Dinner at the hotel
Rice in bags. Drying rice spread behind.
The Monks at evening prayer.5 PM and the birds return. What noise!
Laundry drying.
A classroom at the school.Packing up the dental supplies. A nightly event!
I can't imagine balancing this load, even if walking the bicycle.
Girls are girls no matter where you are!
The equipment sterilization station.
The Dental Room.
Children with their paperwork after the screening exam. Waiting for fillings or extractions.
Paul doing card tricks to entertain the kids.
The Public Health Team debriefing at the end of the day.
The Men's group with Colleen and Phi.
The bicycles many of the women rode to class.
The construction behind the room we were in.
The afternoon session
The health department where we are teaching.
More rice drying.
Warren
The school where the Dental Team was working.
Harriet with some school girls.
Children clowning around for the camera.
The mens side of the bathroom at the school.
Girls looking at the window at us. They would hide whenever we made eye contact.
The fence surrounding the school.
Flying a kite in the fields.
Paintings inside the entrance.
The entrance - under trees filled with birds. A dangerous place to stand!
Warren & Harriet at the entrance to Chua Co Khmer Monastery and bird sanctuary.
Rice drying in the yard.
Rice drying.
Sticky rice.
Theresa and Sally on video.
Thuy teaching CPR.
Theresa and Sally (a nurse from CMH) on the video that was made at Children's. Jeff is our IT person for computers, projectors, screens, electricity.
Dallas Thuy and an infant manikin, Jeff, Thuy Chicago narrating the CPR Video.
Warren - taking movies.
Tam - doing translations on his computer.
Thuy Chicago talking to the women.
Water and a container that can be used for cleaning after going to the bathroom.
The toilet. We are supposed to be teaching hygiene. I had no idea of the challenges in doing this kind of education in a setting where this is what a bathroom looks like. There is not any clean water to wash hands with and no soap. We are all addicted to our hand gel. We need to tell them to use soap and water to wash their hands after using the bathroom or cleaning their babies bottoms and before cooking. But it is becoming clearer that that is not an easy thing to expect people to do.
Phi talking to the class.
Pictures taken on the way to our second dental and teaching location in the Tra Cu district of Tra Vinh Province.
Breakfast. We have 5:30 AM wake up calls and breakfast at 6 to 6:30 and leave at 7 - or at least TRY to leave at 7 AM.
Today we went to our second school - Dai An A School in the Tra Cu District. The Dental Group was actually at the school and the Public Health Group was at a government building about one mile away. The local health department had set up the education day but their space is too small for us to use so they 'hired' the room at the government building. There was construction right outside the building so the noise level was a challenge all day. None of the participants complained about the noise. We had 20 women and 9 men for CPR in the morning and 27 women and 11 men for Safe Motherhood education in the afternoon Since this is the first time this education has ever been done here, we are learning as we go. We are changing our plan for today and are going to try to have more formal presentations on different topics.
Our lunch again included sticky rice - I really enjoy the sticky rice. During lunch we walked over to a Khmer monastary, Chua Co where many storks live. Several types of storks and ibis return to this place every evening. Chua Co is 43 km from Tra Vinh. We saw many people, including the monks, drying rice. We stopped at the school before heading back to the health department because we heard that the bathroom at the school was cleaner than at the health department. Well, everything is relative. It did not smell as bad since it was outside as a separate building. The kids all mugged for pictures and, again, loved being able to look at their pictures. After lunch we had more sessions, including a 'men's session' where we took the men aside and gave them an opportunity to ask questions.
When we were through for the day, we walked over to the school where the dental team was working and got to see the kids. The people are lovely. Everyone is so polite. The area we visited today is pretty remote and it seems like many people may not have seen that many Caucasians. We find people (adults and children) staring at us and, when we make eye contact, they giggle a lot. And they love to say 'hello' in English.
The Dental Group saw 150 childen again. They are working so hard and have had some challenging cases. In addition to treating the children, they are also teaching them about oral hygiene.
We traveled back to Tra Vinh and had dinner at the restaurant in the hotel. Very good food. It seems that peanuts are a part of every meal. This would not be a good place to visit if you were allergic to peanuts! It is nice that our leaders are ordering for us - served family style. It is certainly allowing me to taste new food items and to try things that I would not have ordered. As a warning - the hot peppers are generally quite HOT!
Birds at the Monastery.
