Day 8 Clinic at Kampong Chhnang

Today we worked in a church, not an orphanage.  The pharmacy, medical, chiropractic and dental were all in the church building; a bit noisy.  Where yesterday there were a lot of fillings requested, today, these people wanted extractions.  (This type of work is still unpredictable).  The dental students were in top form today.  Seating and diagnosing patients and sometimes finishing them before I could check on their decision or performance. 

However, along with the gained clinical ability comes a bit of overconfidence as well.  I stayed busy getting full anesthesia where they failed, finishing extractions they couldn’t, retrieving roots they broke and following up on crowns they snapped off. Did I say I stayed busy?

This is our dental team!  Dr. Fanny is in the pink, the eight dental students are in front of us, the guy next to me is a Cambodian interpreter, he just wanted to be in the picture!

We only worked in the morning, so it was non-stop till 1PM.  Since we don’t like to return to the States with too much baggage, we gave all of the left-over disposables, anesthetic and supplies to the students.  Christmas for them.  We even left our $5 thrift store suitcase to one of the students.  She told us she was going to give it to someone who needed a suitcase!

Final count was 3 full day clinics, and 2 half day clinics, we saw about 270 patients.

This is Keng Wong from Singapore, the coordinator for the trip and Ligar Murni, from Indonesia, (she is the Singapore Airlines flight attendant I mentioned earlier) she screened all of the dental patients.

This evening was our celebration dinner here at the hotel.  They had a nice private room for us, then they started to bring in the food.  Keng, our coordinator wanted to keep it in the budget, so she was “conservative” in her choices.  Hmm. Plate after plate came in of all sort of exotic foods.  A first for us was shark fin soup. Nice flavor, not sure where the shark fin entered into the picture.  Another variation was tofu mixed with shrimp and octopus. All very tasty.  When in Rome…..

This photo is of Victor Koh, (Singapore/US) our leader, and Vek Huong Taing, the local pastor.  He wrote a book about his escape and survival from the Khmer Rouge.  The book is out of print, but he did give us a signed copy!