pavlog's log blog

I am a crappy blogger. Seriously. How come I can let this thing lie fallow for weeks and weeks at a time? Am I not self-important enough? Or am I too self-important?

 

I've got all these starts of blogs that I never got into finishing - some are just a sentence.

 

One is about this argument we were having over lunch one day regarding the community water committee for the well nearest the hospital. The Project Coordinator at the time was arguing that the well should be free for MSF to use since we provide free medical care to the community. However, the NGO (Action Contre Le Faim) that set up the well, and the committee, put in place a cost recovery system so that repairs to the pump in the future could be covered by the community and not rely on handouts from NGOs.  The argument that we were having struck right at the heart of our work here from the macro level and also illustrates how development can come to a head with emergency relief.  Clearly in an emergency you don’t need cost recovery, it’s an emergency – just give. In development the aim is for the people to become self-sustainable and move beyond relying on aid.  Here we seem to be always stuck right in between those places. Anyhow, I was advocating for reinforcing the cost-recovery system and offering to pay for our use of the well, just like the families in the neighborhood. Who cares if what we give is free – no one asked us to give it for free, our presence here shouldn’t hinder development, right?  The other side was arguing for the idea that people who offer free goods should be supported by the community. But what is free? Nothing. Even in the “freest” of universal health care, someone pays, and everyone is paid.  The guy that turns on the water every morning for the hospital in France/Japan/USA still gets a paycheck, right? The water company still has to support itself, right?  If I haven’t mentioned it in previous blogs (which I still can’t check from here because that story about the incoming internet connection turned out to be a big tease), then I’ll say that my stay here is constantly reinforcing certain capitalistic beliefs.

 

What’s another one… Oh, yeah – Fairness. There was this big long story I wanted to tell about fairness here in MRK. The battles I/we face on a daily basis to maintain a “fair” approach to every thing we do. For the community, for the employees.  And the uproar that happens the instant that something isn’t fair. All the expats talk about this all the time but I had this realization of how fairness is at home.  I seem to remember this world at home that is constantly reminding people of how the world is not fair and how to deal with it. But the result is often to accept the unfairness and work to bypass it.  Or to push everything into categories to explain the inequities. Sure the immediate human instict is to just feel that when good things happen to others and bad things happen to you, there is some sort of unfairness. But that instinct is childish and not productive, and our society puts a lot of effort into diminishing that – something I wouldn’t have thought of or noticed or I might have even disagreed with before living here. Of course life here in Markounda overall really is not fair. But tell that to the employees who didn’t get picked to go to the capital for the Field Management Course. Or the the two nurses to whom the last expat doctor just mailed some gifts (rather the people who didn’t get the gifts). I am going on vacation next month and I would love to bring some stuff back for a couple of my favorite and most helpful employees. But I can’t because of how it’d be perceived as unfair to the others – even just a small gift like a pocket knife or a pair of work gloves or a flashlight. I think that a healthly long essay could be dedicated to the sense of fairness in a massively impoverished community/country like this one.

 

Note that when I talk about poverty here – it’s not like any poverty I have ever seen before. In the sense that you don’t really even need money to survive here, it’s so poor. People grow their own food (everyone grows almost all of their own food). People build their houses out of local material – mud bricks and straw roofs. Of course the poverty comes into play when faced with the commodities of the modern world. The fact that a sheet metal roof is better than straw in 100 ways.  Growing your own food leaves you vulnerable to starvation from almost anything that would prevent you from doing making it to the field or anything that would make your field not produce. The modern world offers so many solutions to many problems that we don’t usually even think of as problems. But here in Markounda, modernity only peeks in just a little bit. In a way that after a while makes it seem less poor sometimes.

 

And then there was the story about the “promotion.”  About 6 weeks ago the project coordinator (PC) left the project.  The coordination in the capital gave me the title and the responsibilities and I have been the PC since.  Not ideal since no one came in to help out with the job duties I had before the “promotion.” It’s one of my excuses for not writing… it’s been a lot of work. Take that task list I posted a few entries ago – everything that I said “partially” I am now doing fully. And then some. But the flip side of the work is that it is also a ton of fun. I always wanted to solve problems for a living... Anyhow...

 

Questions and comments and encouragement is always welcome at msfh-markounda-log-sat @ field.amsterdam.msf.org  Same rules as mentioned in the previous post about emailing here apply.

Doctors without Borders

After getting a few emails from people, I realize that I never really explained in this blog what I exactly I do here in Markounda.  Funny enough, it's only 6 months into my mission here that I feel like I could adequately tell you.  The last month and a half we've hosted quite a few visitors and I have given several tours of our operation and even a couple of detailed security briefings - I ended up getting asked questions that I didn't know the answers to, but after a little digging around, now I might be in a place to explain. Any of the following information could certainly be improved or might even disputed by someone who knows better, but this is what I think I know.

 

MSF has several operational centers that oversee projects in different countries around the world (more on that at MSF.org).  I work for MSF Holland but for reasons long and political, the Central African Republic (CAR) is overseen by the local office in Berlin.  MSF Holland has been in CAR since 2005.  Our project here in Markounda started around 2006 as a little health post to provide basic medical care to a population that had been displaced due to conflict in the area. A high percentage of the population at the time was living in the bush as their villages had been targeted by government forces looking to suppress an anti-government insurgency.  Many were also living as refugees across the river/border in Chad.  As time went on, the political and security situation stabilized a little, people started moving back to Markounda and rebuilding the village.  The ministry of health had long since left this area and the catholic mission that had been providing health care had stopped for the same reasons of conflict that caused people to flee.  After people started coming back, MSF was the only source for health care in the region and our little health post grew and stabilized.

