the soviet

as far as it goes this week has been good. i have, up untill this week, been grateful of a good bill of health and had no real need for any medication except the obvious aspirin and cafeen, and the ocasional injection of alcohol, sadly my running streak came to an end this week. after a few days of sore eyes and then some sleepless nights it would seem i have conjunctivitus....sore eyes. we went swimming on monday and my eyes were really sensative i thought it was to do with the water but apparently not. i dont know if jani has blogged recently, i think maybe typing is hard with her hand all bandaged up! they just got back from the doctors and had an xray, apparently it wont need to be amputated....what a story that would make! lucy has gone up to stung treang with libby and a bunch of others for the next two days. libby runs a clinic out of a church up there and goes for two days every week then just hangs around in the city the rest of the time, she is semi retired..i think, if not she is a massive slacker.
it rained pretty heavily last night which was nice as it meant a cooler sleep, so i was appreciative, it did mean sovath had a bunch more cleaning to do unstairs this morning which i dont think he particularly enjoys. he did offer to take me to this eye doctor he has been to before, after asking a few carefully selected and deeply probing questions i discovered this doctor is a soviet. im not joking that is what sovath called him! the khmer still use the word because a bunch of places are called 'soviet hospital', 'soviet bridge' etc. that made me chuckle then i tried, but failed, to explain about the fall of communisim in russia, of which i am obviously an expert. this was an interesting coincidence because a few days earlier we were talking about this region and i suddenly realised how we are surrounded by communist countries. vietnam, laos, indonesia, burma and china. all except thailand which may as well be. there is a big national election in may next year and all the mission organisations are updating their emergency evacuation policies just in case something happens. it sounds a bit crazy but political instability has come to define cambodia for the last half century and no one would be surprised if something did kick off.
what a mental place to be. i keep thinking what a mental life i have here, it really is completely mental.

going mental.
Ben.