First Week Blur

Time flies by here. I'm not sure if it's because the sun seems to set so soon, although there is nothing cooling about the night sky drawing around you. The heat lasts, and then it is early morning and you are drowsy and in a tuk-tuk to work in 30 degree heat at 8am.

We have an apartment in Phnom Penh, found during a mad day's hunt. Despite our best efforts to live somewhere a little more Cambodian, our tall white house is in BKK1-the expat and NGO district. SUVs belonging to Oxfam and land mine charities flash by in the melee of traffic. Gates, security wire and nightwatch men in little huts are the norm. We too are behind a rust coloured eight foot gate. In the courtyard lives a beautiful family who help us when our washing machine breaks and lend us brooms to sweep the tile floors. They have a small son who loves to find us and play because he knows we have bubbles and footballs and stickers.

Life has finally taken on a routine. We've established ourselves in nearly all of our work settings. The Children's Surgical Centre is still where we see most of our patients, and where we are currently doing the most therapy work. It has been fantastic to see children with good palate repairs make progress during sessions and become that little bit clearer in their speech. The surgeons have also performed some great lip repairs on children with large clefts. It's worth remembering though that even with a good repair, a percentage of children would still require Speech and Language Therapy - that's why a service is needed here.

The Rabbit School has a brand new building slightly out of town which is light and airy. The children run from classrooms to greet you and take boxes of toys into the corridor so you will play with them. Teaching staff plan functional, fun activities and manage incredibly well with children who have a variety of special needs. Some have sensory impairments such as deafness , whilst others have communication difficulties resulting from conditions such as autism.

The orphanage is in the same building as the Rabbit School. It's filled with light too but the air can be stuffy with the smells of wet clothes, often left to crosshatch the floor as they dry. The staff have a tremendous amount of work here and we muck in changing tartan wrap-around nappies with the best of them! The children are provided with care but it is difficult at times to enter a roomful of tinies who could all definitely use a hug.

Everyday is still a sensory overload in the capital. Your eyes stay open against the grit and dust as you inch through new neighbourhoods. Sunsets give a gorgeous backdrop to the journey home as the sky fills with wild orange powder and still the monsoon clouds hang to the north. You spy on streetlife - at the sugarcane sellars with the fly swarmed stalls, roasting pigs and chickens on skewers, chanting moto-dop drivers, streetside welding that sends sparks into eyesockets, noodle sellars with their wares hanging from the long stick on their shoulders. Children run after me to pat my white skin. Sometimes they ask for money. Other times they ask just for the empty water bottle I am holding - they can recycle it for a little small change.