Sweet December

I haven't written in a while. Someone said a magic thing happens at around three months of being somewhere. People get to know you, the newness wears off, and you go into the "not leaving in two weeks" category that most volunteers fit into. I'm there, and am wondering where my two hours/day of reading medical stuff and daily naps went.

I'm slightly more able to talk to people now in Burmese and bits of Karen, and have worked with most people in the clinic (outpatient departments and all three shifts of each inpatient department). That means I can easily drop in and see patients anywhere, which is fun but time consuming. Some people are treating me like the neonatal intensivist, which is frustrating because most babies who are born sick don't do well, regardless of what you do for them.

I've eased into the monitoring and evaluation side of things, first doing minor work on two projects, and suddenly I have two fairly large ones that I'm basically on my own to do. Lately, I'm at the clinic until either 4 or six, and then spend the evenings working on reviewing the clini'cs TB data over the last year. Today I was talked into starting a one-month prospective study following patients referred to other clinics for TB testing and treatment (we don't do the treatment here) to see what our specificity is and simply how many of the patients make it to the other clinics.

Also, December is full of holidays. The clinic put up a stage in the middle of the grounds and it will be used at least every other night for the next few weeks. The first event was Nov. 30. Karen celebrate the beginning of the Christmas season on that date. It started out as karaoke and transitioned to a church service around 11pm with a birth of Christ reeneactment. Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day, which the clinic celebrated with a lady-boy review (drag show) interspersed with HIV education skits. The birthday of the King of Thailand is on Dec. 5th and is surrounded by days of festivities. Dr. Cynthia's birthday is the 6th. It's a crazy month. [I was interrupted by a friend saying that there is muay thai downtown for the next few nights...now I'm back, it's midnight again and I haven't accomplished anything since I left work]

I had a funny moment when I was showing one of the medics some photos on my laptop. It seems like many foreigners are from urban areas, so I like showing them pictures of the rural south so they don't get the wrong impression. I pointed out my car in one and she said "oh! so you really are very rich!" I didn't argue. She later said "I have never seen places like this," when looking at pictures of the appalachians. I asked if she hadn't seen mountains in parts of Burma and she said "Yes, we have mountains, but I am too lazy to walk up them." Priceless.

One real doctor is volunteering her time here for about a year. As far as I can tell, she never finished residency (or the Spanish equivalent) and went straight to work in Columbia during their civil war. She then ended up working for the international rescue committee and has been everywhere. Kosovo, Rwanda, Indonesia after the Tsunami, etc. It's inspiring. She loves it because one moment you are treating chronic conditions like hypertension, then you are treating TB, then amputating a limb. To me it seems like an extravagantly well-outfitted organization, but still she has run into things that no one can be completely prepared for.