of dream jobs and Buddha babies

Dream job: Medecins sans frontieres

and they say the 1st step to any destination is often the longest, steepest, hardest stride.
so, together with the baking goddess and the ex-boy-next-door, I took the 1st step.
and the next thing I knew, I was in jeans and a stripey tee, setting foot down in the middle of rural rural rural (gotta emphasize how rural the place is!) Cambodia in sweltering dusty heat.

and the next next thing I knew, I was sharing a room, complete with mozzy nets, with the baking goddess and sharing a house with 2 dogs, 3 cats, numerous hens, 1 rooster that crows at weird intervals, countless bugs, the Khmer host family and a few volunteers.

and then, I was taking rounds with Cambodian doctors in a rural regional setting with a translator in tow and playing with Buddha babies in the Paeds ward. and then, I was mixing cement and scrapping paint off rusty beds and mending them and painting them a pretty cobalt blue and chopping trees down. and then, I was spending the afternoons watching the very-charming surgeon suture neat little stitches with as little string as the hospital can spare, eating Khmer ice cream, chatting/sign-languaging with the cute student nurses, devouring desserts at the local dessert stall and trying to get the roving little kids to tell us their names.

and all throughout that, I learnt to really read again, no thanks to crazy workload and hours in medical school and thanks to long long long afternoon siesta lunch hours established by the French in Cambodia and the very comfy hammock and my eBook reader. I also learnt quite a number of Khmer words to get by and to tell the very-friendly Khmers who insisted that I must be Khmer, thanks to my tanned complexion and my supposedly-Khmer ears and other features, that I'm from Malaysia (kunyom mopi Malaysi!!!).

TBC