 

As it stands now, we operate an outpatient clinic (OPD) and an inpatient clinic (IPD) as well as several health posts on the roads between our other projects.  The OPD serves about 300 patients a week treating mostly for malaria, diarrhea, respiratory infections, basic wound dressings.  We have a pre-natal care clinic once a week and give vaccines once a week. 

 

The IPD has 28 beds, treating for the more severe cases of the above as well as having a delivery room and a small malnutrition program.  Most of the beds are full most of the time, sometimes we overflow a bit and sometimes we wonder where all the sick people went.  The most severe cases, like surgery candidates, c-sections, etc. we refer to a bigger project, sometimes sending patients by motorbike, sometimes transporting them ourselves.  Patients stay with us for an average of 6 or 7 days. They are allowed for a caretaker to stay with them, usually there are a handful of children that accompany the caretaker or the patient or both. We provide food and water to the patients and their caretakers while they are in hospital and we have a fulltime kitchen and food stock devoted to this task.

 

Our health posts are staffed by MSF trained local population paramedics who treat mostly for malaria and help gather statistics on the health of the surrounding population.  We frequently receive referrals from the health posts. The MSF expat nurse supervises the health posts about once a week or so. Occasionally we do vaccination campaigns based out of the health posts.

 

According to our demographic information, the town of Markounda is about 3,500 people and the surrounding populations are a few times that.  I’ve read somewhere that we serve an area of some 30,000 people but I think that number might be a little inflated. The security situation in this region of the country is tense but currently there is not any active fighting and most of the actors get along though everyone worries that the peace is shaky. Banditry and general lawlessness is a bit of a problem.

 

My title here in this project is Logistician (or Log).  I was originally hired as a Tech Log to oversee a big rehabilitation project that, shortly after my arrival, was revised and no longer needed full time supervision. A little reshuffling of personnel later, I took over the position of the administrative Log in addition to my “tech” duties and for the last 3 and a half months have been the all-around Log.  So, that means that I supervise:

-    Medical and non-medical supply management. Ordering, receiving, warehousing, distributing medication, equipment, fuel, food, pretty much anything that comes or goes in or out of the project.

-    Movement of expats and staff. Landing the plane, supervising the vehicle maintenance, drivers, informing the rest of the mission (other projects and the capital support team) of our movement intentions and needs.

-    Electrical systems. Generators, charging systems, etc.

-    ICT. I keep the computers running, supposedly.

-    Cold chain. Certain all vaccines and certain medications and lab material needs to be kept cold. This can be a bit of a challenge in the 100°F heat that we get pretty much every day. We have both solar and kerosene fridges, the latter of which I recently upgraded to jet fuel and they seem to be much happier.

-    Communications. We have a few different methods of satellite communication (this thin little email connection to the server in Amsterdam) and a host of HF and VHF radios in the base and the cars.

-    Construction. We ended up doing that rehab anyhow… There are a couple of bridges in the area we need to address before the rainy season kicks into high gear.

-    Basic maintenance and repair of anything and everything that might break that we can’t just replace.

 

Uuh. What else. Oh, yeah:

 

-    Finance and administration. I am the guy who orders and counts the money and stuff, signs the paychecks, supervises the accounting.

-    Certain parts of HR, mostly involving stuff like contract and vacation dates, sick leave, maternity leave, schedules of the employees related to the above tasks.

-    Certain aspects of security. Guards mostly, and the above mentioned movements and communications. In fact, everything has a little bit of a security aspect to it.

-    I almost forgot, certain aspects of water and sanitation. Maintaining the water collection and distribution chain, chlorination, latrines, drainage. We’re in the process of handing over quite a bit of all that to the medical team who is probably more qualified than I am to supervise hygiene but I still have my finger in that pie. Is that the wrong metaphor when talking about hygiene?

 

Well, I’m sure that there is more and I am just forgetting it.  I was actually looking for my job description for some time and when I complained a little about it, I was given the task to write it myself.  The above is the closest I have come to doing so.  Funny, when you write it all down, it seems like a lot and frankly it is. It’s probably a good thing that there isn’t anything to do around here at night otherwise I’d never find time to write anyone anything. But I have a pretty good staff (about 23 people, 6 directly under me) and they are really the ones running the place – the supervisor (my position) changes out every 6-9 months, so you can imagine how that adds to efficiency.

 

So in many ways, my job here is just a regular office job with meetings and to-do lists, dead-lines, conflicts with co-workers about this little thing and that.  But we’re doing it all in a 3000 BC farming village meets bizzaro Mad Max land, 1000 miles from anything most people in the US would consider a city but less than 70 miles from what has recently been determined to be the exact geographical center of Africa (ask me about the centroid sometime). You know, it’s a job… And not a bad one at that.

