Five weeks passed very quickly at the Angkor Hospital for Children in Siem Reap, Cambodia. We were tasked with producing a report on malnutrition, and thus sifted through about 150 patients’ charts to gather data. Our supervisor, David Shoemaker, also dispatched us often to follow-up on patients and, in the process, to see the ‘real Cambodia’: a conservative society revolving around the family and the field. It was a world apart from our native Canada; when we reported that a child, admitted to AHC in 2007 for malnutrition, had since been crushed to death by a cow, we were told that this happens frequently in Cambodia.

The chart review itself was equally fascinating. Written into the charts were family trees as large as they were complicated. The notes described murder, incomes below one dollar a month, fluctuating family sizes, appalling malnutrition, abandonment, and cases of HIV transmission via wet-nurses’ breast milk. And so, over five weeks, we were introduced to the private life of Cambodia.

For volunteers though, life in Siem Reap has few hardships, as the city boasts a tourist infrastructure capable of handling the Angkor Wat crowds. Only during working hours do volunteers see the ‘real Cambodia’, whose families travel from all over the country to take their desperately sick children to AHC. The hospital staff are charming, and the lingua franca is English (which, owing to great differences in sound and structure from the Khmer language, led to delightful phrases in the charts such as, “the road was very pumpy” and “some food was lost because of dog biting”). In short, AHC is a wonderful place to volunteer. The only risk is that, as some have found, you won’t be able to tear yourself away. (By Rebecca and Nicholas Canadian Volunteers Summer 2008)