A hat for mom. A hat for baby.
Sister Bev Armstrong and her husband, Elder Bob Armstrong, a retired doctor, accepted a church call to serve an 18-month mission in Thailand. The church then asked them to go to Cambodia, instead. The couple from Manti, Utah, agreed.
When I met them last Wednesday, they had completed 14 busy months traveling all over the country, visiting dozens of health centers and hospitals, assessing the needs in the rural health care system of a developing country and arranging medical trainings and donations of medical equipment.
Early in their mission, Sister Armstrong saw an ancillary need. No matter how hot and humid it is, every Cambodian newborn wears a knit hat for three months. Every mother wears one for a month after giving birth. Not all can afford them, however. So she crotchets hats. In 14 months, she’s crocheted 600 of them. Over time, three Cambodian women have joined the project. Together, they had completed 1,410 hats as of last Wednesday.
As she handed them out to women and newborns at the hospital and at a health center, she came upon a mother, Phirun Manin, 29, a sewing factory supervisor in Phnom Penh, more than two hours away. Manin returned home to the little village of Mesa Prachan to stay with her parents to give birth the day before on a gray table in a tiny, rundown health center that delivers 20 babies a month. |
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The Armstrongs delivered a brand-new, bright pink delivery table, other medical supplies and Sister Armstrong’s hats for Manin and her newborn daughter, Phira.
Armstrong said childbirth in Cambodia is improving. We discussed health care as we made the long drive to the hospital from Phnom Penh, passing lotus fields alongside rice paddies. Both fields and paddies were flooded. She told me the lotus flowers are brewed in tea, the stems are eaten in salads and the seeds are like pine nuts. The stems also are used to make thread for clothing.
The infant mortality rate was above 30% as recently as 1978, her husband said. It has improved rapidly since then, to about 3%. The government is successfully working to improve it further.
Sister Armstrong said the government now provides a national incentive for poor women to get prenatal care. They get $10 per visit for up to four visits, where they receive information, training and vitamins.
They receive another $50 if they deliver in a hospital or health center instead of at home.
That’s a lot of money for the poorest people in a society where the median household income is $1,500 a year.
That also provides more context to the grateful smiles I saw in the faces and eyes of the women who received Sister Armstrong’s handmade gifts of a hat for mom and a hat for baby. |
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What I’m Reading ... This is a delightful story by Nicole Yang at boston.com about an NFL rookie who is living off 10% of his football salary and investing and saving the rest. He is driven by watching his mom live paycheck to paycheck, which gave him anxiety about their financial instability. He began saving as a young boy. Now he wants to pay back his mom.
My colleague Gretel Kauffman wrote about how the controversy over how to ban conversion therapy in Utah appears to be over with an agreement that pleases all sides.
Basketball has changed dramatically. Driven by statistical analysis, teams want to shoot nothing but 3-pointers and layups. But it turns out the most valuable play in basketball is getting fouled while shooting a 3-pointer. So, many NBA players today make bizarre, nonbasketball moves as they try to be fouled while shooting from way outside. Since this piece by John Hollinger is behind a paywall at The Athletic, I’ll give you a taste of the analysis. A 2-point shot produces an average return of 1.04 points. A 3-point shot produces an average return of 1.06 points. The reason they are so close is that while 3-pointers are worth a point more when they go in, they are harder to make. There’s a huge difference in getting fouled taking those two shots. The return on a two-shot foul is 1.56 points, the return on a three-shot foul is 2.33 points, which actually rises to 2.56 points, because the shooters taking the longer shots are better free throw shooters. So, they contort themselves wildly to try to get referees to call fouls on their defenders and hand them the most valuable opportunity in the game. The author’s argument is that the NBA should do away with giving three free throws for fouling on a 3-pointer. The return is unfair compared to what the shot itself is worth.
I devoured Michael Connelly’s latest novel, “The Night Fire,” in a few hours on airplanes. Connelly is a former L.A. Times crime reporter who created a fiction series about Harry Bosch, a homicide detective in Los Angeles. |
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 | | Chun Phaly sits up in one of the three emergency room beds that serve the entire rural Cambodian district of Pea Reang, which has a population of nearly 125,000 people. She became the centerpiece of my story on the public-private partnership between a public hospital and Latter-day Saint Charities that led to the creation of the district's first emergency room. |
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 | | Sinat Yet, 33, smiles as she holds her newborn child, Mony Rith, last Wednesday. Mony was about 12 hours old at the moment. They are wearing hats crotcheted for them by Sister Bev Armstrong, a senior medical missionary from Manti, Utah. Mony is Sinat's fourth child. |
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