 

 

 

3 o'clock high

I never blog in the day time.  It’s 15h00.  The reports that I didn’t want to do last week are done – the MSR, the TSR, the KPIs, the VFU sheet, my project equipment inventory list, and the 8 page narrative report that ties it all together.  Apparently, we do this every 4 months.  You’d figure that giving things away, charity, should be simple.

 

I am mostly caught up on supply papers. Still procrastinating a couple of receptions but I’ll have to get to them before the generator goes off with the printer.  And the fan.  It’s hot and I just figured out, on close examination of the fan (that only runs when the generator is running otherwise it’d suck the batteries dry) that there’s actually a fair chance that those whirling stamped sheet metal blades could just come down from the ceiling with little to no notice and cause some pretty serious damage.  Would cut your head off or anything but could result in some stitches, certainly some triple antibiotic ointment (which we don’t have, funny enough – only antiseptics) and would probably result in a broken laptop screen. The fan is attached to the ceiling with a bent 10 penny nail.

 

Water and Sanitation advisor from Amsterdam passed through here yesterday/today.  Learned all kinds of things that I would have thought I knew but didn’t really.  At the last minute he ran a test that I think might have just solved out team diarrhea problem we’ve been having off and on for the last couple of weeks.  Turns out that when concentrated chlorine is exposed to high humidity, it absorbs the moisture and begins to break down, becoming less potent.  Didn’t know that.  I had followed up on chlorination procedures recently, suspecting hygiene myself but everything added up as it should – I didn’t account for bad chlorine.  Rainy season stuck it’s foot in the door just about a couple of weeks ago and the ambient humidity been high ever since.  Switched out our chlorine concentrate for smaller, less susceptible to contamination containers. I’ll run the tests tomorrow and see if we’re back to normal on the chlorine side.  Total sum of the visit? A bucket of HTH chlorine, a couple of cases of soap, and a little hygiene awareness campaign would fix at least as many problems as a whole warehouse full of drugs can.

 

Landed a plane today. Not as a pilot, but as the air traffic controller.  Pretty easy since there’s no air traffic – you just keep the cows and little kids off the runway and speak little airplane talk – Red526, runway two one clear for landing, wind two zero, speed five to ten.  Actually, it’s totally routine now, plane comes twice a week.  Anyhow, today, right after landing, the military jeep the base in town rolled into the airstrip full of soldiers and with the big swivel gun obviously loaded (it’s not usually). Rolled in like they meant business.  No business, just looking.  Scared the crap out of me for about .5 seconds. Then I saw the lieutenant was wearing camouflage hot pants. Awesome.  We don’t get enough hot pants around here.

 

 

 

 

 

oblahdee

I have been procrastinating writing the narrative for my 4M report for days. I just don't want to. Now I am right up to the deadline and I am going to have to pull an all-nighter to get it done.

 

Walked to the market today. I don't leave the compound very often lately.  Sunday afternoon and there's a lot of seemingly angry drunks about... I kind of get the feeling like there are plenty of people in this town who would kill us if they thought they could get away with it.  The fate of people who do wrong here in the eyes of the community is not usually too nice.  Kill - get killed. Rape - get killed.  Steal someone's cows - get killed.  I can only imagine what the community punishment for driving away the only source for medical care would be (free medical care at that).  Does that mean that I am an unwitting beneficiary of frontier justice?  We make it a point to not get involved in or at least be very careful in how we get involved in any sort of even potentially criminal matter.  Just treat the patients and stay neutral...

 

I am kind of bored lately.  Right now it's just 3 expats in the project and it looks like it is going to stay that way for at least a few more weeks.  It can be a little tiring.  Sometimes I wish that this blog thing should work backwards once in a while and I could hear what people I know are up to.  And hey, why shouldn't it?  I am going to do something horribly foolish and give you guys my email address here - I trust that you'll act responsibly with it and not add it to your spam list or your joke of the day list or whatever.  But if you want to send me some news or say hi, it could be pretty awesome. I could even entertain topic suggestions for the blog, answer questions.  Right now, I can’t read the blog comments from here so it’s currently a very one-way means of communication.

 

OK, Here are the rules:

 

1. Text only - that means no pictures, no links, no attachments, no fancy HTML, etc. Bandwidth is scarce and even internally we have a 100k limit.

2. Put my name in the subject – this is not my email address, it belongs to my position here, if ever I am out of the project or change jobs, this email is no longer going to go to me.

3. Delete this email address from your system when I post that I’ll no longer be here – same reason as above.

 

Msfh-markounda-log-sat at field dot Amsterdam dot msf dot org

 

I spell it out because I am deathly afraid of spam and our ability to combat viruses is as limited as our internet connection (which is none) – we get a CD from the capital every 6-8 weeks with an update…

 

Is it a deal?

 

 

 

9 to 5 (actually it's more like 07h30 to 19h30)

I'm still here.  Back from vacation 3 weeks and time is slipping through my fingers.  All my talk about life in Markounda, I don't think I have written much about work here.  It's really all we do.  I sometimes have my doubts about it.  All the regular office politics magnified by the fact that we all live together, too.

 

I spent the first half of today processing orders and receptions, clearing my desk and the warehouse for a stock count and a 4 Month reporting cycle.  A little break here and there to check on the always problematic refrigeration systems, talk movement and vehicle planning with the head driver.  It was only 105°F at lunch today which was a nice little break from the heat we've been having lately.  Laying down for a couple minutes after eating, I was pleasantly surprised that it took a whole 12 minutes for my eye sockets to well up with sweat rather than the usual 7 minutes.  Then back to work.  Trying to track down what medicines went where when we split our child project off on its own too late for our own good. 

