A few days after we got back from Koh Tonsay, we had the chance to travel to Prey Veng to do a field visit of the RACHA provincial office and the partnering health clinics/referral hospital there. Prey Veng is the province just east of Phnom Penh, on the east bank of the Mekong river.
The visible poverty in Prey Veng was absolutely astonishing. Visiting the health clinics took my breath away, and not really in a good way. I knew to expect poor sanitation, but I guess it had never felt real until I was seeing it first hand. Even more than that, seeing patients actually suffering in these conditions made me realize just how thankful I am to have clean hospitals.
On the first afternoon we attended a "Community Scorecard" health center self evaluation. Community Scorecard is a program run by RACHA to help the communities and health centers communicate with one another more efficiently to improve the quality of care on the local level. This self evaluation meeting was only the health center staff (3 people) evaluating themselves on things like cleanliness, availability, communication etc... The next day we visited a few more health centers, and then the referral hospital for the province. The referral hospital was even more crowded, dirty, and heart wrenching than the health centers had been. That afternoon, we went to the second half of the Community Scorecard meeting. It was held at a school out in an even more rural area, and it was a meeting for the health center staff and the representatives from the villages.
I'm sure it would've been interesting to listen to, but since my Khmer is pretty minimal, it was mostly a really long (5 hours) meeting in a hot room with lots of bugs. Driving back from that meeting, we got caught on a "road" that had been dirt, but had turned to mud that was a few feet deep. Some cars were stuck, and the ones that weren't, were sliding off the road into the ditches on the side of the road. By the time we had arrived to the muddiest spot, there were a fair amount of men there to help push cars through.
Long story short, it took about an hour and a half to get the car through maybe a quarter mile of the road, our driver was incredible, and without those men we would've ended up in an overturned car in a ditch. It was kind of like being on the Indiana Jones ride, but without the fire, loud music, and assurance that Disney would keep you safe. Later that night, I had one of the weirdest nights I've had in Cambodia. We decided to stay in Prey Veng for another night, to see another RACHA program, "Comedy for Health". Basically, the idea is that they have these large trucks that fold out into a stage and sound system. They park them on the side of the road out in the province, and hundreds of people come to watch a play to teach them about a health concern. The one we watched happened to be about pregnancy.
Again, my handle on the Khmer language is extremely poor (I know some phrases, but I can't really understand people speaking at a normal pace) so I had no idea what was being said in the play, but gesturing and movement definitely crosses language and cultural lines. In fact, while the play was meant to be funny, I believe it was at least six times funnier not being able to understand a single word. The play was about 3 hours long, and was extremely over the top. By the end of it I was confused, and my sides hurt from laughing. After the comedy, they do a question and answer session with the audience and the actors (who are trained in the health area that they are acting about), which is probably the most helpful part of the event. Then, they put on a short drama at the end that has nothing to do with health. It was seriously one of the weirdest, funniest, most confusing nights of my life. Our friend Pee Room (I'm quite sure that that is not how you actually spell it, but that is as close as I can get phonetically) was trying to translate at first, but he wasn't spectacular with his English speaking quickly and, like I said, it was pretty hilarious without knowing what was actually happening.
