Phnom Penh

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I arrived in Phnom Pen and found myself a cheap room. Having totally forgotten about the project for a week in Bangkok, I was suddenly getting nervous. I didn't exactly have the details sorted out yet.

In fact, my interaction with my host NGO up to that point could be summerised as follows -

Me - Hi I'm a med student from England, can I do a project with you this summer?
TPO - Sure why not

So my propensity to leave EVERYTHING until the last minute, combined with the fact that they're very busy people and they didn't always get back to me, meant that things were not planned as well as perhaps they could have been. The week before I came was a national holiday in Cambodia, so no chance of getting in touch. Three days before I flew out here I got my ethical approval. Two days before I received an email with an address, time and date to meet in Phnom Penh.

I arrived in PP the afternoon before said date. My plan was to spend the day reading through some background stuff, which somehow I had failed to find time for before coming out here, and planning what I was going to say, which to be honest I had yet to consider in any great detail. This is my standard, leave everything till the last possible second style of time management. It has never failed me yet. Except when I try to switch on my beloved laptop, I get some kind of hideous hard drive related error message.

Panic.

Panic panic panic.

Laptop failure, what to do? I instinctively text Kit, which costs 40p and doesn't really make me feel any better. I go downstairs to the hostel's internet cafe and look up the error message on the internet. BAD. I come back upstairs. Now it won't even switch on. WHY? Why why why?? This is grave situation, for I am not flying home until the 3rd of September, so obviously with the project being due in July, I was relying on this laptop pretty heavily. More imminently, it meant I had lost access to all my reading material, plus my ethical approval documents, meaning I would be pathetically under prepared for my meeting in the morning.

So I am delighted I didn't have chance to write a blog the night before I met with my NGO, because it would have gone something like this -

I am so fucked without my laptop, I won't be able to write up this project, the NGO probably has no idea who I am or that I'm coming, I haven't got any of my documents for the meeting tomorrow, I know nothing about mental health anyway, this isn't anything to do with the topic I did my lit review on, the project probably isn't even possible, they will definitely be able to tell I have no idea what I'm doing, I probably won't be able to find a translator, what am I even doing here wasting my time and everyone else's attempting a futile pointless project that is no use to them or me or anyone for the sake of a qualification I only took to put off graduating for another year??

But I'm over that now. Of course, some of those questions still remain, but hey ho.

Anyway. I love the NGO I am working with. They were aware of my existence and prepared for my arrival, they did not demand a detailed run-through of my proposed methodology or ethical approval, they did not quiz me on mental health issues and the work they do it awesome.

I'll be honest. I only ended up here because my original project fell through but I still had my heart set on Cambodia, so I emailed every NGO in the country and they were basically the only one to respond positively, and rapidly, to the idea of organising a project at short notice. They are a mental health charity. I told them I want to be a psychiatrist. This is a lie. I know nothing of psych. The literature review aspect of my dissertation was on something completely different. But I tried to get my act together before I came, and now I'm here I am well into it. Which is just as well really. It is SO interesting.

Actually it's probably not at all interesting unless you're a medic geek so everyone else might want to skip this bit.

The Exec Director, who I shall refer to as Doctor S, spent the morning showing me around and explaining their various projects. The scope of what they're doing is much greater than I had gathered from their very out of date website, which had been my only source of information so far.

I will explain a little background. Before the Khmer Rouge there were a grand total of two psychiatrists in the whole country, and one psychiatric unit. The Khmer Rouge destroyed the hospital and, in their battle to exterminate the educated, managed to kill almost every single doctor in the country. There were 6 or 7 doctors left alive in Cambodia by 1979. Due to the period of civil war and instability that followed the KR, no medical schools operated for many years. Dr S graduated with the first group of students in 1992, but there was no psychiatric training whatsoever. This didn't happen until a foreign university set up a program in the year 2000. Now there are 26 psychiatrists. An improvement, but not a lot for a population of 15 million that has experienced such trauma. And of course, they all work in the cities. So a big part of what TPO does is try to extend psychiatric services to rural areas. They run outreach clinics, organise support groups and educate monks and traditional healers about mental illness. This is the basis of my project. Many people in Cambodia don't understand the concept of mental illness. In rural areas, it is still widely considered to be a result of spiritual possession, bad karma, witchcraft. I am going to (with a bit of luck) talk to 'traditional healers' to find out about their perceptions are about the causes and treatments of mental illness. Or something. I haven't worked out the details yet.

TPO run a lot of other great projects as well. They're currently counselling the witnesses in the ongoing EEEC Khmer Rouge Genocide trails, which is... well, heavy stuff. They have a free clinic here in PP and others in the provincial capitals, and they train staff from other NGOs on basic 'psychological first aid' and how to deal with trauma victims.

So yes, in conclusion, I love my NGO.

I am spending only a few days in PP, learning about the organisation, then on Monday I’m being shipped off to one of their provincial centres, in Kampong Thom. Dr S said the man in charge of the KT team knows of some traditional healers who should be willing to talk to me. San, my original contact, who clearly was reading my emails if not answering them, remembered that I needed a translator but said one would be too expensive and impossible to find out in the sticks, though someone from the team will be willing to help me. It's looking like things might work out fine. So score one for winging it... this means I don't have to plan effectively or be organised or responsible, because everything will go my way anyway! So no consequences or lessons to be learned here...

There was still the issue of my laptop.

I showed it to San. After some fiddling we established that it will power up only when someone is correctly wiggling the three pronged connecty bit (correct technical term, I believe) that inserts into the boxy adapter part of the power supply. So it's not the laptop and it's not my excellent rewiring skills of the laptop inserty part, which I had previously fixed using part of an old mobile phone charger. This is a whole new and exciting type of breakage. Oh joy. So during the lunch break, I went on a mission to try and get it fixed.

I went to maybe 7 different computer shops and nowhere had the right AC adapter. My laptop is some kind of freak. This was however a good way to get to know my way around PP. Each place would say sorry we no have, but suggest another possible shop which I would then have to locate in a bizarre technological treasure hunt. This eventually led to a dead end. After a brief stop in a net cafe where I consulted a very useful PP expats website, I finally found a place that could at least replace the faulty plug end of the wire, if not the actual adaptor. I figured this would work. I returned sunburned but triumphant. Then of course there was the bastard error message to deal with. I was really hoping it might have just gone away. But no. I looked up what it means on the internet, and it can be summerised thus - sometimes it fixes itself, if not then your hard drive is fucked. Not brilliant. San calls in the tech support guy. I can't understand what he's saying, but he's using the classic 'afraid I have some bad news...' tone and body language common to doctors and repairmen the world over. So Tech Support took my poor laptop off to be diagnosed and treated overnight.

And this lengthy rant concludes my first day in PP. So far, overall, good progress.

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