Though I’ll stop well short of saying our healthcare system is perfect, I think we can all agree it’s preferable to nothing. Sadly, nothing is what many villagers deal with in Cambodia. I got a taste of this last week when my host sister fell severely ill.
The trip to the doctor and series of blood, stool, and urine tests ran the bill into the hundreds of dollars, or a few months’ worth of salary. Without other options to pay the bills, the family sold off half of their largest and most liquid asset–cows.
My host sister stayed on the daybed for nearly a week before fully recovering (she’s fine now). Here she is on one of the first days she arrived back from the hospital in Phnom Penh.
Our family had four cows. None of them were working cows, used instead as collateral or a source of emergency funds. To sell wasn’t an easy decision, but at the time the family sensed they were only on the event horizon of both my sister’s illness and the medical costs associated with it.
My host father called a seller in the morning and within three hours two cows had been loaded and sold for close to $750. The bulk of it paid for my host sister’s medicine and hospital bills.
Loading the brown and largest cow onto the transport. He was the biggest and fetched the most.
Both cows are now somewhere in Vietnam, with predictable ends that befit the Vietnamese market for non-working beef cows.
