Katie en Laurent bij de Khmer: Without Fear or Favor

After meeting dr Dara, probably the best surgeon in Cambodia, we were dispatched to our separate departments. I finally felt more inclined to do some more traumatology and I wound up in the service of dr Monty. He is the adjoint chief of the traumatology department and the only neurosurgeon in the house. He talks french very fluently and is very happy to explain and translate for me. The only thing is that he's about 1m 40 cm high and I get a neckache when I talk to him for a long time. I also refer to him as Mon-P'tit instead of Monty. It also soon became clear to me that the DES (which is how they call the medical students who are in training to be a assistant) was going to be a perfect nuisance. His name is Phaerum and he's extremely nice and polite but he doesn't feel he ought to let me assist during operations. I can't blame him of course. Therefore I decided that it would be better to go to the hospital at 8.00 and leave when the operations start at about 10.00 to come back in the afternoon when there are less students hanging around the place. It was a bit of a hard start, coming from Siem Reab where we knew everybody by name and then landing in a huge hospital where nobody seems to care who you are. But after a few days things loosened up and finishing an operation with dr Monty I said "chop haiee" which means "finished", and the aneasthetist added "lu khao" and when I repeated that I had them rolling on the floor with laughter. Someone explained that "chop haiee, lu khao" means "finished, pull your pants up"...
I think we'll get on like a house on fire.

In the mornings I have a special place called "coffee cafe" to go to. It is always full of cambodians and serves the best coffees at low prices. An extra bonus is that you get a whole teapot for every drink you order. In the sweltering heat I kick back and enjoy the Cambodian Daily slurping an Ice Cappuccino or a Caffe Latte. The Cambodian Daily, without fear of favor to quote it's name in full, is a Khmer news paper with original national news and extracts from internationally reknown papers from around the world. Especially the local news is interesting, to get a feel of what is concerning the cambodian in the street. Friday afternoon an operation was scheduled "foreign body removal", with an x -ray of an arm full of metal scraps. After asking dr Monty it soon became clear that this was in fact one of the wounded involved in a grenade explosion in Kampong Thom the other day. On another occasion alot of the trauma patients came from a protest action against their eviction from a certain district in Phnom Penh.

Tuesday evening we went to a cultural centre called Meta House. This german run film production house screens documentaries and movies with political or economic significance. Most of the films are cambodia-related. But that evening they were showing "the inside job", a docu about the financial crisis. It was a very pleasant night in an open-air rooftop cinema watching a stunningly interesting movie. I can only recommend it. Tonight we are going back there to see a documentary made right after the Pol Pot regime about the situation of Cambodia. Should be good too...

Today we got up early to visit one of the most horrible reminders of the Pol Pot era. Tuol Sleng, the infamous "security office S21" or torture prison in the centre of Phnom Penh. In the midst of the lively streets the silent greyish buildings of the former high school are still haunted by their past. Upon entering you can see the tiny cells which contained one or two people during the interrogation/torture period before they were send to the Killing Fields. Everything was extremely well documented and the exposition contains hundreds of photographs of the man, women, children and even babies who were indiscriminately slaughtered after having been brutally tortured (starvation, beatings, pulling out of nails, excision of nipples, waterboarding, hangings...). The balconies are still covered with the barbed wire that was intended to stop prisoners committing suicide by jumping off. Of the 17 000 known prisoners of S21 only 7 survived. It's a sobering visit.

None the less it is amazing how far this country has evolved since 1978. Let's hope this dark period of Cambodia's past is never to return...

I'll leave you with some impressions of our Phnom Penh and of our neighborhood, close to Orussy market, a great place for BBQ!

L.