Mission to Cambodia 2013
from Leighton Eby

I woke up still feeling exhausted from the long and hot bus ride home from siem reap the day before. At this point in the trip I am missing my family and friends back home and the constant change and uncertainty  of the entire trip is really wearing on me. I’m learning to adapt quickly to whatever is thrown my way and to just go with the flow but that is definitely something that I struggle with. With all that being said about how I felt before we even left the hotel to what I am feeling now after the day is over is a complete 360 degree change. We started out the day by hopping onto tuk tuks to ride over to the hospital. Once we got there we split up into groups. Some helping with nursing check offs, some observing in the hospital and some catching up on journaling. I chose the group that was catching up on journaling since I hadn’t even started the journals for community health. I worked on those for a couple of hours then we headed to lunch that was provided for us at the hospital.

After lunch the community health group headed to do home visits. As I was on the bus riding to the home visits it was extremely hot (as usual) and being in scrubs did not help at all. Once we arrived at the village my feelings started to shift from frustration, and annoyance to grief and shock to see how the people of this village lived. There was a big group of us so we split into 3 different groups. One group went into the village to do two home visits while the other two groups stayed back at the mobile clinic at the front of village. My group went last so I was sitting at the clinic for a while before I actually got to go into the village. While I was waiting there were so many women bringing their babies and children to the clinic to get medicine. Most of the babies were unclothed and all of the children were barefoot walking around in the dirt.

My time finally came to go into the village and meet the two families we were bringing rice and fish sauce to. I really didn’t know exactly what to expect but what I saw definitely was not it. Walking to the houses we had to walk on huge concrete cylinders that were placed into feet of water and sewage in between rows and rows of huts the people of the village lived in. The smell was absolutely awful. My heart was absolutely broken for these hundreds of men, women, children and babies that had to live in conditions like that. What amazed me the most was that in the midst of all these terrible conditions these people were living in, there was a smile on every single one of their faces. That especially goes for the children that were living there. They were so happy when they saw us and started running up to us giving us hugs and high fives and a couple of kids even chased after us because they didnt want us to leave. As we were leaving I thought to myself if the people of this village are as happy as they are living in these horrible conditions how could I ever be unhappy about anything? I immediately felt so humbled and even guilty. My perspective of this whole trip completely changed after leaving the village. I am so very grateful that I got the opportunity to go on the home visits. It has been my favorite thing on the trip thus far. Every time I feel myself getting frustrated because something changed or didn’t go a certain way, I’ll think back to all of those smiling faces and tell myself if those people be happy in the situations they are in so can I, no matter what.