Cambodia: Day 28

Monday, June 6th, 2011

Om Loon's House in Phnom Penh

9:42 PM

Remember how I went on that tangent a few days ago about the survey I was excited to conduct? The one about the iron and folic acid stuff?

Yeah. You can forget about it.

I walked into the Child Health and Nutrition unit this morning feeling a little nervous. I was planning on talking to Dr. Ketsana about my survey proposal and whether or not it would be a good project. I took my seat at my new desk and logged onto the internet to take care of some emails before I dove into research about previous iron and folic acid programs instituted in developing countries.

Dr. Ketsana came in a little after seven, as did Chris. To some degree I think that Dr. Ketsana is more intimidated by me than I am of her. A sweet little Cambodian woman of about 45 years of age, she received her medical degree from a Russian university and worked in a hospital in Cambodia for quite a few years. They had her working ridiculously long shifts that kept her from eating or sleeping, so she eventually decided she needed a career change and came to work for RACHA.

She's a very impressive lady, to say the very least.

She came over to my desk and shyly told me that she hadn't thought much about what she was going to do with me. I met her smile with my own and told her it was ok, that Chris and I had talked about my options for a long time on Friday and that we had come up with a few different ideas. I tried to explain them to her as best I could, but she had another suggestion for me.

RACHA has been partnered with a UN organization known as the World Food Programme (WFP) for about two-and-a-half years now. They have recently begun phasing out the program and are in need of some feedback about the impact the project had on the health of the women and children in the villages they administered to.

That's where I come in.

The way it works is this: every month, the WFP distributes food to a few villages in three different provinces within Cambodia: Siem Reap, Prey Veng, and Pursat. The food rations are targeted towards women who are pregnant or lactating, and women who have children who are 0-23 months of age. In order to receive the rations of food, though, the women must attend a health seminar put on by village health volunteers under the guidance and direction of RACHA. These seminars educate the women on a wide variety of topics, including HIV/AIDS and other diseases, nutrition, sanitation and hygiene, breastfeeding and complementary feeding, pre-and post-natal care, etc.

Dr. Ketsana gave me the proposal for the project and left me to go off of that. I sat at my desk, spewing over the text, trying to think of some possible questions I could throw together for a survey that would be simple to analyze, but in-depth enough to give me some good statistics. I obviously didn't have enough background information to make an informed questionnaire, so I finally got up the courage to ask Dr. Ketsana if I could sit down with her and clarify a few things.

Once that was said and done, I felt much more at ease and got to work. I came up with a few questions, did some revising, and then searched on my word processor for a template to do a survey.

Then the frustration came.

Have you ever tried to make a table in Microsoft Word? Not that hard, right? Well what about a table that's asymmetrical, with cells of varying sizes? And then you have to write in them while making sure the text isn't too big or too small? Oh, and you also have to make sure it all looks nice and pretty with all the words using the same orientation. Wait, you want to use bullet points, too? It's not easy, not one bit. Then try moving your table around to the area you want it to be, while making sure the rest of the text on the page doesn't get garbled.

Oh, yeah, and remember how my computer has the newest version of Microsoft Word while all the other computers that are connected to the printer have an outdated version? The kind of outdated version that causes all of your blood, sweat, and tears to go down the crapper when you try to transfer your document to get printed?

There comes a point when I can no longer be held accountable for my actions.

I may or may not have reached that point today.