Traveling Health Fair

A fellow health volunteer invited me along to be apart of a traveling health fair in our provincial site. I was happy to be included in on this project because it gave me the opportunity to travel to the schools and sites that are close by where I live. I also got to see where my provincial partners (fellow volunteers) live, meet their host family members and scope out their surroundings. I'm always curious to see how other volunteers live and what their homes look like. This was a great opportunity not only to visit my fellow neighbors site but to also help carry a positive and healthy message to our communities. We visited four different sites in a matter of one week. We each biked to each others site (which was exciting and exhausting at the same time), slept and ate in each others homes and presented on different health subjects at the high schools we visited. I did a health exercise on yoga and had about four to five sessions at each site. I had many students that were very shy to do it but they eventually got into it and were motivated to keep trying. The other volunteers did presentations on traffic safety, recycling, germs and sanitation and nutritional health. Our goal was to provide education on topics that aren't normally taught in schools or that are often neglected to be talked about by parents and other community members.

Volunteers conducting a role play on traffic safety. Cambodia is notorious for not following safety guidelines when driving along the roads. Motor bike drivers and car drivers hardly pay attention to road rules, they drive at an extremely dangerous speed and there are no regulations because police officers do not pull over people for breaking the traffic laws or for going over the speed limit. Cambodia has a very high percentage with car accidents and deaths. We just wanted these students to be aware of traffic road rules and how to be a cautious driver especially at night because there tends to be a lot of drunk drivers.

Another volunteer doing a presentation on how to reduce, reuse and recycle. Plastic bags in Cambodia are everywhere and it causes a lot of pollution and trash buildup. Since the trash systems are almost nonexistent in Cambodia mostly everyone is subjected into having to burn there own trash. I can't tell you how many times I've walked out of my house to the smell of burning trash. Sometimes, I can even smell it before I go to bed at night. It's unfortunate because Cambodians are left with no other options with getting rid of their piles of trash other than burning it.