I've had the real privilege to volunteer at a great place this summer. The Sihanouk Hospital Center of Hope is an NGO run by Hope Worldwide that provides free medical care to the poor and disadvantaged here in Cambodia. I have been working in the Communications and Development Department which means I have helped with translating a few things both ways for things from newsletters to research studies as well as helping in drafting and editing documents to help the hospital in fundraising efforts. I have learned that it would probably be my preference to spend most of my time actually interacting with patients or fixing their problems, but I am incredibly grateful for this chance that I have had.
Here is a promotional video for the hospital that you should definitely watch if you have already read this far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip-gDJMCrqs
I have also had the chance to do a good number of patient visits in very poor communities surrounding Phnom Penh. I will describe 4 of them below in an excerpt from a paper I just wrote for my BYU program:
"The first visit was a woman who had HIV and had been receiving care for the past year. Chhavelith, the director or the Home Care program, showed me a picture of her a year ago where she was very frail and quite sickly, and on this day when I saw her she looked about as healthy as anyone you might pass on the street. They made sure she still had the medications she needed and talked to her about how things were going. It wasn’t clear exactly how many months longer they would be visiting her now that she was mostly healthy, but she also talked about how she still faced stigma from her neighbors and how even her kids had ran away to live with other family members because of her HIV.
That same day we met with an older woman who was a widow taking care of four of her grandchildren. The children’s father had died because of an electrical shock during a flood and their mother had died due to tuberculosis and HIV. The grandmother was now providing for these children selling fruit on the streets and earning maybe $3-7 a day, but her arm had recently been hit by a speeding motorbike and she couldn’t use it hold her fruit basket. I believe she had contacted the Home Care Team as she knew them from when they had taken care of the children’s mother before she died. They provided her with a bike so she could continue her livelihood of selling fruits by setting the fruit basket on the back of the bike.
On a different day we stopped by a woman’s home where she said she was struggling to pay her monthly rent of $10 and was two months behind. Her maybe 11-year-old son came by on a bike that had also been provided by the Home Care Team and showed us the watch he had bought for around ten cents to make sure that his mom was always taking her HIV medication at the right time as that is essential to the medicine working properly. Again the Home Care Team mostly just talked with her about her health and encouraged her and before leaving I saw one of the workers give the boy a little money.
Lastly, we went to a foreign sponsored housing site to visit a woman with 2 kids who has been recovering her health and living off of her father’s income of about $2-3 a day from driving a motorbike. The site was next to a place that used to be a dump where the very poor people would collect trash to recycle for a living. The dump has now been closed and the people here have access to a communal water source. I was informed that a few days after we visited her she was able to find work washing dishes at a restaurant."