My Relationship with My Supervisor

It was a rainy afternoon and we were the only two left at the health center. No one was around and he lit his last cigarette, taking a few deep drags. “Christine,” he says, pulling his chair next to mine and placing his hand on my knee. “I think you’re a great woman.”

Just kidding. That didn’t happen. My relationship with my supervisor is nothing like that. He doesn’t even speak English.

In fact, my relationship with him couldn’t be farther from that. He reminds me of my dad from back home: stoic, steady, somewhat senile sometimes…and yet completely juvenilely hilarious when he wants to be. In the health center I usually don’t get to observe much of his hilarity because he works at the consultation desk and is constantly asking, in his robotic monotonic voice, “Name…age…address…” before issuing a prescription, usually for some analgesic or antacid. The real hilarity comes out when he goes into the villages to do outreach work, and I’ve had the incredible privilege of accompanying him on several of these trips.

My health center serves over 14 villages, and the farthest of these is 13km away—a really far travel for the poorest of villagers who do not have access to a motorbike or even a regular bike. Thus, we do these monthly community outreach sessions where the nurses are loaded with vaccines (measles, diphtheria/tetatus/pertussis, polio, Japanese encephalitis, TB) and medicines (acetaminophen—called paracetamol here, vitamin A, mebendazole, iron sulfate + folic acid) and travel to the remote villages to administer vaccines and give supplements. Usually two nurses are assigned per outreach session, and save for when it’s one of the elder, no-nonsense nurses who really don’t want me around fucking up or when it’s rainy, I’ve gone to pretty much all of them. The most fun sessions are always with my supervisor, because he always makes an effort to actively engage me in the process, whether I like it or not.

First of all, getting to the villages with him is always a reenactment of Mr. Frog’s Wild Ride. He hops on his moto, and I on my bike, struggling to keep up because he always manages to pick the shittiest roads to travel on, because “it’s fastest this way.” Yeah, maybe fastest on a moto. Meanwhile, I am sent flying this way and that while loaded down and pedaling with the vaccine icebox, and I constantly pray that I will still have feeling in my lower body at the end of all this. During these trips, he giggles as we hit particularly large bumps and I let out a terrified “Ohmygod.” He also tries to educate me on all the different kind of trees we pass (mango, banana, coconut, palm), and he makes things up when I ask what a certain tree is that he doesn’t know (“uh…vegetable tree”).

While we are at the villages, he works very slowly and methodically. No one dares interrupt him, and I doubt anyone can, because he is so oblivious to everything but what he’s focusing on. One time he was tallying the number of vitamin A capsules we gave out and a woman comes to him with her arm bleeding and saying that a dog bit her. Without even lifting his head, he says absentmindedly, “The dog bit you? Bite it back.” During one of our breaks when we are eating the pomelos that the other nurse bought, he refuses to be fazed by the immunization sheets parents are waving in his face and instead says, deliberately, “Will you wait a minute? I am eating this fruit.” During one of the lolls in our session when we’re just waiting for people to show up, he will point to the cow walking by and ask if I’ve ever eaten beef. I’ll say yes. He’ll then ask if I’ve ever eaten duck. If I’ve ever eaten chicken. If I’ve ever eaten pork. I’ll be saying yes absentmindedly to his slow and deliberate questions until he turns a corner with, “Have you ever eaten cement?” (This is relevant because our village is right next to a cement factory.)

No, Bet (Health Center employees are all called “Bet [Name]”, as “bet” is short for “kru bet”, meaning one who works in the hospital) Vy. I have never eaten cement. Thank you for asking.

The other day a patient gives us a bag of limes. He asks me what they’re called in Khmer. I respond with “groit ch’maa”, which is correct, but literally translated it means “orange cat”. He giggles to himself as I answer and asks me, “Are you sure it’s not groit ch’gai [orange dog]?” Yes, Bet Vy. I’m sure.

Hilarity aside, though, he’s the only one that actively instructs me to do things. Give this patient 10 tabs of paracetamol to take home. Administer 200 IU of vitamin A to this kid. 2 drops of oral polio vaccine to that kid. Half a tab of mebendazole to the baby over there. He even had me on bookkeeping for awhile, until he realized that I don’t read Khmer and I was fucking up left and right. Since then I’ve been pulled from bookkeeping and stuck with only orally administered drugs so we’ve been fine. I can actively follow what he is doing and pull out the correct vaccines and right sized syringes for the job to expedite the process. I’ve started the practice of pinching babies’ noses in order to get them to swallow the weird-tasting vitamin A. And I’ve pretty much got the pill counting and distributing down pat. He gives me responsibility, and even made a comment today about how I know what’s going on now.

I really appreciate it. He doesn’t have to. He can treat me like an observer like all the other nurses and not say much to me besides hello. He can easily do everything himself. But he lets me, and in turn alleviates some of my feelings of uselessness.

And on the ride back, it was back to, “What tree is this?” and “What fruit is this?” Except this time, we passed by a watermelon stand. Not only did he teach me how to say it correctly, he stopped and bought one. Then he bought one for me. As I was riding home from the health center with my bike dangerously wobbling because the watermelon dangling from my front handlebars made for extremely uneven weight distribution, Bet Vy zoomed by on his moto and all I could hear was some faint giggling that faded into the peaceful silence of the rice fields.