 

Anyhow.  Just wanted to check in but lately I haven’t been writing much because I feel like I spend all day behind the computer.  I miss my ergonomic keyboard.  So much for romancing about the mangoes and the drummers and the chickens… 

 

Monday afternoon

Images from this afternoon:

 

The wind is whipping - wonderfully cooling down the 110F° afternoon.  A blitzkrieg of mangoes rains down from the tree in our yard, dropping 1lb fruits from as high as 100ft in the air.  55ft/second², right? That's a dangerous projectile. Seriously, a sticky haired concussion waiting to happen. I wait out the wind under the overhang of the roof of the house, eating peanuts with the Head of Mission.  Watching the ants who’ve invaded our eating area and plotting how most efficiently put a permanent stop to them, we marvel at their speed and strength. In a conversation that’s probably been had many times among like minded people, we start to do the math and figure that for an ant, one end of the table to the other is like 2km for a human.  More calculations, we figure that they are running at about 180km/hour.  When they climb to investigate the state of the cap closing the lemon syrup bottle, it’s like climbing to the top of the Eiffel Tower - in 4 seconds.  Something in physics makes these comparisons not valid exactly, I don’t remember exactly what the rule is but it’s fun to imagine.  Elizabeth sits down and catches the end of our conversation, looking at us like we are complete morons for wasting our time like this.

 

Work is over, for today. At least the daytime employees have gone home.  There’s still a ton to do, but I’m done for the day, too, I think.  Only an hour until the sun sets. No dusk, just night. In every book about Africa they talk about it, how when night comes it’s almost instant.  Silly books about Africa, it just has to do with being near the equator but anyhow, I only have an hour of natural light left. I sit and read a book about Africa…

 

I wake up from a jetlag inspired nap on the wicker sofa in the peyote. I am completely drenched in my own sweat.  The wind has calmed a little but there is still enough to cool me down as I stand up. The yard is littered with mangoes, and it’s still not super safe to just stand about under the tree. The smell of broken fruit on the ground inspires me to take an appetizer before dinner.  I grab a knife and peel a mango, citrus hinted sweetness, fibers making a home between my teeth for the next few days. My eating brings interest to the dinner table, we set it together, the four of us.  Left over couscous, left over rice. Left over ratatouille-ish stuff, left over sausage and sauerkraut. Some mushrooms and carrots and meat(?) in a coconut milk sauce. Mango cake that Stella made in the “oven” (a pan full of hot rocks over a burner on the stove) for desert.  There is some discussion about the Indian vs. Chinese economies.  Jelle and I get off on another tangent debating the best way to make mango juice in our current situation.  He goes off into the dark of the kitchen, comes back with an armful of mangoes, a Tupperware bowl and a cheese grater(?). What the hell are you going to do with the cheese grater? More pseudoscientific hypothesizing, another trip to Dresden (under the mango tree) to get more mangoes, some Swedish Chef impersonations, an aluminum foil funnel and some very sticky hands, we have mango juice.  We decide that it will be better to try it cold and in the morning so he throws the bottle in the (newly jet fuel powered) fridge (another story you should ask me about one day). 12 mangoes = 2 small glasses of juice, we need to work on our efficiency.

 

The conversation drifts back to work. And gossip.  Apparently guy who works for us threatened to kill other guy who works for other NGO. Something about someone’s wife but it turned out there was a little misunderstanding and it was the other guy’s girlfriend instead. Not before there was a barricade in the road and some inter-NGO negotiations. Eh, death threats… All happened the day after I left the project a couple of weeks ago, I just hadn’t gotten the story yet. Also got the skinny on how the wrong cat got killed the other day. Was there a right cat to have killed? Who is killing cats? Talk about a cross cultural miscommunication with our house staff and the guards.

 

I step away from it all for a second, go stand in the dark, looking at the sky for the stars but there’s none.  I go to the office across the street. Maybe there’s an email for me. Maybe I’ll update my blog… Definitely sleeping outside again tonight. Man it’s hot. I am full of mangoes.

 

solitaire

Found out today that we will be getting a VSat. Satellite internet connection. Don't know exactly when but eventually.

I don't know how I feel about this, oddly enough. When I first got here, it was hard to be without an instant answer to any trivial question I might have, hard to be away from instant contact with friends, family, acquaintances.

When I heard the news tonight this thought popped into my head - one of the only things that makes the isolation here bearable is...the isolation. I don't have the entire world taunting me with its existence all day long. We are just here and that's how it is and we deal with it. Don't know the answer? Make a decision anyway. Want to do more research? Can't. Just do it.
Is more information going to put more drugs on the shelves? Is more communication going to speed up the bridge repairs? Is more access to the world going to organize the stock room?

And then more questions for after work. Will the town be bigger if I can see what everyone is doing today on Facebook? As much time as we spend together as a team, nothing else for us to do after it gets dark at 6pm other than talk to each other, have a nice long dinner, curse at the ever begging cats, or talk about how the little chicks have gotten all adolescent ugly, wonder where the eggs get laid, watch the bats wake up, listen to the tam tams and the children singing outside the yard we're not allowed to leave after dark. And if we were, there's nothing to see until you get close enough to touch or within 5 feet of the fire.

