Welcome to the Cambodia trip 2009 blog page.  We are posting messages from the volunteers currently engaged in the field.  Please come back and review updates as we receive them and feel free to send best wishes to this team.  

Volunteers in the field are only 1 part of Peacework Medical Projects.  We also seek to recognize and thank our "home based" team as well and encourage them to comment here as well.

-J

Laura: 26 Jan. 09
"Hello from Cambodia!  We have arrived."

Freddie: 31 Jan. 09 
Good morning (7:30 AMhere).  All is going well. Pam's "well oiled machine" is working and the "model" transfers well from country to country and culture to culture. The monks and the community have been very welcoming, very receptive and very tolerant. Our medical skills and knowledge are challenged by having to redefine what is 'normal' and our expectations about what we can do adjusted.  Children tend to look younger than expected - 5 year olds look like 3 year olds, 12 year olds the size and stature of 8-9 year olds - and older people (suprisingly to me there are much more than I expected, especially women in their late 70's and 80's) look decades older than I expect.  We have seen several patients with serious conditions that we can diagnose (woman 9 mos pregnant with 9th child, severely hypertensive/pre-eclamptic, middle age woman with thyroid goiter and atrial fibrillation, woman with chest pain and tachycardia, etc.) and for which there is readily available treatment back in the USA, but here little we can do but advise them to go to the health center.  One is confronted with the reality that knowledge, knowing, may not alway be 'good' if one cannot do anything with it.  I certanly am learning as much, if not more, than I am giving."