Dr. Carl Richard Jackson

Impression Excerpt from Katherine Miller
Elective Term (completed Year 3)

Someone said once that Cambodia changes you forever. They were right. I have seen kindness with no bounds from a people who have lost everything. I have watched dedicated doctors improve life with cardboard. They rebuild children because children are the future of this country. I have learned and seen things that I would never, and probably will never see in Australia. Cambodia has changed me, it has educated me, it has shifted my once-insular Western perspective to something else. Something bigger. I’ve never been in a civil war. But I’ve learned from the Khmer people that losing everything doesn’t mean stopping everything. Through their beautiful nature, through their response to that horror, they have given me courage. My psychiatry textbook had a paragraph in it on a humans response to highly negative events in their life. It said that those who responded with altruism to these events, were the highest-functioning. Nothing could be more true of the Khmer people. It is has been an honour to work with them.

Impression Excerpt from Adrian Lo
ILA (completed Year 1)

For my sake and the sake of my patients I was glad that the National Pediatric Hospital, Phnom Penh is a large teaching hospital. I certainly didn’t get to perform outside my capabilities but I did manage to learn an incredible amount in my 4 weeks. I spent the whole time in the surgical department, watching mostly orthopaedic procedures on deformities we just don’t see in Australia. Things like osteotomies on children suffering Rickets, triple arthrodesis surgery for talipes equinovarus and hip surgery for children who had congenital hip dysplasia but weren’t picked up until well into their childhood. I grappled with the many reasons why such preventable deformities would still be happening, but after visiting cultural sites like Tuol Sleng (S21 prision camp) and Choeung Ek (the Killing Fields) I realized this small nation, including their medical system, is in the process of being dragged back into the 21st century after the Khmer Rouge regime sent it hurtling back to an agrarian society only 30 years ago.