Birthday

Sometimes you have a really rough day.  Sometimes you don't realize you've had a really rough day until you're sitting down at night and all you can do is stare at the wall.

But sometimes you see something really cool, and you realize you're having a great day when you catch yourself humming, with a skip in your step.

The hospital here delivers 45% of all babies of all 5 MSF sections in the entire country of South Sudan.  That's not 45% of all babies in South Sudan, but still translates to a few births every single day.  I got to see my first birth today.

I was doing rounds in the hospital, and had just finished wandering through the General Pediatric Ward, which is deserted as it's being painted (we moved all the patients into the hallway... Life goes on).  I decided to pass through Maternity, which is a very smooth-running ward.  There aren't too many sick people there, so things have the appearance of being low maintenance and easy.  As I make my way back to the delivery room, I hear loud chanting/singing/yelling.  I poke my head through the saloon-style swinging doors and say hi to the delivery room staff.  The yelling continues from beyond the partition.  I ease my way around to the delivery area to find two women up in stirrups.  The OBGYN is intently working on the business end of the near woman, and the two expat midwives are chatting with national staff near the yelling woman.  They don't seem too concerned.

The OBGYN starts explaining to me the abscess on the near woman's vulva, and the catheter he's inserting to keep it drained.  I'm all for privacy, so I immediately feel pretty out of place.  I'm rescued by the far woman starting up again with a sing-song chant/yell.  I guess it's another contraction.  The midwife team jumps into action, and it looks like the baby is crowning.  The action dies down, and the OBGYN puts in a few more sutures.

I pretend to be completely at ease, and make myself useful by surveying the biomedical equipment in the room.  I can always blend into the background while I check me some serial numbers.  A big yell/song draws my attention, and the baby's head is out.  All of a sudden, one midwife is climbing on top of the woman, pulling her knees back to her ears with a vengeance.  The other midwife is bearing down on her stomach, and the OBGYN drops his suture work and rips off his gloves to push.  Apparently something important just happened.

Out pops a vaguely purple little boy, who gets toweled off and put on mom's stomach.  A few beats later, his yells replace his mother's.

The OBGYN explains that it was a very big baby, and that's dangerous to let the baby stay inside after the head has come out.  Best to get them out quick.

The cord is cut, the placenta is quietly delivered, and the OBGYN fixes his final sutures.  I sneak out as they're measuring and prodding the baby.  As I leave, I discover a smile sneaking across my face.

Happy Birthday, buddy.

Six Months in South Sudan

Two years ago, I was typing into my phone on my first MSF mission, ruminating on my motivations for going on mission.  A memorable lead-up to my application to MSF was a book by a doctor working for MSF called Six Months in Sudan, which was a string of blog posts, lacking any capital letters, recounting his six-month mission somewhere in Sudan.  Years after reading that book, I was on my first MSF mission, for Six Months in Malawi.  A couple years after that, I'm in the Sudan.  Now there's a South Sudan, the world's newest country, so I'll have to look up where his mission took him.  I could be following in his footsteps, with my Six Months in South Sudan.

For the next six months, I'll be the Logistics Referent for our project at a regional referral hospital in a large town in North Bahr el Ghazal, in the northwest of the country.  We're pretty near the 14-mile zone, which is a controversial buffer between Sudan and its civil-war-torn spin-off to the south, but the area is relatively calm.  That can change in an instant though, so we diligently go through our security routines, following movement guidelines, radio checks, and curfews.

It's the dry season, meaning it's logistics season.  There's some construction to do, and a lot of supplies to lay up for the rainy season.  As with all MSF projects, things are in a bit of a disarray when I arrive.  They're usually unusual, in the sense that nothing is every smooth, calm, stable, or easy.  We say to each other that if it's easy, it's not MSF.  Gaps in filling positions makes even the best-run project devolve into a mired mess of miscommunication.  When anyone from coordination or international headquarters visits, everything of course breaks, reverses, intensifies, or somehow dissolves into chaos, just to prove that even the best-run projects are tenuously close to derailing.  We always know the 'usual,' the 'normal, base operating level,' which never seems to get around to being experienced.  We're always in high season, rainy season, measles season, construction season, visiting season, planning season, or changeover season.  Sometimes a few at once.

But if it were easy, I wouldn't be here.  None of us would.

Solar Dehydrator

This is less of an adventure, and more of a construction report, but it aids my adventuring, so I decided it was blog-worthy.  A friend and I built a solar dehydrator out of beer cans.  I was toying with the idea of building a dehydrator, maybe with a lamp, maybe with a desiccated toaster, maybe with solar heat.  A few google searches later determined that solar heat was very do-able, and in fact very cheap.

