An Accident on National Road No.4

On March 22nd, at around 2pm, a severe accident occurred on the National Road No. 4, only 10 minutes drive from our site.

A sedan-type car was smashed by a big truck. We rushed to the scene with our community ambulance and a command car, but it was already too late, the driver of the sedan was crushed to death. There were no other passengers in the car.





What happened? It seems that the sedan first hit a tanker running in front of it, and that the sedan’s bumper was trapped. The sedan probably then detached itself from the back of the tanker but lost control. It was then smashed by a big truck running fast behind the car.

This is not a unique case. Such tragic accidents are happening all the time on National Road No.4. It would have been even worse if the big truck had hit the tanker, as it would have caused a huge explosion.

This is one of the many tragedies occurring on the roads in Cambodia…

Vegetable Garden for the Health Center

We have started growing vegetables, which will be served at the health center.

In this remote area of Cambodia, people rarely grow vegetables at home. The reason is that either they lack water to grow plants, or they are not aware of the nutritional benefit of vegetables, focusing instead on getting any food to fill their stomach. They mostly eat a lot of rice with a salty fish paste. Since they don’t grow vegetables themselves, they need to buy them at the market, and it is costly. They thus tend to give up eating vegetables.


We grow vegetables not only for the health center meals, but at the same time we want to use our garden as a demonstration farm for the community people. They will see how vegetables are grown, how to take care of them and how they can be cooked.

We are also planning to provide cooking classes for nursing mothers and pregnant women, and to give them a kind of starter package to help them start their own vegetables garden in the near future.

Children malnutrition is a critical problem in this area. We very much anticipate that this kind of programme will contribute to improving the current poor nutritional status of the local people in the long term.

We often obtain seeds from the existing vegetables and fruits. Tomato, paw paw, mango etc.. All grown from the seeds remaining when we eat those things. It works quite well!

Construction Up-Date 2

The father of one of our workers passed away in the beginning of February. Since all our workers belong to the same community, they all left the construction site, in order to help with the funeral. We had no choice but to leave the building site idle for an entire week.The work has now resumed and we are about to put on the roof.


We are planning to organize an opening ceremony on March 23rd, 2009 with GRAPHIS and SIDE-BY-SIDE INTERNATIONAL, the main donors of the health center. We have only one month left…..

The Road Branch to the Health Center is opened!

At the end of January 2009, the repair works on the road branching out from Road No. 4 to the Graphis Health Center were completed. It was a very rough rock littered dirt road overgrown with grass, which made access to the Health Center difficult and dangerous.

Thanks to the support from the local authorities and from the main donor, GRAPHIS, a Japanese students group, we could manage to repair this road section in three weeks!

The local authorities contributed heavy machinery and workforce for 3 weeks. GRAPHIS provided the funds needed to cover all the costs, including fuel, food for the works and other costs.

It now takes just 5 minutes to access the health center from National Road No. 4, instead of half an hour.



There is still more work to do in order to keep the road smooth throughout the year. As it is not paved, we are planning to cover it with tiny red stones that will act as gravel to prevent it from becoming slippery when wet.



We dug a ditch on both sides of the road. During the rainy season, the ditch will work as drainage. In the dry season, we will fill the ditches with water, to be used by the villagers.
We also plan to raise fish in the ditches. It will be a valuable source of proteins for the people of this area who rarely have opportunity to obtain it.
The ditches will be connected, to keep water moving and prevent it from becoming a breeding ground for malaria-spreading mosquitoes.

Mobile Antenatal and Mother and Child Clinic

We conducted a Mobile Clinic around the villages between January 21st and 26th, 2009, for expecting women, nursing mothers and children, in collaboration with a Japanese midwife nurse and medical staff from Kompong Seila District health center.

This project was made possible thanks to the generous funding by OHDAKE Foundation through the NGO Side By Side International.

The mobile clinic toured four villages and provided health check and medical treatment for over 120 outpatients.

There are many villages located very far from any health institute. When we visited these villages, we met many pregnant women who had never attended antenatal clinic before. We did basic check-ups, distributed iron tablets and provided consultation services and medical advice.

Our objectives for this mobile clinic attempt were three-fold:

1. To provide health care to economically or geographically vulnerable pregnant women
2. To collect medical data while touring the villages, in order to help Graphis Health Center better assess the situation and needs of the local population.
3. To establish an effective communication and collaboration network with Kompong Seila District’s Health Center, which is currently the largest public health institute in the district.
   

The Road to the Health Center

The Graphis Health Center currently under construction is located 8 km from the National Road No. 4.

Why didn’t we build the health center along the National Road itself?

The main reason is we didn’t want to create additional accidents from more traffic that the health center would inevitably generate. Once the health center opens, it would inevitably attract many people, coming in and out of the center, walking across the road, erecting food stalls around and so on. If the health center were located along the already busy and accident-heavy National Road No. 4, it would become an additional cause of traffic accidents.

We decided therefore to build the center a little bit away from the main road, but not too far so as to be able to drive emergency patients quickly from the main road.

Up till now, the existing road branching out from National Road No. 4 to the health center was quite rough. It took at least 25 minutes to drive from the main road to the health center on this dirt road.

Now, with the support from GRAPHIS, a Japanese students group, as well as from local authorities, we have started to repair the road section to the health center, to ensure quicker and safe access.

Local authorities are providing heavy machinery such as excavators, shovel car and trucks, as well as workers. GRAPHIS provided the funds to cover all the costs, including fuel, workers’ food and other expenses.

Thanks to their generous contribution, we have started the repair work of the road section on December 23, 2008.

Once the road repair is completed, travel time from National Road No. 4 to the health center will be reduced from 25 minutes to only 5 minutes!

Introduction: Handmade Back Board

When you are injured in an accident, it is crucial if your neck is fixed while you are rescued from the scene of accident. If you get damage on your neck and people move you without fixing your neck, you may get additional damage or, in the worst case, it kills you.



The back board is one of the rescue tools which can make a patient's body be fixed and stable during evacuation and transferring by an ambulance.



The back board is currently not available in Cambodia; we need to import it from outside. It costs around few hundred dollars if you purchase a back board in some countries like USA, Japan etc. We decided to produce handmade back boards in collaboration with TICO Cambodia. We provide piece of woods and TICO Cambodia make back board from them.

[Handmade back board (Left); photo taken at TICO Cambodia Office]

It cannot last long compare to the plasitic commercially produced ones. But our handmade back boards already saved many victims from accidents.