Up and out at 7:45am with the ever smiley Emma collecting us from our Hotel.

Arrived at the ever busy surgical centre where we did the ward rounds with Dr Jim. The wards, split over two floors, had the post operation patients, some of which had been there a number of months. One of the residents, who I remembered very well from my previous visit in August 2009, was a Vietnamese guy. This particular gentleman was a commercial diving fisherman in Vietnam, and he used to fish at depths of about 4 metres. He was sent to Cambodia where he was sent down to a depth of 40 metres, and on that particular day, he had done two dives. This unfortunately resulted in him getting the bends, and whilst they transported him the 8 hours back to the mainland to hospital, they left him in the engine room to get warm. To cut a horrifically long story short, the paralysis from the bends made him unaware that his body was against the engine which was slowly burning away his skin. He had to have his legs removed due to the irrepairable damage caused, and he is now working on rehabilitation and physio to make him stronger to try and live a normal life. This is just one of the many stories that, whilst incredibly sad, also shows the incredible power of human kindness in Dr Jim and the CSC folks, who never gave up on this guy, even when he’d lost all hope himself. When we were here last August, this guy had had enough… This guy now has more colour in his cheeks and Jim is talking about his long term rehabilitation plans for this guy. He may never dive again, but CSC have given him hope, and given him back his life.

After work, we all went out to celebrate Australia day, which was fun, but I couldn’t quite get to grips with the strange accent! First we went to Snowy’s, which was a quaint little place on the river, ran by a cool character who has been a resident of Phnom Penh for a long, long time. Here is quite a nice picture that I took from their balcony.

After a few drinks there, Emma booked us into Romdeng, which is a restaurant I would recommend to anyone who comes to Phnom Penh! On the way there, we passed this chap who was only too happy to pose for his picture

The menu, amongst an array of fantastic food contained a stir fry of wild red ants (wrong!) and deep fried tarantula (wronger!). Monster Mullane, however, clearly enjoyed this particularly wrong wrong wrong delicacy

T’was a lovely evening, and from all of us at CSC, I wish you funny talking natives a happy Australian day!

p.s. the eejit wearing the scrubs has watched way too much E.R. and in the words of Adolf Mullane “he didn’t realise when sitting opposite me, how un-Clooney-esque he really was”