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..."

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