Chea gets his first bike

After a bright and early start on Saturday morning, a couple of flights and a short sleep, I woke up in Siem Reap, Cambodia on day one of my first Open Heart International adventure.

Hi to all our readers! My name is Lana Jeavons-Fellows and you’ll be hearing all sorts of stories from me in the next week. I must put a disclaimer in my first blog that I am not a doctor or a nurse – I am Communications Assistant – so if you are looking for highly technical analysis of the surgical techniques to be employed during the week, I am going to disappoint!

The first job for many of the team Sunday morning was to review the upcoming cases that had been tentatively selected and to work out the plan of attack for the week. I’ll update you a bit more on that in future blog posts.

Chea is one of OHI’s favourite little friends, abandoned, orphaned and in desperate need of a heart operation. As a first time traveller with OHI, I had not met Chea, but I did know his story (click video below).

Yesterday afternoon, we travelled the short distance outside Siem Reap to visit Chea. He is now gowing up fast, and living in a children’s village. As it turns out, our fearless leader Fiona had been in contact with the children’s village and had heard on the grapevine that some bikes were needed. And of course a few OHI volunteers were pretty quick to chip in a few dollars to make sure Chea got his first bike!

Add to this the new friends I made, and checking out the one of the ancient wonders of the world, day one of this adventure has been pretty good!