implemented in two thirds of the country, many poor families are able to access more timely heathcare at a reduced cost (all HEFs cover healthcare costs, and some even cover transportation, food, and lodging costs - none cover opportunity costs yet). For the time being, much of the Health Equity Funding are coming from internatinoal Aid agencies, but more research is needed to figure out how on earth we can fundraise sustainably. One province, Takeo, currently has a local NGO, called Buddhism for Health, that is trying to do just that, but collecting donations from the community itself for the Health Equity Fund.

Anyways, I thought I would take the opportunity of the dog bite to explain the issues that I've been reading about and experiencing in Cambodia. Moral of the story: always check that there are no rabid sleeping dogs under your table, and appreciate the public health care system in your country!

---

I have uploaded some pictures here about our recent visit to some nuns in Kep.
Preview:

Thanks Daddy, for sending me to school...

This is a good example of how Cambodians pose for the camera. One is the actual photo The and Thy posed for, and the other one was the candid shot. Can you guess which one is which?














__________

I will be spending the next little while compiling a Literature Review on Health Equity Funds (HEF) in Cambodia. I feel kind of silly being in Cambodia and doing a literature review because I feel like I should be out in the field rather than in the CIH office reading online articles and typing on my computer. At the same time though, the Literature Review is a VERY important part of the report we hope to produce. The reason it is so important is because it puts the Most Vulnerable Families List (MVFL) and HEF in context. How useful is the MVFL as a poverty-reduction strategy? How does it compare to other strategies that currently exist?

Or, in business terms, the point of the Literature Review in this case would be to introduce our product - the MVFL. What is it? Why do we need it? How is it going to improve the awesomeness of our lives? Apparently, many NGOs do not engage in a lot of research (mainly because they are afraid that private donors would not be willing to fund it). More and more NGOs, however, that they really should be investing in program evaluation if they want their programs to improve and make sure that their programs are really reaching their target population.

I am so glad that I majored in Anthropology. I think I would find this work impossibly overwhelming if I didn't have that training from Haverford College. So, even though I have my work cut out for me for the next 6 weeks, I am very happy right now that I have some experience doing Literature Reviews, and hope that this one will come out nicely. :)

Over the weekend, Sray Tal, one of our translators took us to the home of a 58-year-old woman who had been interviewed for our water safety project. She was living with her 28 year old daughter and two sons, and owned three small rice fields, enough to feed her family for 6 months, and sold some hot palm-fruit and coconut cakes to make a living. She earned about 1000-2000 riel a day (25-50 cents).

But I swear, her cooking, is AMAZING. She cooked some delicious red curry with snails for us, and it was so good, I would have eaten three bowls of it, if it weren't getting so dark near the end of our meal (there is no electricity in that village, so when it gets dark, it gets dark, and that is the end of your day). The cakes she made were also amazingly delicious. I ate 1 before the meal started, and she sent us home with 11 more - of which I ate 3 when I got home...

Eating this meal was more than just about the wonderful hospitality of these families who own next to nothing. It was about seeing that these people have something to offer, a very delicious cuisine! If she were to open a restaurant, I would be eating there everyday. All she was missing was some start-up funds.

----

Today, I met up with my travel doctor's friend, Judy. She was a very charming and well-spoken woman with a million-dollar smile, short but lush gray hair, and an amazing energy about her. She and her friend Linda were staying briefly at the Kep Lodge, a 15 minute walk away from where I was staying. She was working as a consultant specializing in organizational change, working with an NGO whose job was to provide policy leadership for hundreds of other education-focused NGOs in the country. She was just terminating an 18-month volunteer work experience with VSO, which is a UK-based NGO that places volunteers with particular skills in NGOs across the globe.