These things are all we have after work - the team, the cats, the chickens. Only a little privacy. What will happen if that little precious alone time is spent communicating with more people? Adding such a powerful tool might just be adding one more thing to support, to manage.

Another project asked me the other day if I had a carpenter to lend, they needed to build some shelves for a new warehouse. Proceeding cautiously, I asked about the scope of work for the guy. Somewhere in the explanation were the words "electric saw." No flipping way am I going to give you this guy I have integrated into my team, who knows how and is willing to saw by hand every plank. I don't care if it goes faster for you, when I get him back, surely he's not going to want to saw planks by hand anymore. Not for me at least. And even if I get him an electric saw, what good is it going to do him when we leave, or his contract is up and there's not a power outlet capable of supporting an electric saw for 100 miles in any direction - leaving him discouraged with the tedium of the hand saw. No, he's happy now, he works hard, we pay him well and he builds fine enough quality fast enough.

I feel kind of like a puritan grump recounting a story like that but I can't help but remember it when I think about getting internet here. That we have to base our work and our lives on a solid foundation. We're already in a quicksand field. Adding more weight to the building, hoping that it will reinforce that foundation by making our lives more comfortable and communication easier and cheaper, knowledge more available, neglects the possibility that it also makes the structure heavier and maybe more prone to sinking.

See you on Facebook in about 6-8 weeks...

beep beep part 2

And I forgot to mention about the constant whine of the HF radio. Hissing
and beeping, with voices from Starwars mumbling in the static.

I woke up in the middle of the night because my earplugs had fallen out (or
I tore them out in my sleep). These are the new ones the Head of Mission
gave me as a gift. My old ones had diminished to a mismatched pair because
of similar losses. These new ones work almost too well. Luckily, I found
them in my sheets, in the dark. Put them back in and then it's quiet again.
More than quiet. When awoken in the morning, kind of surprised (I've put a
bed outside where I sleep when it's too hot - doesn't help with the noise),
the only words I could use to describe what wearing the earplugs is like
-"It's like black."

Anyhow. Back to work. Logistics report due yesterday . . .

beep beep

Is that a car alarm? No. There aren't any cars here, just a small handful of Toyota Landcruisers. At 10pm, half past midnight, Markounda time.  I never needed earplugs to sleep until I came here. Unbelievable, the sounds that can come from a (almost) completely isolated village, in the very middle Africa - The children sing and the drums play until 10 or 11, 4-5 nights a week, I haven't figured out the schedule.

The roosters start crowing at about 2am, unreasonably eager for the sun to rise. No one ever said, and I've little reason to believe that chickens are particularly reasonable. There's argument among the team as to whether they say "kokoriko" or "kikiriki," and I'm the only one who thinks they say "cock-a-doodle-doo" which everyone thinks is hysterical - and wrong.  Cows are usually quiet but when they decide to say something, everyone hears it.

Crickets and birds, songs unmuffled by the hum of traffic or computer fans or refrigerators.

If tension is high, or my imagination get's the better of me, sometimes a door or something banging in the wind starts to sound a little like gun shots in the distance. Or mortar fire. Once or twice there was a gunshot and you can tell the difference, but still - that damned imagination. The other night, I heard a jet flying over. Like, regular commercial jet, 30,000ft. Perfectly normal at home. Here, I got out of bed and went and looked.

The guards talk all night, which is good because if not it means they're sleeping.

And once in a while something unexpected, like a car alarm. But turns out it's not. Just some dude, laying on and off the horn on his motorbike. No drums tonight, must be Wednesday. Put in my earplugs anyhow, the roosters will be up sooner than me.

tune in tokyo

The TV has sat entirely unused since we moved into the new house some 7
weeks ago. Up until this week, it was just sitting on a huge stack of NaCl
0.9% in the living room. Our new house was the old house that had been
converted into a warehouse but now back. We only just found a new home for
the 500 cases of sodium chloride that is no longer used for the trypano
program because they changed treatments. I don't think anyone has missed
the TV and it's not like we have anything to hook it up to other than the
DVD player, there's no AM radio here let alone VHF or UHF. But I don't
think we really have any DVDs anyhow. It must have been a priority for a
previous team.

So occasionally, to get a live action reminder that the world is still out
there, I occasionally listen to the shortwave radio that the last doctor us
with. If you want mindless entertainment, shortwave might not be the thing
for you. it's kind of a tiresome activity, turning the dial in
imperceptibly small increments, just in the hopes that you'll run into a
familiar language. But if you just want to know that the world is still out
there, it's perfect.

I've never listened to shortwave before, don't know a lot about it, but from
what I think I know, the signals can transmit almost all over the world,
depending on various meteorological conditions, etc. Lots of Chinese.
Arabic, English, French are all fairly common. But what's been more
pleasant for me is to play the game of just identifying languages and then
moving on. I've heard Russian, Swedish (or at least some Scandinavian
language I'm pretty sure), Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Afrikaans
(confirmed by a Dutch speaker), Portuguese, Japanese, a handful of African
languages I can only identify as African, Hindi (or maybe Urdu).

