AsiaLIFE

My wife, Oun, is a full-time student at the local community college. Her dream in life, along with meeting former U.S. President Bill Clinton and seeing the Atlantic Ocean, is to become a registered nurse and spend the rest of her life helping sick people. To gain experience in the nursing field, she decided to use the three-month summer break from school to work as a caregiver at a nursing home, a facility for people who are too infirm to take care of themselves.

Taking care of the aged and ailing is not easy work. For me, having to change the nappy on my infant son was enough to set both baby and me whimpering, or whining, with discomfort. The messiest messes, which a baby produces with frightening regularity, often triggered wails of anguish – from me, the father. The idea of changing another adult and cleaning up those messes was too terrible to contemplate.

But Oun was fascinated by the concept, partly because such a place couldn't exist in Cambodia. The idea of sending aged relatives off to decline in an isolated place surrounded by strangers shocked her Khmer sensibilities. But the idea of providing care to elderly folk warmed her heart, because she had been raised by her grandparents. She wanted to give something back to that generation, even if they were on another continent. Many of the residents of this and other nursing homes are of the "Greatest Generation." They won World War II, fuelled a massive economic expansion and made the cheeseburger the icon of all that is free and entrepreneurial. Sadly, the American generation caring for them isn't so great.

In the first week, Oun found there were three shifts, each apparently self-segregated by race. The morning shift employees were mostly white, mostly lazy and smoked more cigarettes than a nervous Frenchman on deadline. The night shift employees were all from Asia or various Pacific islands and displayed practiced skill at raiding the kitchen and taking naps where the manager wouldn't find them.

The afternoon shift employees, for the most part, were the most respectable of the lot. They worked hard, didn't gossip like the morning shift, and didn't take a fifteen-minute nicotine break every half-hour. Oun liked them, but these diligent workers weren't the pride of America, they were from Mexico. (Few of them spoke more than a little English, which may have helped limit the amount of gossip.)

Americans complain about foreigners showing up and taking their jobs. Business owners complain that their workers spend all their time sitting around complaining about foreigners. Meanwhile, the foreigners, who are from nations where laziness means slow starvation or a local government job, wonder why everyone is sitting around complaining instead of getting things done. This, apparently, is globalisation.

Anyway, a few of the native-born Americans would work afternoon shifts, apparently because it was easy to sneak out of the building after dark and get stoned – and that made changing adult diapers and shepherding Alzheimer patients far more entertaining. Oun was excited about this because that was one of the herbs she had been searching for since we moved to the U.S. – I hadn't quite put "gancha" and "ganja" together – because a bit of hemp makes for tasty soup in Cambodia. The glazed expression on some of her chemically enhanced co-workers, however, convinced her that sharing what they were smoking might not be the flavour enhancer she was looking for.

Despite the miscreant colleagues, the rotten hours and the inevitable deaths of her beloved patients, she's still eager to work. It helps that here in the U.S. she can make more in a week than a teacher or factory worker in Cambodia makes in a year.

Will Koenig lives in Oregon with his wife and son. Contact him at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .