Women’s Health Fair

Thought the funding of world vision my hospital was able to hold a 3 day health education or women who are pregnant in my community. Sadly though, no one told me this was going to happen so I had mins to get ready for said education. Its always frustrating when you want to help and get utilized properly but instead get to find out the morning of this is happening. Well despite the rest of the staff being a wear they had to teach do you think they knew what they were doing nope not at all now if, they talked to me and told me what they wanted to teach I have lesson plans and materials they could have used err. Anyways I did what I could it turned out to be okay another pcv has this special project going on testing out this new text book on women’s health and asked us to help test it out and write up how well it works. The chapter was on family planning trying to get to the issues with why its hard for them to family plan the value of big and small family’s. The thing about Cambodian people they are taught not to think just given info so they can re say what they have heard from other ngos but, cant quite put the pieces together. This is where I like to think I can come in and help where I make them get in groups and ask for specific economic reasons vs them just telling me Cambodia has no money which if I had a penny for every time I hear that phrase I would be a million air but, that is besides the point. However getting them to think and talk and figure this out is like pulling teeth and its not just them its the staff to because they just like to read and be done with whatever it is so to have staff who was helping me with translation understand why I was making them do the activates I was, it was like beating my head against the wall. However by the time, I was done with the education all the women were genuinely happy and the good news is that they actually requested that I do more health education or them so while I was only allotted one subject the staff had to add me into more time slots =) the other good out come of this is they actually tried to copy my way of teaching for other topics they were covering. Another topic I covered was hiv and aids once again the way most ngos teach Cambodians is very basic and never go into scientific detail for fear it will go over their head however,I am not someone who likes to give up on people just bc it might take more time to learn maybe bc all my life I take a exceedingly long time to understand things. Anyways instead of just talking about the usual how to prevent hiv/aids I went though considerable length for them to understand how the virus kills the immune system showed them pictures did some role playing etc and by the end they actually understood complex ideas about cell biology and the body along with how to prevent hiv this made me immensely happy. Funny story with this education is that in the health center, there is a wooden penis that I thought I could use for a condom demonstration this however, went ary very quickly. I think last year I told you all about the story of having an argument about American condom brand vs khmer with the nurse who was trying to tell me khmer condoms are smaller well now I understand more so than before. I get this wooden penis and they give me an O.K condom (a popular brand of condom) and when I go to put it on said wooden penis it was to small so mean while all these women are watching me struggling with this hysterically laughing at me. In Cambodia, they can ask downright crazy question, for a culture that is supposed to be so shy about sex they all start to ask me if American penis is bigger than Khmer penis. I am like o god so I just answer the only way I could think of which was to say I am not married so I would have no ideas about such things. No lie they all were like we do not believe you bc Americas do not wait they all have sex so I had to debate them for like 10 mins that Americans do not all have sex. Anyways lesson learned Khmer condoms are actually much smaller than I knew and I should test out size of condom on the fake penis I will use for education in the feature. Until next time peace out from the other side of the world!