The vacation part of my vacation has officially ended and today I worked on the Hope for Tomorrow Medical and Dental Mission in Siem Reap for the first time. We drove for about 12 hours to Cambodia from Saigon and I basically slept the whole time, and conked out again once we got to our very nice hotel room.
Siem Reap is a floating village on one of the world's biggest lakes. The water there reminds me of those Hershey commercials where everything is brown; it's actually because of the silt. Contrary to popular belief, the color is not due to the pooping and drinking and bathing all in the same body of water. There are a lot of Vietnamese refugees that lack paperwork to go back to Vietnam or seek asylum in the US, Canada, etc. The Hope for Tomorrow group set up medical and dental centers today in one of the boats, which is usually a Catholic school.
At the beginning of the day, I worked at the registration desk, probably because I can read and write Vietnamese pretty well. That proved useless, however, when everybody there has a really strange accent that I couldn't understand half the time. Most of the patients didn't know their last names and took awhile to recall their ages. I'm pretty sure I wrote down some funky stuff onto the paperwork we give the doctors and dentists because I couldn't understand them, but hopefully they figured it out.
After awhile, registration got a little stressful and I decided to help in the pharmacy instead. Our patients were in need of lots of medication and vitamins, so working in the pharmacy to fill prescriptions and count pills was like playing Diner Dash in real life. By the end of the day, I smelt like the oil they put in the multivitamins.
It was a day of hard work but never have I felt so accomplished in my entire life. Seeing people in such poverty but still with so much happiness gave me an amazing adrenaline rush that made up for my physical exhaustion. I'm not sure how to put it into words, but today was beautiful. Distributing pills and making so many people happy was enough payment to last me a lifetime. The children coming in for treatment really made me smile because they were excited by the littlest things, like a toothbrush or a stick of gum. I was working on the medical boat, but they called the dental part the "torture chamber". Let's just say there were a lot of extractions, so Co Thi got a little blood on her scrubs.
I'm so grateful I got to experience such a breathtakingly alive and joyous atmosphere with the Hope group, and I can't wait to work again tomorrow. Our group relaxed a bit afterwards by going into the city and having dinner and getting a foot massage. There were fish eating dead skin cells off our feet. It was freaking scary the first couple of minutes but after awhile it feels really good. The shopping here is good. If I didn't get so much money stolen I would have bought A LOT. RAY BANS FOR TWO DOLLARS. Ahhhhhh I'm going through shopping withdrawal.
The next post will probably be a massive photo dump. Thanks for reading :)
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