We picked up a shelf structure, curbside, and commenced planning how to turn it into a solar dehydrator.  A few google searches, videos, and picture mash-ups later, we hatched a plan to connect several beer cans into metal tubes to heat up air and channel it into a drying chamber.  Scrap-gathering turned up almost all the materials we needed, then a quick trip to a building materials recycling center completed the set.

The first batch was tomatoes and carrots, then we threw in some apples.  Next up will be onions and garlic.  Bring on the sunshine!

Touring on a Tandem - First Sortie

As a long-distance backpacker, I've been casually interested in the whole bike-touring thing.  It's a similar event to backpacking, with the packing everything down and doing the hermit-crab, self-sufficiency thing, but instead of your feet hurting, it's your butt.  The whole not-having-a-bike thing, combined with the horrible saddle soreness I experience when I first hop on a bike after a long break, deterred me.

I had a chance to do some bike touring on a tandem, though, so I jumped at it.  Not-having-a-bike, solved.  Saddle soreness?  Readily apparent.  But all things pass, so I'll deal.

Our first trip was a short overnight of 40 miles there and 40 miles back, with the possibility of avoiding a climb up to the Golden Gate Bridge on the return if we took a ferry.

5 hours of biking, including lunch breaks, pee breaks, and get-off-the-bike-and-walk-around-because-life-is-too-painful breaks.  We used Google Navigate, on the much-improved bike setting.  There were a few wrong turns, but nothing too serious.  The worst was a very hilly gravel road that turned out to be a driveway, which put us right back on the correct trail, with the exception of a six-foot-tall chain-link fence.

But a quick unload, boost-and-climb, and a helping hand from a dog-walking stranger saw the tandem, the two of us, and our paniers, safely over the fence.  Not even a ripped stocking.  Onward to Samuel P. Taylor state park, to the hike/bike walk-in campsite.  We set up camp, made dinner, and even got a happy fire going.

The next day, we packed up, retraced our route, and headed to the Sausalito ferry for the easy route home.

All-in-all, a huge success, and a not horribly numb tushy.  The next attempt will be a longer, multi-night route.

Caring for my Gi

I've studied and trained in martial arts since I was a kid.  When I stopped to think about it today, I realized that I started training 20 years ago.  I haven't kept it up solidly through that entire time, with logistics of locations and styles and payment plans preventing me from consistently training in any one dojo.  But I find myself drawn back to practicing, studying and training in martial arts, despite a few years away.  I've branched out and learned about other styles and arts, and will continue to train in whatever style is available.  My martial arts experience is a large patchwork quilt, with every new technique, philosophy, experience and pattern adding a color, a patch, a counterpoint, a harmony to the whole.

I've studied mostly Japanese martial arts, but I've also studied a few Brazilian martial arts.  I've talked with others who train in Chinese martial arts, and even did an academic study into Indian martial arts.  Across all of them, there's an underlying philosophy which is much more important than the techniques or defense.  No martial art is developed in a vacuum.  Every style asks "Why is the attacker attacking you?" and "What are you going to about it?"  I find myself gravitating to the styles that teach the Peter Parker mentality of "With great power comes great responsibility."  First comes the sense of restraint and the weight of choice to use your skills, then comes the teaching and training that allows you to become dangerous.  Just because you can hurt someone does not mean that you ever should.  The current art that I study, Kokikai Aikido, teaches that the better you are, the less hurt your attacker ends up.  It's like the Native American tradition of Counting Coup, where the most extreme case of defeating an enemy was hitting them without causing harm.

This ordering of priorities greatly influenced my development, and ends up being a huge draw for me to return to training, despite much time away and many cultures experienced.  It's not religious, and I'm not a religious person, but it does become a baseline for a code of behavior.  I can see where Buddhists are coming from.

One aspect of martial arts, and the reason for these musings, is the respect demanded of the place of training (dojo), one's training partners, and one's equipment.  Foremost in the equipment department is the Gi, or uniform.  One must always practice in uniform, and most dojos are very choosy with their forgiveness for laundry disasters or other mishaps.  You train in your gi.  It's a mark of respect, of safety, and comfort.  It also puts you in the right frame of mind, and helps establish an atmosphere in the dojo.

