Village Clinics

We took our last trip to the villages on Wednesday and Dr. Bruce Hess and Amanda will leave on Friday. They are from Alaska and
we hope they will bring more Alaskans back with them when they return! The village in the pictures is Tom Tum Tngii. I doubt that is how you spell it, but that is as close as I can come up with. Rick is having a break with some water. He got stuck in sun most of the day, but there was a nice breeze. I guess you can find me in the picture with all the kids! Rick finished up first and went out and played ball with them in the road. They all had a good laugh with that. It is tiring and uncomfortable at times, but the smiles and the feeling you get is more than worth the discomfort. Short-term mission work has its place, and the need is always there. Dr. Hess did check a little 6 month old baby with a very high fever. We hated to leave him with just antibiotics not knowing what exactly was causing it. So we loaded baby and mother in the van and brought them back to a pediatric hospital in Phnom Penh. That brought about another experience of the witnessing the lack of communication and understanding of the medical system here. I think Bruce and Amanda were totally frustrated, but they saw first hand the inadequacies of the hospitals and medical staff. After checking today on the baby, he is doing much better and realized that it probably would have been alright to leave him in the village with medicine that Dr. Hess could dispense. But we wanted to make sure. Hopefully the ship will have a fully functioning lab that can handle situations like this. Bruce and Amanda still hope to return to Cambodia and work and we are very excited about that! Gail