Eye to eye!

It’s been pretty quiet and slow going for the last few weeks. Teachers have collected the text books from the children, the syllabus has finished so there’s not a lot to do in schools, many teachers and directors are being trained to work at the polling stations for the upcoming national elections (27th July). On top of all that I am still without a translator and the schools will officially close at the end of July anyway for 2 months school holiday.

For this reason, as well as general lethargy brought upon by a cocktail of inactivity and heat, my body has become bored. So bored in fact that it has started misbehaving! My right eye decided to become unattractively swollen, red and painful over the course of a few days and I honestly think it was simply due to boredom. My body has been so bored it has started thinking of ways to make life more interesting!

It’s funny what goes through your head in a place like this when the threat of illness raises its ugly head though. I think I have a fairly high tolerance for pain and discomfort but all the time I am quietly calculating how many hours it might take me to get to hospital in Phnom Penh or Siem Reap or whether in fact it would be quicker and probably a better bet medically to get to Bangkok, and oh, where is my passport? And I wonder how long it would take me to go blind if I left this untreated?

In the end, it took me about 2 hours to get to a pretty good hospital in another district where another VSO volunteer Tricia, works in the Health sector. There I was shown to see a very competent Khmer eye specialist who gave me some ointment for the bad eye after a few painless tests. What a relief! While there though we encountered a slight moral dilemma. It was similar to an imaginary one given to us during our pre-departure training in Birmingham to encourage us to think about this type of situation we might find ourselves in. What do you do if you come to a hospital with a potentially serious problem (ok, the eye really wasn’t that serious but bare with me) and you are seen by the doctor immediately despite the fact that there is a queue of locals waiting their turn, each with their own potentially serious problem for the doctor to see? It’s funny to observe how I am treated here due to the colour of my skin. Well, I walked straight past the queue of locals and asked the doctor if I was jumping the queue. Thankfully, I wasn’t and the seated line of patients were all waiting for dilation. Phew! The Director of the hospital still refused to take my money for the ointment though which was a little frustrating to say the least.