Home Care Visits and Dental Outreach

Ryan and I got to go out on a home care visit one morning. We trekked (by van) into incredibly rural areas outside of Siem Reap to follow-up with patients right in their homes. We saw two kids with HIV, one in a nicer wooden house, and one in a grass hut. Both had lost their mothers to the disease. This was a pretty incredible experience!

The next day, I went out on a dental outreach visit... and by dental outreach I really mean pulling teeth, because that's really the only thing they can do with their limited resources. The dentists were already wondering why I was there after I said I was a business student, but I certainly didn't help my case when they started work on the first patient. Who knew dentistry was so violent? After giving this poor girl some hefty doses of something in a giant needle, the dentist started digging through her mouth like she was hoping to scrape gold off the bottom of it. This was gross enough. Then she actually started cracking her teeth into pieces to get them out. I'll spare you the rest of the details, but just hearing those noises was enough for me. Inside I'm thinking, I'm already not a lot of help right now... imagine how NOT helpful I would be if I passed out. So I decided to wait out the rest of the surgeries from the bench outside... peering in whenever I felt so inclined... much to the delight of the other Cambodians, who seemed to find this REALLY FUNNY. I got the last laugh though... most of them were waiting for their turn in the chair.