Broken bones and baby chickens

Our typical language study week is broken up into three days of studying at school and two days of studying with a tutor at our house and a weekend of hanging out with neighbors and friends.

When we study at school, it’s to learn to read and write. We study from 9 a.m. to noon. We have two teachers. The second comes in for the third hour. After two hours of reading and writing Khmer script, it’s sometimes fun to have a little conversation practice. Also, the third hour teacher likes to tell us stories.

So, we’ve decided to share some of these stories with you, our readers. Enjoy!

One day, our teacher was telling us about broken bones and how they are treated in Cambodia. She included several wince-inducing stories about poorly set bones which had to be re-broken and doctors insisting a bone wasn’t broken only to later find that it was and now it was going to require metal screws to fix. In one story, she told us about her cousin who broke his arm. The family called the kru khmer (local witch doctor) because they didn’t have the money to go to the hospital and anyway they had lost confidence in the doctors at the hospital after several experiences there with botched treatment.

The kru khmer made a compress to wrap around the broken arm. As he was working on it, a chicken with some chicks scurried by and the kru khmer snatched up one of the chicks, threw it in his mortar with the other compress ingredients and smashed it up. Then he wrapped the whole compress including every part of the smashed up chick around the broken arm.

Our teacher said this is a tried and true remedy for broken bones. Any of you medical people have any ideas what a chick that’s just gone through mortar and pestle treatment could do for a broken bone?

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