After eating banana pancakes at The Little Garden Guesthouse, I joined our group on the bus, leaving to go to a village to meet some high school students sponsored by Friendship with Cambodia. At the first stop we met with a 17 year old girl and her family and a young man from nearby who is sponsored to attend the university. He wants to teach English in the local community. At age 9, he lost his foot from a landmine, but has been fortunate enough to get a prosthesis. It is unfortunate that he is missing a significant part of one of his upper incisors. We all really wanted to fix his tooth. The girl is hoping to attend a university in management. She was very shy. Her father was busily chopping coconuts to provide one for each of us to drink the coconut milk. The younger brother, about 7-8 years demonstrated his agility at going up and down the tree. The elderly grandmother was there retained a very stern expression; however, when she saw me pick up the coconut and drink out of the straw, she flashed a big almost toothless grin. I had made a small slide show of scenes of California, NY, and New England, leaves changing colors, Halloween pumpkins which I showed at both homes and provided some entertainment and information for the people. We learned from Panith about the Cambodian version of a witch that is only a head.

We left and drove a short distance to the second stop. We had to walk about ¼ mile down a dirt road and came to a small village. This girl lived in one of the poorer homes, but it was impeccably neat and clean. This girl had moved from another province to live with her grandmother when she was offered the opportunity to continue with school. A year or so later her family moved and her father changed from being a fisherman to a construction worker. We toured the village. There were a couple of bigger homes with large satellite dishes, very different from the wooden house our student lived in where homework was done in the evenings with a small oil lamp. We saw a fish farm, the well, some vegetables growing, a large group of ducks being raised. It was all very interesting. One thing quite novel about this area was that most women and children were wearing pajamas. Some of the outfits here look like pajamas, but these were real print pajamas in bold colors with Disney characters, animals, Winnie the Pooh, etc. - quite colorful.

Back to Kampot and lunch at Epic Arts, a restaurant associated with a program to help persons with disabilities and hearing impairment and is associated with an arts center. The manager is deaf, turns out she is from California (Whittier), was diagnosed at age 1 because of an astute grandmother, received intensive education and services at John Tracy Clinic and then her family moved to Seattle. She stated her mother is a very strong advocate for the deaf. Although one could tell she had a hearing impairment, she had completely normal spoken language.

Next was, of course siesta time. I did not return to the hotel but walked around a bit to see some of the old French colonial buildings, happened upon the town prison in a French colonial structure, and then returned at 2 PM to meet Panith who was going to accompany me across the street to see if I could visit the regional hospital. The only possibility was to meet with an administrator who was busy and possibly would return. There was a large dry erase board on the wall with monthly statistics that was interesting - length of stay, admissions (about 500/month), mortality (5-10) except TB, deliveries (80-120), referrals from rural health clinics. I stuck around until 2:45 and then went in the office to indicate I would leave. There was a woman at the desk who spoke a little English who is one of the midwives there and she offered to talk with me. So we spent about 15 minutes in her office. This hospital has a big sign out front that is meets the UNICEF and WHO criteria and is a Baby Friendly Hospital which means it has an extensive program to support breast feeding (all US hospitals do not.) There are 15 midwives and 2 doctors; midwives who train for 3 years do all normal deliveries. She told me how she suctions babies, pays attention to the temperature, and promotes skin to skin contact. If the baby has a problem it is referred to pediatrics, but it sounds as if there is any need for advanced care the baby is transferred to Phnom Penh (3 hour drive) by ambulance, no air transport. I thanked her for her time and returned to the hotel.

The tour for this afternoon was on paper lost time - two hours of siesta and two hours of wrap up. However, at 4 PM we got in the bus and returned to a fishing village we had passed to walk around and take pictures. We were surrounded by hordes of children which was fun, but I could have used more time to walk on the docks and see the boats and fishing nets, etc. As we headed back we saw a very pretty sunset. Dinner was switched as the original place was out of business, so we ate at Mea Culpa, primarily Italian. The man who served us indicated that the "Mea Culpa" was all his, not ours. There was a real brick pizza oven. I had a vegetarian pasta bake and salad - both were good, but the portion sizes were about four times what I could eat. Then back to the hotel and the end of the day.