Early Impressions by Diane

Here I am in Cambodia for six weeks. So far, so good.
It’s nice to be with my husband, who it turns out is a hero of the hospital. "We love you husband" I heard a lot the first day. He has learned to speak very slowly and clearly and look into the eyes of the 8 medical students, who rotate here for a month for Radiology training. We have to wonder what sort of training they get when he is not here, for the hospital staff is stretched thin to take care of all they have to do to mind the patients. He finds the fully trained doctors who are on staff here fairly limited in their basic knowledge, as they are evidently poorly taught in either English or French, which are not languages that they speak or understand well. So, he has to concede that he will do what he can do and hope that he “pushes the cart a little further up the hill.”
I am at the hospital now, day 3 for me. My function is still being defined. It seems that the first matter at hand is for me to help develop a management training program, seminars that will take place 1 hour at a time, 2 days a week, for 4 weeks. They have a newish HR manager, a nice woman from California. (Incidentally, this woman and her husband, a pediatrician with a successful practice in Southern CA, have committed to be here at the hospital for 3 years with their 2 children, ages 11 and 12. It never ceases to amaze me how many people there are who decide to spend time and resources to serve in the third world!)
Anyway, HR and management training have been neglected here for some time, and it is showing! There’s problems with conflicts within and between departments, extra long lunches and other work ethics, time management, teamwork, and so on. So my job shall be to help get this program together which I shall do with a little help from my friend, Google.
The director of development is also planning to yank me in her office when her current volunteer leaves at the end of the week. That’s okay, mix it up and I am never likely to be bored!
On Friday afternoon, I shall be visiting an orphanage for the purpose of simple interaction with the kids after school and helping them with their English skills. English is so crucial here because no other country speaks Khmer, the language of Cambodia.
There is very little office space here, so I work in a small conference room and hence have a much larger space than other people, but I can be thrown out at any minute if someone needs the space for a meeting.
How about home life? Michael has been living in a little apartment, called a service apartment, because it comes furnished and utilities are included. One of the best features of this is that the ladies who clean it daily take your laundry away each morning and it is clean and folded or hung when you get home. I haven’t seen a laudromat and wouldn’t mind keeping it that way! These ladies live on the roof of our building in a little shelter. They are always eager to smile and say good morning and are happy when we say hello to them in Khmer. The poor people all over Phenom Penh all have little charcoal or wood fires every morning I assume for making breakfast and maybe for heating up washing water. In the morning I step out on our tiny balcony and see the city waking up and little fires everywhere.
We have a little kitchen with a small double sink, a 9 or 10 cubic ft. refrigerator, and a 2 burner gas stove. No bakey here! We have a/c in the bedroom but not in the kitchen, so cooking goes quickly. There are beautiful vegetables and fruit to be had everywhere. Michael had a bowl full of 10 or 12 tomatoes when I came that he had paid about 50cents for! Maybe we need to have a better kitchen with all the great veggies!
Near our apartment are a lot of restaurants that cater to foreigners. We had a delicious Indian meal out Sunday night. Each entrée was $4-$5, and I think that’s fairly high here! Maybe we don’t need a better kitchen after all!
We also live near a park that is between 2 sides of a boulevard. It’s all nice and wide, thanks to the French laying out the city all those years ago. There are nice wide sidewalks on each side of the grassy area where I go walking every morning. There are lots of Cambodians doing Tai Chi and some martial arts and many folks walking slowly and stretching their arms. I am by myself, it’s 6:30 am, and I am perfectly safe. The scariest part is crossing the streets to come home!
Back to work- I have to earn my pay:)