Sunday, June 14, 2009

The Game

A boy walks with cleets, and two rare air-filled footballs. He leaves the beach brimful of children. Girls in bright frilly dresses nearly falling off. Boys in stained t-shirts and trousers. Running, playing, screaming on the pearl-grey sands of a Zanzibar beach. A little girl comes to ask me for my pen, then screams in ecstasy rolling in the sand. Dangerous to sit so near the beach. The wazungus a few meters down are drawing a crowd. One girl is older, perhaps 13 or 11. She wears a kanga, pink and black, as a headscarf. A little boy in loose pink trousers and a black shirt throws a water bottle into the sea, then moments later a piece of driftwood. They are the same--washed up, thrown to sea. A boy in the water wrestles with a huge log. The base of a palm tree. It is black, and heavy in the water. He rights it and toys with it and the water until it comes crashing down. Blue football jersey attempts cartwheels. One success. There is just a touch of fading in the light, crabs--small white ones--begin to scuttle across the beach, leaving their holes for the sea. The game begins.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Hai Phong

Yesterday for work I went to Hai Phong, a large city on the Red river delta. I walked on the beach of the Pacific ocean--it was wonderful to smell the salt in the air on the ocean breeze. I went along with a woman I work with and a group visiting from HPI (Health Policy Initiative) China, to visit the HIV/AIDS legal clinic that HPI Viet Nam (the project I'm interning with) had set up in Hai Phong. The clinic was small but effective: two rooms, one for greeting potential clients and one for counseling clients. It works well on a shoestring budget because the lawyers who work there are retired and receiving healthy pensions. Jurists and peer counselors work together with the lawyers--clients first meeting with peer counselors to review their situation and determine whether their case is HIV/AIDS related (discrimination in workplace, school, etc).
After learning about the clinic's work, hearing some success stories, and holding a question and answer session we all went to lunch. There were lots of amazing foods on the table, including a salad made of thin strips of black speckled jellyfish , seaweed, carrots, and other vegetables. Of the course the first and last dishes (steamed octopus and squid and crab soup respectively) were passed over my right shoulder and placed nearly directly in front of me--rather than the 5 other people who would be sharing them.
Luckily I was sitting next to my co-worker--a former anesthesiologist--who was familiar with allergies. I was a little suprised when, after telling me she was allergic to peanuts, coconut, basically all nuts, as well as seafood, she proceeded to eat a peanut and dig into the shrimp-filled fried spring rolls. I looked at her quizically and inquired. She then proceeded to tell me that her allergy was a different kind than mine--hers was cellular, her bodies' cells would attack anything foreign and send out too many histamines, but she didn't feel the affects right away, she said she felt them a few days later. If she didn't take a claritin (antihistamine) before she ate foods she was allergic too, she said she would feel sick and swollen 2-3 days later. She also said she only ate limited amounts of the foods she was allergic too. She informed me that my allergy on the other hand, was "in the blood," and when exposed to an allergen my allergy acts faster and is therefor more dangerous.
I tried to argue that we both had the same things happening in our bodies--an overproduction of histamines which causes swelling of soft tissue--but that her allergic reactions were simply not as severe, given that her 10mg of claritin seemed to do the trick, allowing her to partake in what seemed like far more than "a little bit" of shellfish. The last time I accidentally "ate" shellfish was when only the rice on the edge of a piece of sushi containing crab was dipped in my tamari. I kept using the tamari to eat my vegetarian sushi and 30 minutes later I had a lump in my throat which made it very uncomfortable to swallow. Though it dissipated in a few hours my throat was sore for 24 hours. But no, my allergy was different because it was in the blood. She also said that people like she and I (allergy sufferers) wouldn't get cancer, because our bodies would recognize cancerous cells as allergens. Hmmmm....
Allergies are bizzare. And certainly, different cultures have different perceptions of what they are, why they happen, and what can make them better. As far as I know, the number of people with allergies to food, latex, insect stings, and pollen etc has increased dramatically in recent years. Maybe there only seems to be more of us because we're living longer thanks to medicine and EMS; but I think there actually is an increase beyond this and I do wonder what kind of protective factors having allergies gives us. I doubt resistance to cancer is one of them.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Electricity