My little list of languages I totally would not have expected: Romainian
(that one took a minute to figure out but then was confirmed when they
switched to their English language service, which was almost more
surprising); Greek (Greek? Wouldn't have believed it if I didn't speak it);
and most awesome, unexpected language on the shortwave . . . Esperanto!
Who'da thunk that my brief foray into Esperanto a couple of years ago would
have paid off in such a trivial way (playing my own little games). Not that
studying Esperanto often pays off in a non-trivial way, and I'm sure rarely
pays off at all. First there was the news, it was at the time of the Berlin
Film Festival, but then they switched programs and started giving Chinese
lessons. In Esperanto. If you know me, you can surely imagine the big
stupid grin I had on my face, listening to Chinese lessons in Esperanto
while in the Central African Republic.

And that's how I know that you're all still out there. Sitting in the yard
in the dark surfing the hissing crackle of the shortwave frequencies,
listening for the ghostly whispers of the outside world.

sweet and sour

What a place. I can't even get into it, it's almost too much.

I was walking to the market today, noticing how the mangoes hang from the
trees like monochromatic Christmas ornaments - perfectly distributed. The
branches sighing from the ever growing weight as they get closer to ripe.

People passing by, everyone says hello, whether it's in French or Sango or
Kaba or Arabic - or at least they respond when I say hello, as I try to
guess which language would solicit the best response. I like it that often,
usually the women, reply "thank you" when you say hello. I don't know why
but I think the exchange sounds nice - "Bon soir," "Merci!" I hear that it
doesn't really make sense in French French but I think it's nice.

The kids are constructing ever longer contraptions to reach higher into the
mango branches in vain hopes of loosing a ripe mango. The bigger kids,
perhaps the less engineering ones, just throw sticks and rocks into the
canopy for the same purpose. Mangoes with one or two bites taken out of
them litter the ground under the trees. They're not ripe yet but they still
try. Are they hungry or are they bored? Both?

There's the dynamics of the hospital and our program here. Constant
questions about what constitutes and emergency and what our role here should
be. We could build a project like ours in every village from here to Bangui
and all the beds would be full all the time. We give care and food to
anyone who comes but I don't know if that's the right thing to do, at least
not in the long term.

There's the trash that litters the streets in a way that no one even thinks
about. Fires of all things burning all the time - grass to clean the yard
or a field, cooking bricks, cooking food, burning trash.

At the outpatient clinic, when I went to lay out a new waste zone this
morning, one of the drivers went into the bush and came back with a small
bird (they called it a pigeon but it was only kind of like any pigeon I
know). I asked him how he caught it, and he showed me the trap he'd set up.
He's got a little time on his hands, hanging around waiting for somewhere to
drive. He handed the bird to another guy who promptly broke both wings to
cripple the bird but not kill it so it'd stay fresh 'til lunch, I guess.

Or the chickens hanging from the handle bars of bicycles, no longer clucking
- as horribly stupid as chickens are as animals, they are smart enough to
know when the game is up.

Or the other morning when I pointed out to my medical store keeper a bat
that had landed on the ground and had been trying to take off again.
Apparently, and I'd never thought of this, bats don't do so well taking off
from flat ground, once they're down they're kind of stuck - that's why they
hang in the trees, it's more of a take-off convenience than anything else.
Rather than share my curiosity about this helpless bat, he stomped on it and
kicked it away from the warehouse door. When it didn't go far enough and we
could still hear it squeaking, he followed after it and kicked it farther
again, stomp, repeat, until it wasn't bothering anyone. Except me of course
who had had no intention to have the poor little bat get stomped on - wasn't
even in the range of possibilities when I first saw it there. Funny enough,
Ferdinand is a fairly quiet, gentle seeming guy. So's the guy who snapped
the wings of that pretty little bird.

I've got a hundred more stories of the beauty and the cruelty that are
constant here. Constant questions about relativity and perspective. The
days are full things to watch and stories to tell, some small, some big, but
trying to weave them together into some kind of constant - it's just
impossibly overwhelming. So instead, I just work.

rocks on fire

I totally just had a full on discussion with the night office guard about
meteorites, like, what they are and what causes them. Well, that was the
beginning of the conversation as he came up to me while I was just standing
there in the dark, staring at the sky. It's beautifully clear tonight,
often there is a lot of haze. Couple that with the fact that there is
literally zero light pollution, most nights the stars are just kind of
normal. Tonight, no haze, no clouds, the waning moon is not up yet - the
stars are just so detailed you can't help but stare. Or at least I can't.

So guy comes up to me (one of our guards, he's the second shortest and
second oldest - am I horrible that I don't yet know all the guard's names?
Up until a couple of weeks ago we had 22 guards who all changed positions
every day and night so I didn't put too much effort into learning the names
of the more non descript guards. Now, for a long list of only
semi-interesting reasons, we have reduced the number to 14, a slightly more
memorizeable number, but I still don't have all of the names down and I have
been here long enough that I am embarrassed to ask now) - so guy comes up to
me, stands next to me and sticks his chin up in the air to have a look at
what I am looking at. "Eh, just the stars. Just thinking about the stars."
He stays there for a minute and then says that he likes it when the stars
move. "Move like how?" Well, like sometimes they just move real fast across
the sky just a little ways, other times they move slow and steady almost
across the whole sky. Then he asks if they're satellites. Holy crap, did he
ask the wrong guy if he didn't really want a detailed answer.

