ups and downs

I made it a whole week!

I would call last week a success. Work was good. I got my official assignment with the Safe Motherhood area of RACHA. I will be working on a project with the Helping Babies Breathe course. It is a neonatal resuscitation course that has been created for developing countries. The teach midwives, doctors, nurses, and other health care workers skills for routine care of a newborn baby immediately after birth as well as what to do if the baby is not breathing. The plan right now is for me to create a survey for the participants to find out what their self-efficacy is after taking the course. We want to know how confident they are implementing each of the skills in practice. The last two courses of HBB in Phnom Penh have been this week so I had to finish the survey by Monday so I could bring it to the course in case there is time to have someone who reads English look over it. After we get it reviewed/pilot-tested we can start taking it out to the provinces to have health workers take the survey. Most of my time at work was spent creating and finalizing the survey.

After work Kira and I would go to the market if we needed to, make dinner, and hang out at home, trying to stay as cool as possible. One of the big markets in PP is called Russian Market. It's geared more towards tourists. We went a couple times in the evening to check it out but pretty much all of the stalls are closed by then except for the produce stalls on the outside. On Saturday we went during the day and we finally got to see the inside stalls. They have some really cool stuff. There are some cool stores on the street around the market as well. We spent a lot of time there looking at everything and tried not to spend too much money. Luckily we didn't bring much with us because eventually we ran out of money and decided it was too hot to just wander around. After shopping we went to a birthday party for a guy in our ward. Kira met John and his wife, MIchelle, the first Sunday she was here and they invited us to his party on Saturday. It was really fun to meet them and their friends. They also have a little 2-year-old daughter named Anna, and there were a lot of other really cute kids there. We ate delicious food and played with the kids for a while. We were some of the last people to leave and it was nice to visit with other people there. Michelle went to grad school at the University of Iowa so we discovered that we know some of the same people from my ward in Iowa! Small world!

Sunday we went to church and it was good! We attend an international branch and people are from all over the place but everyone speaks English. There are about 50 people in the branch and everyone was really nice. They asked me to help with the music in Primary so I'll have to brush up on my piano skills! Kira left church to go to an Indonesian celebration with a friend so I went home by myself. I just hung out for a while, played guitar, and read, and edited pictures until Kira got home.

This week for work I have been attending the HBB training courses. They are held at the Maternal and Child Health Center (basically a hospital for pregnant women and babies). The courses are all in Khmer so I don't understand a single word but Chris has been there to tell me what is going on and a lot of the teaching is done by demonstration, so I'm not totally lost. It has been very interesting to see how the participants do in the course and to see their improvements by the end. Chris asked one of the doctors if it would be possible to see a live birth while I was there and today I got to see two! They were happening at the same time in the same room (separated by a curtain) and it was amazing. It is really incredible to witness something like that and I have such a great appreciation for women who go through that. What a miracle it is to see a baby right after it's born! I loved it!

Kira is working in a different province this week so I have been by myself. It is kind of liberating to figure things out by myself. I was kind of relying on her for a lot but I've had to do things on my own this week! Monday I went to the internet cafe and then went a got dinner at a place down the street. And last night I took a tuk-tuk to a phone store and bought myself a phone. I felt pretty good about myself after that. It is a little lonely going home to an empty apartment and not knowing anyone around to spend time with. Today was the first day of the second HBB course so it was all very familiar to me and I found myself daydreaming several times about America. There are definitely some things I miss a lot, especially people. I feel homesick every once in a while and that makes things hard, but I just keep reminding myself that things will get better and I will learn to love it here.

I figured out how to get pictures from my camera to my computer so you have those to look forward to. In the meantime, here are some from my phone from last week!

The eggs we buy are usually really dirty so we have to wash them. Then we lay them out to dry! 

This is one of our loads of groceries from the market one night. So much delicious, fresh, and new produce!

This is the wall around the Buddhist temple we walk by on our way to the Russian Market. 

A closer view inside the temple. You can see a couple child monks dressed in their orange robes. 

The outside of the temple.