Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse…………………..

After being so sick I thought it best to take a week off work and take some much needed time for myself to recover and regain some strength. I wanted to stay here and was determined to complete what I’d set out to do. But if I thought I was going to have a quiet week OH BOY was I mistaken!!

A few days of being out of hospital myself the two volunteers who are here went out to the village for work as usual, a 45mins tuktuk drive each way.  At a time when they would usually be home or nearly home my phone flashed up with a text from the founder of the schools saying “Beth and Natasha got accident. Come and help me”. Immediately I was on my feet running for a tuktuk and trying to call to find out where they were and what happened. All he told me was where they were and that “they were in an accident in the tuktuk” (tuktuks here are a motorbike with a cart on the back). It took me about 15mins to get to the clinic the girls were at. It must have been the longest 15mins I’ve ever experienced. With only a small amount of information, knowing the pitch black road they drive down, the torrential rain we’d had for the past few hours, after about 6 days of no rain, and not knowing how serious the situation was, all I could think about was “how do I call their mothers and say that their daughters are in a critical condition in a 3^rd world country or worse yet, dead?” 

I ran into the clinic, if you can call it that, and saw Natasha lying on the bed holding her head and Beth sitting next to her. They both started crying. I’d never been so happy to hear someone cry in my life. Noise meant they were alive and conscious.

Their tuktuk was hit head on by a car that was traveling at speed. The car hit the tuktuk and continued to speed off in the direction it was going. As the tuktuk was hit, the back cart spun and flipped over with the two girls inside. Natasha landed head first on the road and Beth, whose side of the tuktuk had taken the full force of the hit, landed on top of Natasha.

It had rained for the first time in about 6 days so we used a different tuktuk. One with rain covers.  Amazingly the rain covers were the difference between the girls being in the position they were in and ending up in a more critical situation. The covers held them within the tuktuk instead of skidding them across the road (one of the few sealed roads) and into the trees on the side of the road. The one day I wasn’t going to curse the rain!!

The clinic they were in was not really up to a standard I would have thought you would take someone to who’d just been in a car accident. While the girls lay on the bed I went around checking where all the medications where, if they were sterile and who their doctor was. Was he really capable of being able to assess and treat the girls? As we do in the west, the Cambodians just trust that a doctor is doing the best they can and that they have the right equipment for the right situation. I’m pretty sure these doctors had not seen a road traffic accident in a while and had very limited experience of emergency response. It’s a strange situation to be in where you feel like you have more knowledge and understanding than the doctor. They seemed to lack the ability to look forward and consider any injuries that they could not see or may come up when they leave the clinic. They were not impressed that I questioned everything that was happening and wanted to look around but at that point all I cared about was that the girls were getting the treatment they needed otherwise I would transfer them. Beth who had taken the full brunt of the accident was not being assessed and they could not understand why I was asking them to look at her. Luckily I’d met a Kiwi/Cambodian A&E doctor, NZ trained, a few weeks earlier. I called him and went through the situation. We came to the conclusion that he didn’t need to attend, that they would be ok and he prescribed what they needed and what I needed to do when I took them home. Two minutes later he called me back and said he was on his way. Ahhh relief. He turned up and assessed the girls and spoke with the doctors in Khmer, which was really helpful and gave me peace of mind that they would be ok.

I took the girls home and got up every 3-4 hours to wake them, give them medicine and check that they knew where they were and what was happening. When they were in bed asleep I sat on my bedroom floor for about an hour thankful that they were asleep in the room next to me.  What sleep I did get that night I had with my door open, concerned that they would call out and I might not hear them. I’m sure that’s how it feels to be a mum.

I monitored them for the next few days, while still feeling pretty ill myself. I don’t know how they did it but they walked away with a sore head, whiplash and some bumps and bruises.

The teachers were so worried about them, most having never stepped foot in a clinic or hospital, and 7 of them, including the tuktuk driver, turned up the next day to check on them. They were so pleased to see that they were alive and well. They must have stayed for 3 hours just asking them question after question.

I understand that the value on life here is different than where I come from but I was not overly impressed with how the founder behaved during the whole thing. All he seemed to be concerned about was whether the girls would sue the driver,  it was a hit and run, or not. A lot of pressure was put on me to get the girls to sign a waiver saying that they did not want the police to continue searching for the car, for which we had no details. I managed to avoid getting anything signed the night of the accident by explaining that they needed to call their travel insurance companies first. I’d tried to explain travel insurance to him for about 45mins, a concept they just don’t get here, the week earlier and now understood why I went through that battle.

The girls asked me not to call their mothers as they were going to do it which was ok but I knew I needed to make that phone call at some point. Totally prepared for a mother to have a go at me and cry for hours I called Beth’s mother the following day and explained that they were ok and they were resting but I was here and taking care of them. She was amazing. She said she was very impressed with how I’d dealt with the situation and she’d offered to fly the girls back but they said no they were having ball and did not want to leave. When I got off the phone I felt like I could breathe again and finally get some much needed sleep.