Before leaving Cambodia I did some training with my local colleague on how to correctly weigh babies. She has since trained one of our village volunteers. Last night they sent me some weights from the past few weeks to interpret and advise on. Before I even analyse the results properly, I can see a range … More Baby Bears and Coffee Creamers
Sadly I’m returning to Australia after four very fast months in Cambodia. The last few days have been busy tidying up loose ends. Yesterday I had a final child health meeting in a Phnom Penh neighbourhood of busy alleyways encircling a very large pagoda. Tuk tuk rooftop scraped past truck walls, moto handlebars knocked my … More Pre-Departure Refurbishments
Both of these young women are Cambodian. One is 23yo from current day peasant roots and the other, now a generation or two removed from her peasant roots, 17yo from an established ruling class family. Juxtaposed, these photographs demonstrate my point that poverty is not necessarily a visible thing. So often I have encountered elegant … More A Collision of Two Lives
One of the things I have learned about the world since coming to Cambodia, is that there must be millions of people whose lives could be transformed by something as simple as a wheelchair, but who instead are confined to a tiny space by their inability to walk. I have met a surprising number of … More Wheels
Cambodia is in the throes of “the Hot season”, better known in tropical Australia as “the Build-Up”. It is hot and extremely humid, with clouds building up in the sky but very little rain, so that the humidity just builds and builds. Even the locals are suffering. Tonight, leaving my apartment, our security guard was … More Cool Fires
Sometimes whilst blogging I go searching for the right quote to fit my reflections. This quote seemed perfect for today’s story relating to the small Islamic community I am currently working with. I had never heard of Ali ibn Abi Talib, who according to Wikipedia “…. was the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, the last … More Sometimes The Battle …
This cartoon derives from a 2015 article about an anti-corruption exhibition organised by Transparency International Bangladesh. TIB arranges 10th Anti-Corruption Cartoon exhibition at Drik Gallery. It illustrates the user-pays health care system prevailing across the poor world in which health professionals are enriched on the backs of an already impoverished general public. “Without money you … More Catastrophic Cycles
One of the people I didn’t mention in my previous blog is a 32yo woman residing on a little wooden canoe on the muddy water with her husband and three children. I would have said four children only last year her three year old fell off the boat and disappeared. The community men spent days … More Ladles and Jellyspoons
Burnt to a crisp, parts of his clothes fused to his charred skin, his face black and locked in an expression of pain and horror, the patient had been doused in petrol and set alight by an angry boss. Shuttled from health center to provincial hospital and finally making it at impossible expense to the … More Treating Treasures as Trash
She lives in a tin hut in a back alley filled with makeshift shacks stacked beside and atop of each other. Roosters crow, ducks, chooks and skinny kittens peck around for morsels in the same muddy piles of trash, dogs laze in shaded patches, and pigeons coo from a cage. A neighbour is crouched over … More Trash To Treasure
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