Her friend, Linda, who had come to Cambodia for about a month and a half, was a specialist in gender issues and health and was working with UNICEF to assess its programs and make recommendations. We discussed the issues involved with trying to educate uneducated people about health. Because many of the Most Vulnerable Families are illiterate and have very little education, often times, they will know what germs are, but will not know how germs can make you sick, or why you ALWAYS need to boil/filter your water, not just SOMETIMES. There were a lot of gaps in their knowledge, and if you think about it...it's not that surprising. How many times have you zoned out during a very boring office meeting? or during class at school? If you are illiterate, and do not have any picture books or written materials to review what you've just learned at a "health education meeting at the village chief's house" you are bound to forget things, misunderstand things, and ultimately, be very confused about what it is that you've just learned. So, it is VERY DIFFICULT to do health education in a population that is largely uneducated.

Judy saw the issue from the Education perspective. She noticed that a lot of students did not get the opportunity to go to school not just because of poverty, but because of bad health and illness. One third of deaths of children under the age of 5 are due to water-borne illnesses. Those that make it past the age of five often suffer from respiratory diseases, or malnutrition. Talking to Judy made me realize that we can't just offer people education or health, they have to be supplied in tandem.

Another issue is community mobilization, which we talked about as well. Linda explained that often what happened with community health projects was that they were abandoned after a while, because nobody took responsibility for them. If the water pump broke, sometimes the only 2 people trained in the community by NGOs will have migrated to Thailand or Laos to work. There was no sense of communal ownership of the water pump. So, what UNICEF has been trying to do since 2006 is mobilize communities by supplying them with nothing but information. They do things like visit the feces-covered areas of the community to show the villagers where the flies also hang out besides around their open food. They calculate as a group how much feces the village produces in a year to give a sense of how much bacteria is circulating the community endangering the health of the village's children. And so far, these efforts have been successful at getting the community to think for itself and demand change, rather than passively accept it from a hodge-podge of NGOs.

A huge barrier to political or community participation though for the poor is, simply, poverty. If you are poor, your options are extremely limited. If you barely have enough food to eat, are you going to go out of your way to visit the village chief and make a complaint? And risk not having enough to make it to the next day?

Anyways, it is getting very late, and I should close up. Thank you for reading!

Lost in Translation...very lost...

Because of the multitude of NGOs that are present in Cambodia, their efforts to improve the lives of Cambodians are making good progress, but the work is extremely uncoordinated. It's as if Cambodia had a thousand different mini-governments running the country...and I got a taste of what it was like this week.

One of our volunteers, Kathleen, who went into the field to do interviews about water safety encountered an angry villager who complained to her saying that an assistant village chief had forced her to pay 10,000 riel (about 2.50 USD - keep in mind that everyone we interview are families that made it on the Most Vulnerable Families List, and therefore have 25 cents or less to spend on each member of the family per day) for a communal water filter that was yet to come.

When Kathleen heard this, she, very responsibly, asked the woman to bring her some information about the water filter or organization that was providing the water filters, and the villager showed her a black and white photocopy of the CIHCambodia pamphlets we have been giving out during our interviews to educate villagers about clean water practices. It appeared as though someone, perhaps pretending to be the assistant village chief, was scamming the villagers into paying 10,000 riel for a filter that never showed up, and was doing it all in CIH's name.

In shock, Kathleen's translator, Mr. Sun, told the woman that she had gotten jipped because she had paid $2.50 for a water filter that she could have gotten for free from CIH (because she is on the Most Vulnerable Families List - although this isn't true. We now make villagers pay a sum of 50 cents "contribution" to avoid giving out "free" things and encourage recipients to take good care of the donated filters).

When our supervisor Rebecca, she was absolutely alarmed and decided to put Kunthy, our Kep Program manager, on the case immediately. We knew that the Red Cross was selling filters for 2.50 USD, but it seemed as though the fact that they collected the money before delivering it made it very easy for any official to come around and say that they were collecting money for filters.

The next day, Kunthy personally went to visit the woman who had made the complaint. After speaking to the woman, she came back to our CIH office, and told us that it had all been one giant misunderstanding. What happened was the woman who had complained had actually sort of been interviewed before by CIH - by me, to be exact. Kunthy showed me the picture of the villager, and I recognized her face immediately. She was the neighbour that had sat down next to my interviewee, and started answering all my questions, even though they were not directed at her.