But apparently he kinda did want a detailed answer. Or at least he acted
curious as I told him about meteorites and satellites. I figure because then
he started telling me about other things that he noticed about the sky, how
in the rainy season, those three stars are further south and sometimes the
Milky Way (very well visible tonight) looks like it's going another
direction. Frankly, I have no idea if the Milky Way changes apparent
direction depending on the time of year (I think it doesn't but I never
asked or noticed). The interesting point in all of this for me whas trying
to figure out quite where to start with the story telling. Here's this man,
at least 10 if not 20 years my senior but I have no idea what he knows about
astronomy, even at the most basic level. Shadows, distance, geometry,
rotations . . . I am pretty sure that he doesn't have much beyond a 1880s
7th grade education and comes from a community where he is doing probably
relatively quite well because what education he does have got him a job with
us (meaning that he can at least read and write French at a basic level).
Am I just making myself sound like an idiot talking about how rocks from
space catch fire when they hit the atmosphere of our planet? An atmosphere
which seems soft and easy from our point of view but when you hit it wrong
or too fast it can be hard - I make an analogy to a fish in water vs a belly
flop? He looks at me like I'M from space. Or is it genuine intrigue and
curiosity?

I don't know what to do with these kind of stories. Not really worth making
a big deal about, I'm not going to write a story each time something little
like this happens, if only for the fact that the whole incident above took
but 5 minutes to happen but 20 minutes to write. It's not like it could
only happen here in Central Africa. But it's the kind of thing that it's
really hard to bring home with you, hard to share with other people. It
happens at home once in a while but here this kind of interaction happens
every day it seems. Well, I guess only if you let it, huh? Like you just
stand there in public, looking into the sky like an idiot, long enough for
someone to ask you what you are doing... And then you tell them.

mercury blues

I hope this doesn't become a pattern. 2am again. Awake.

Some jerk went and got us a thermometer to put outside. A big one with
Celsius and Fahrenheit. Up until now, the only thermometers we've had have
been either in a fridge or broken. I'm fine with kilograms and kilometers.
I've even gotten used to writing the date backwards but Celsius hasn't ever
meant much to me, relative to my own comfort. I know that 20 is "room
temperature" and that 0 is freezing. We keep the vaccines between 2 and 8
(hard to do lately - the kerosene fridge keeps getting to cold and the solar
fridges can't keep up - if only I had some kind of heat exchange tube
between the 3 of them...)

But viscerally, what is 5 degrees? Is that cold? Is 30 hot? Well, regardless
of conversions, we got the big stupid thermometer that tells me what I
didn't want to know. Today was not as hot as others lately. 102F in the
shade. I totally didn't want to know that. I was OK just knowing that it
was hot and hearing the rest of the expats mumbling about how it's gotta be
40C or 45C, whatever the hell that means. But 102 in the shade - that means
something to me.

Funny, up until a couple of weeks ago, we didn't really talk about the
weather . . .

And that happened . . .

Oh man. It's 2am and I can't sleep. My body is aching from some
undiagnosable ailment that paracetamol seems to work ok against. I'm a
little upset at this fact since tonight is the first night in a couple of
weeks where it's not too hot to sleep. A ferocious wind came through
yesterday afternoon, smelled like rain but then didn't, but at least cooled
things down. People were saying that there might be some mango rain - just
learned about it today - a kind of pre-rainy season rain that helps the
mangos ripen. Go figure, until today, everyone said that there would be 0
rain until end of April. Another example of me listening to people here
turning out to be the wrong thing to do.

Sorry I disappeared. I don't even know who I am apologizing to more, me or
the people who asked me to keep updated. That last post - well, I was
actually a little upset at myself for failing to get deeper. I never really
wanted to come here and write about curious cultural observations. At least
not exclusively. I also didn't want to write about things I would change my
mind about later. Turns out, that is all there is to write about here.
First impressions are happening non-stop and, frustratingly, I end up
interpreting most wrong. Since finishing my first month here I try every
morning to remind myself that whatever my assumptions for the day are, they
are probably wrong. For such a simple place, it's a little hard to get an
accurate reading.

So, now. I don't want to be vague anymore or bite my tongue afraid of
mentioning specifics. Amazing things are happening here. Everything that I
put down in this blog will probably turn out to be wrong in some way, from
some point of view at least, if not entirely. What I wanted to write about
instead of the stupid Christmas Pig story was the emergency patient transfer
to our referral hospital, 76km and 2.5 hours away. Rushing all the way to
get this young girl, not more than eighteen, who had a baby with no signs of
life in her belly, obstructed labor. Found out a week later that she was
actually 40, this was her 12th child and it ended up being born normally.
What a flipping ride.

Or about the woman who fell in the market while I was there with a team
fixing the well. Face first in the dirt with a baby on her back as the
whole market looked on, for just a second to confirm that she was having
some kind of seizure and then went back to their business. I went and took
the baby off her back, turned her on her side so she could breath and
radioed the doctor. We took her back to the inpatient clinic (IPD), she
recovered quickly, there's not really much we can do if everything is normal
after the fact, if the seizure isn't related to some other treatable
disease. Sent her on her way later that day. I thought I was saving her
life, but apparently this kind of thing happens to her often and she's still
around. I wasn't there to roll her over last time, and I won't be there
next time.

