Community Outreach and More Language Lessons

Once a month, my health center will pack up its needles, vaccines, the whole shebang and head out to one of the neighboring villages to deliver service, whether it’s a polio vaccine or the next injection of Depo-Provera. Usually we gather at a central location within the community, like the wat or the village chief’s house. The idea is that people will bring their babies and problems to this central location to get them taken care of, but in every village, there are always the laggers who fail to show up (as checked against the record of number of babies born and the number of people who come). Instead of letting their babies fester and die of tuberculosis or polio or diphtheria, the nurse will usually saddle up at the end of the morning and go from house to house, visiting on those who either forgot to or were too lazy to show up.

Quite some service, huh? While I was still trying to wrap my mind around who wouldn’t take advantage of these “we come to you” days (and who wouldn’t want to get their babies vaccinated!), the nurse was ever-patient, asking parents where the fuck their babies are and why they weren’t at the wat to get vaccinated. Then he’d do whatever needed to be done, and say a cheerful “see you next month!” which I’m sure these people probably interpreted as “see you at my house because I didn’t go the central location and you’ll surely track me down again”.

I guess this is why Peace Corps sent me here. There’s evidently a lot of work to be done.

Yesterday, my counterpart and I visited on the Muslim community a few kilometers away from the health center. When we rode past the village sign labeled with Arabic, I immediately thought of Maya, and wanted to start breaking out with “salaam” and “khalas” and “inshallah” but I figured it was best to not look like an idiot so I kept quiet. Who’s to say these villagers even spoke Arabic anyway? (And who’s to say they’d even understand the completely random ass words I’d be throwing out? And finally, when did I start thinking I myself knew Arabic?) They certainly were conversing very fluently in Khmer. Amongst some of the people we paid house calls to was a family with a day and a half old baby girl. Tiny, tiny little thing.  As I stepped closer to take a look at her, I noticed that she had a pile of yellow caked dirt sitting on top of her head. I thought it was odd but I didn’t ask until we were out of earshot. My counterpart laughed and said something in rapid-fire Khmer that I didn’t really catch, except for a few irrelevant words like “chicken” and “green”.

Today I tried to ask my language tutor what the dirt-looking stuff sitting atop a newborn’s head was. It was an ordeal to get my point across; and while doing so we covered a whole range of topics like that Muslims don’t eat pork (I knew that), how the males wear these hats to cover their head (which is what he thought I was referring to), and when the heavy rain comes, because our village is considered a “highland”, Kampot town will flood first so “don’t worry.”

Eventually, though, we got to the bottom of the yellow-dirt mystery. Apparently, it is a part of Khmer traditional medicinal belief to cover the fontanel of the baby’s skull with this yellow-dirt, which really isn’t dirt at all, but ground, dried young leaves of a certain indigenous tree mixed with salt. The fontanel is the soft cartilage part of a baby’s skull where the skull bones have not grown in all the way yet, and the belief is that this leaf-salt mixture will hasten the hardening of the skull (and the growing of skull bones), making the baby less prone to injury. This was such an odd and interesting discovery to me that I couldn’t help but ask a few more questions about it: “Does it work, Mr. Sophea?”

To which he promptly responded, “No.”