A few days afterwards, a Red Cross Volunteer (who often happens to be a village chief, or one of the village chief's many assistant community-chiefs, you could say) had come around asking for $2.50 in exchange for a Red Cross water filter at a later date. She had given him the money, and the next day, my fellow volunteer, Kathleen, went to interview her. When Kathleen asked her for some information about the organization who provided the filters, the poor woman got confused between the two organizations (Red Cross and CIH), and her neighbour (the man that I had interviewed the week earlier) showed up with the pamphlet that I had given him.

To make matters worse, Mr. Sun's well-meaning but ill-informed comment about the price of the Red Cross and CIHCambodia water filters caused the woman to demand that the assistant village chief/Red Cross Volunteer give her her money back, which he did. When Kunthy came a few days later to find out what all the fuss was about and to clarify to the woman that the CIHCambodia actually wasn't free, but cost 50 cents, the woman became even more frustrated and upset. "Whatever," she said, "I don't want a water filter anymore!" And apparently scooped a bowl of dirty water from an open ceramic jar and fed it to her young toddler to drink. So, in the end, the one who is harmed most in this entire misunderstanding is the villager, and her family, who now are not only extremely poor and uneducated, but are angry and unwilling to consider the option of using a water filter.

That same day, Kunthy notified the Red Cross Chief about the issue, and she and I went to meet up with him. In a room with a long desk, topped with binders and papers on one end, I met with a solemn looking man in a pink dress shirt who refused to look at me when I spoke to him. It was incredibly distracting, because I wasn't sure whether he was disrespecting me or respecting me, and later learned that often Cambodians will do that because they feel shy or embarassed when they do not understand the foreign language I am speaking. The whole meeting, I felt as though we were in a precarious dancing competition, trying to see who could back down first.

My aim in meeting with him was to try to figure out why some of the villagers were feeling like they were being tricked into paying money for filters they might not receive, and how we could work together on this same issue of safe drinking water. I wasn't questioning him or anything, but the whole format of the meeting, with us facing each other, Kunthy having to translate everything back and forth between us, and the Cambodian body language that was so new to me made it feel like I was in a face off.

I found out that the Red Cross Volunteers were only being paid $4 a day to do Red Cross administrative stuff, like collecting money for water filters (which they do separately from the filter distribution in order to avoid mis-counting money or losing filters because of theft - CIHCambodia had lost about 8 filters the last time it distributed filters and collected $ for them during a ceremony - one of the theives was someone rather important in the community that shall remain unamed). When they broke, it would be up to the villager to notify the Red Cross Volunteer who would come around and try to repair the damaged filters, or re-educate the villager. However, because the Red Cross recently ran out of funding for the water project, they had to stop paying their Red Cross Volunteers, which resulted in worse service, and problems like failing to tell the villagers what the money is being collected for, what the filters are for, how to take care of them, etc.

At the close of the meeting, feeling a need to end with something positive and diplomatic, I thankd the Red Cross Chief for his time and his free bottle of Red Cross water, and expressed my hopes that we would try to share information with each other, if either of us found a better way to educate villagers about safe drinking water. A nice, but rather unproductive, end to an awkward meeting. I would have hoped to come out with more concrete steps as to how we were going to avoid misunderstandings like the one we had experienced with the villager, but there wasn't enough time, I only have 6 more weeks here, and they apparently have dried up their water project funding. But this whole story just goes to show how much can be lost in translation...

---

Other updates (on the food front):

- finally tasted the water fromt the water filter - earthy, but still good! (and free!)

- located a bubble tea stand at Kep Beach and am now in danger of becoming one of my supervisor's and fellow volunteer's diabetes research project subjects. Bubble Tea: bubbles, condensed milk, powder, and ice....yum! And for only 37 cents!

- then today, I visited my favourite dessert stand and thought, 1 bubble tea (37 cents) = 3 bowls of sweet green bean with ice (only 13 cents/bowl!) therefore...felt entitled to two bowls of dessert.