And a hundred other little stories, some about local economics - ask me one
day about Crepin's shoes - to farming practices, to water shortages. Oh,
yeah, that's a good one that I'll probably elaborate on later - we now have
one working well that produces about 10 liters/minute which, if pumped for
12 hours straight, would be about 1.8 liters/person/day in town. People are
drinking from the river. Funny thing is, it's apparently not a huge deal.
Just something to talk about, like the weather.

That's just been it. Figuring out what is a big deal. You can only make so
much of a big deal out of so much - everything is relative. When the
Chadian army was on the other side of the river wanting to escort some of
their people to retrieve the bodies of their kin who'd been massacred on our
side of the river, down the road some 25km . . . who were massacred in
retaliation for their ties to banditry on said road. And the CAR army didn't
want them to come in but they did anyhow? Was that a big deal? Yeah, I
suppose - I mean I spent 3 days with my jam bag packed trying to mentally
prepare to find myself in the middle of an international conflict. How
often have I found myself in the position of worrying about a foreign
military invading the town where I live? Funny thing is, a couple of weeks
later, it doesn't seem like a big deal. Eh, everything turned out fine.
Whatever the hell fine is here.

So. I'm sorry I haven't been posting. I've been more timid than I want to
be in life. I am finding my voice though, learning how to speak up in a way
that I feel doesn't cut short my openness to experience. In the past,
travelling for me has been about listening, observing. There's still plenty
of that to be done but to go the whole 9 months here without processing,
it's too much - I'll just crash when I'm done, throw away all the
experiences I put on my plate unable to digest them all at the same time.

Oh, and by the way, that Chadian army business is exactly the kind of stuff
that shouldn't get posted much farther than this invite only blog, ok? At
least for now.

Xmas Pig

December 25th, 2009

We decided that we shouldn't name the pig. We figured if we named
it, we wouldn't eat it and that would ruin Christmas dinner for sure. Even
without naming it you start to get attached fast. The two kids who were
holding the pig down were waiting for me to take over so that they could
take payment and get on with their day. How much rope do you need to tie up
a pig? What do you tie it to? It's gotta hold til tomorrow at 11am, the
determined hour of . . . well, you know. OK, about eight feet? How about
to the pole that holds up the roof in the "conference room." Yeah, that'll
do, then the guards can watch him and make sure he doesn't get out. Uh oh.
The pig just became a "him." Crap, just don't name him, otherwise the BBQ
pit was a total waste of time. Best to keep my distance.
I give the rope to the guards and move on to the next order of
business, finalizing payment. Jeez Louise, you gotta pick the pig up by one
leg and his ear? That is horrible! He clearly doesn't like it, he's
screaming like a, well, like a pig being carried by his friggin' ear! I
don't know if I can do this. I begin to question if I just accidentally
became a vegetarian by way of trying to make Christmas dinner a little more
interesting. You hear people say, that if you can't kill the animal
yourself, you shouldn't eat it, ach, how close do you need to be? I mean,
the point of that is to say that most people couldn't stomach their animal
products if they actually knew what goes into it. Am I learning this lesson
now?
Horrible squealing stops. Come back, pig's tied up, rope around one
leg to the pole in the meeting hut adjacent to the guard post. They can
keep an eye on him til tomorrow. Poor little guy is totally freaked out,
rope stretched taught. Whatever you do don't name him. Certainly not
anything cute or memorable like . . . aaah, there you go, not gonna fall for
that one, you can't even suggest a name, 'cause he's just begging for one.
Give him some water or something though, huh? We're really gonna do this,
we're gonna eat this pig for dinner tomorrow?
Come back later, water pan is tipped over, probably not a sip drank.
What do pigs eat? I see them sniffing stuff around the village all the time
but the only thing I have ever seen them literally eat is cow shit. But I
bet they like green leaves. Or grass? Should you even feed a pig before a
slaughter? Better not risk it. I go to grab the pan to refill it, little
pig totally snaps at me. Aw, I scared him. Better let him be.
Before going home, check on pig. The pig. Remember, his name's not
anything, not even pig. Don't name it. He has completely destroyed
everything within reach of his circumference. He's wound the rope all up in
the benches. I go in to see if I can maybe untangle him a little, 'cause I
know the guards won't do it and I don't want him to have to spent all night
tangled up like that. He totally tries to attack me. Good thing his rope
was tangled and he only had about a foot to lunge.
Dinner that night there is discussion about meat eating, ethics,
etc. Just don't name it.
Morning. Pig still there? Still there. Pig tries to attack our
doctor who is just having a sympathetic look. What an ungrateful bastard!
I am still afraid that I will feel guilty but the pig's behavior is not
winning him any points. My fence sitting however is no match for the linear
nature of time and 11am rolls up pretty fast. I nervously keep an ear open
for signs of suffering but from a safe distance, outside the office across
the street. And then, without any fanfare, one little squeal and 11am is
over. I tentatively mosey over to the yard where the kitchen is to have a
car wreck peek. Oh, it's not so bad. This part I've seen. Pig hanging, no
skin, just like at the butchers. Radio to the house, tell the guards there
to get the charcoal going.
I conclude that pigs are tastier than they are cute. I posthumously
name the pig Clarise (I never bothered to check the sex, so now it's a girl
pig).