Mom on the Sidewalk

I was driving my motorbike a few blocks from my house when I noticed a crowd beginning to form on the sidewalk. I stopped and saw a young woman lying motionless, but fortunately she was breathing. I next noticed her baby girl sitting next to her on the sidewalk who began to cry. A female bystander pulled the woman’s shirt up, exposing her breast. The infant climbed on top of her and began breast-feeding while she was unconscious. It was a sight I will likely remember forever. When the baby finished she climbed back down and sat on the sidewalk with a smile.

I offered to pay to get her to the hospital. A tuk tuk pulled up and two concerned Khmer woman came along as we went to 3 different clinics before finding the only open emergency room, the woman gaining consciousness as we drove.

The ER looked like the infirmary in a war zone. The 6 waiting patients all had the exact description; young men, all having injuries to the face as well as other parts of the body, almost certainly from motorbike accidents without wearing helmets. The hospital staff were gathered by a desk while the patients moaned in agony, their dirty wounds left unattended. I offered to help the man who seemed the worst, and the staff indicated they were OK and rolled him out for treatment shortly after. I was now numb.

The woman was given a saline drip bag, the standard treatment for just about everything here (I have seen many people riding on the back of a motorbike with a saline bag on a pole above them). They wheeled her to what I assume is the no-money part of the hospital, a large balcony on the third floor with patience strewn across the floor. Here she became fully conscious, and decided she was ready to leave even though her saline bag was just part way into her. I think the Coke I bought her was what mostly revived her, as she said she hadn’t eaten. Others said she had been drinking and not eating, a mistake I never make. Whatever her situation, she walked out of there 1 hour after I met her, with her baby, down the sidewalk back to her world on the streets.