Dreaming of sleep, and hoping it will be in my bed tonight and not in a hotel. I've migrated from the coffee shop that closes at 9pm to the coffee shop that closes at 11 pm (that gives me 1 hour and 11 minutes for the situation to resolve itself). The beauty of the house I live in are the roll-down metal security gates. At night when we sleep we are uber secure (kind of bizzarely excessive I think). a few weeks ago during one of the somewhat infrequent power outages, we realized that if the gates were down, we wouldn't be able to get out of the house. Fire, earthquakes, medical emergency--we could think of a few reasons why this might spell problem. So we devised a plan--leaving the roll-down gate that opens to our neighbors little shared courtyard open all the time, as there is another metal padlocked gate (to which we have a key) barring entrance to that courtyard from the alley. For some reason this plan was never put into action. As it happens, today on my way home from the 9pm coffee shop, as I walked down the alley home most of the neighborhood blacked out. Foiled. On this rare occasion no one else was home. The husband-half of the couple who live in the house is in the states for work, the wife and the visiting daughter were just out at the night market in downtown Hanoi (they've been home tried the door, called me and are now coming to meet me), and my roommate I haven't heard from--but she was at a friend's house down the road.
Barring the fact that most of the powerlines here look like woven sphagetti (the other day after a windstorm I was practically limboing under falling wires on my way down the steps from the street to my alley) this problem could be resolved if people used less power. At the last power outage (about a week ago) we consulted the neighbors and discovered that our house is one of the houses on our block that's on the "bad power connection system," so anytime someone on that system (or the combined input of all of us) runs too many air conditioning units at once, or too many of our on demand hot water heaters, the power is--apparently--likely to go out. This should certainly make us all more conscious of energy use, but with the hottest part of summer approaching, I anticipate this will be regular occurrence. I think we might be getting a generator.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Dalalala

Our first journey (and subsequent journeys) to IMTU (International Medical and Technological University) was by way of "private" bus. Our country coordinator didn't feel comfortable with us taking public transport for the 25 minute voyage from our semi-rural community, a satellite of Dar es Salaam, to the University--also located well outside of "Dar." The buses are called Daladalas, but our Italian professor from University College London preferred to call them "Dalalala"--said with the inflection of an Italian accent. Each morning we waited at our "bus stops," sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for an hour, until our purple ~18 seater arrived. My bus stop was in front of a little corner store, in a neighborhood where dusty dirt tracks met the towering walls of little enclaves with houses which more often than not offered an extreme contrast to the tiny one-room open-front dwellings that lined the back streets of the market near the main road. Under the trees at the corner store, rough-sawn plank board benches that swayed underseat acted as temporary repositories for our bodies, yet to adjust to the Tanzanian heat--already overwhelming at 7:30 am. Not far beyond the borders of shade, brilliant green grass--clipped short from ruminants--reminded us of the sudden thunder showers that sometimes came at night. A few meters further afield a little muddy creek ran west toward the main road, paralleling the line of tall metal towers and their snaking plastic-coated wires, which brought power to the community of Tegeta.
Walking at twilight, nearly breaking the "home before dark" curfews, I sometimes saw children hauling buckets of water from the slow, shallow creek. A creek where each day in the evening drivers of mini-trucks came to wash their vehicles, wheeling them into the center of a wide spot not 3 feet deep. They would splash buckets of water over their machines and scrub them with rags--washing the dust, oil, and sweat of the land into the still water, destined to quench the thirst of gardens and tiny bellies.
Somehow we always managed to squeeze 31 sweaty students, 2 professors, 1 travelling fellow, and 2 or three "bus drivers" onto our little bus. We got friendly. There were always a few people standing, occupying the steps and front 2 feet of the passageway. The aisle was always full, as the flip-down center seats were never without bodies to fill them. The first day at IMTU we took a tour, visiting our long cavernous third floor classroom with its tightly packed desks, open-air windows, and ceiling fans that ran as inconsistently as the power. We journeyed across the grounds, past the dirt and turf volleyball and football zones to a residential building that housed a little cafeteria serving Indian food. Broken in two, the halves of our group passed each other on the stairs to floor five, and there were whispers of disgust from some. They had found the cadaver room, where two medical students worked meticulously, dissecting their dry, gray-brown almost unrecognizable human body. A note on the chalkboard read: "Please do not run away from the cadaver room."
Later that week we discovered a miracle of taste. Hidden in the corner of the Tanzanian food spot on campus, two women worked overtime slicing and dicing in the palm of their hands as foreign customers lined up each day for a perfection which can't be found in the US. Mixed fruit platters prepared to order right before our eyes--pineapple, banana, mango, avocado--served with a toothpick for the price of just ~30 US cents. That was my lunch (usually two plates) more often than not on school days.