A gi, therefore, is not something to be tossed around lightly, or another item of clothing.  It's not your sports bra, your yoga pants, your favorite synthetic t-shirt.  People usually have one gi.  Period.  It's your gi.  It's with you during your training, during your journey.  You bleed, sweat, and cry in and with your gi.  Belts may come and go, you may change dojos or styles, but your gi is a history of your practice, of your study.  It deserves respect, and it deserves care.  Gis are not discarded lightly.  Wear and tear happens in martial arts (it's rather physical, if you don't know much about martial arts), and that adds character and weight to a gi.  A worn gi is a mark of long hours of training and effort.  A gi is only retired after much fatigue, or at the end of a student's career.  A gi may go to another owner when sizing or training ability force a change.  They're sturdy and well-made pieces of equipment, so they can last throughout years of training.

I got my gi second-hand, from a dojo that I attended in college.  I lamented my lack of gi (my previous gi was a light-weight, and from before high school, so not going to work for the current situation), and one day one of the instructors brought in a few second gis.  There was one that more or less fit, a little raggedy around the edges, but would suit the situation just fine.

Nine years later, I still have the same gi.  It doesn't fit perfectly and it is much more raggedy.  But it has 9 years of off-and-on training with me, 9 years of sweat steeped into the fabric, 9 years of occasional washes to turn creases into tears, 9 years of painstaking repairs to prolong its life.

Today was a day for more repair and rehabilitation.  I had skinned my elbow during a recent class, apparently, which I had not noticed until I got out my gi to sew a torn sleeve.  Little dots of dried blood showed through on the sleeve, so half the day was spent soaking and scrubbing with every combination of bleach and cleaner that I could find in the apartment.  After thorough cleansing, I moved on to repair the entire left sleeve, that had ripped a few years ago along its crease.  

The previous stitching had pulled out, so I picked it out, and resewed it with dental floss.  It's got a cool, minty cast if you look closely, but that just adds character.

Real Vacation

It felt like the lead up to the first day of high school.  I say that having never really felt apprehensive about my first day of high school (my school was the same for middle school and high school, so I already knew everyone).  But think of stereotypical social-anxiety feelings.  Who will my friends be?  Where will I eat lunch?  What if I trip and fall flat on my mask?

I was hours away from a weeklong liveaboard charter on a dive yacht.  I was going scuba diving for seven days with 10 complete strangers.  I was going alone.

I had gone on a similar trip with the same company a year and a half ago, in Belize, so I knew what was coming.  There, I had an excellent time, and had absolutely no problem being a solo traveller.  That gave me confidence to book another trip, and I was looking forward to some much-needed relaxation time.

So I was surprised when a few days before flying out, my misgivings flared up.  Didn't I go through this last year and had my every fear put to rest?  Well, I guess no matter how many times you do it, how much you 'grow up,' the first day of high school is kind of nerve-wracking.

I fly from San Francisco to Kona, Hawaii, and make my way to the Kailua-Kona pier to board the Kona Aggressor II for a week of manta rays, sharks, coral, fish, gear talk and fine dining.  The weather was not ideal, with some rough swells making their way into our sheltered side of the island, but it was far from bad, with sunny skies and calm enough water to make every single dive.

Five dives a day included a night dive, and let us see a wide variety of life, from tiny nudibranches hidden among coral to hammerheads cruising by to check us out.

The routine of breakfast-dive-snack-dive-lunch-dive-snack-dive-dinner-dive-sleep-repeat was an excellent change of pace from 2 weeks of visiting family and friends, traveling between states via bus or car every other day, or 9 months in Chad solving everyone's problems.  It was a real, grown-up vacation, where you pay your money and you get your relaxation.

Now it's time to call the office to see what my next posting is.

Six states of visiting

I delayed thinking about Thanksgiving until I got back from Africa.  This was smart, since I had only a feeble internet connection, and plenty of stress and worries to preoccupy me.  This was not smart because I got back a few weeks before Thanksgiving with no flights booked.  Plans to visit people can fall together (or apart) in no time at all, so I wasn't too worried about fine details.  But I did have to get from San Francisco to the east coast at some point.  Preferable on miles, to fit into my humanitarian budget.  This proved a challenge.

After trolling the web for a few hours (hey, this wasn't rocket surgery), I found a flight there and back on miles, making this a free trip home for the holidays.  I ended up flying into Boston and out via New York, and with that itinerary, I set to sketching out a plan of visits.  I wracked my brain for who I knew where (I really need a list) and put together a game plan.  I put a few necessities (tooth brush, change of clothes, and the warmest coat I owned) into a small backpack, and went.

Here's a log of my itinerary:
Nov 20 - SFO to Boston, stay with family
Nov 21 - Boston, talk about MSF in my uncle's class, stay with friends
Nov 22 - Train to Providence, car to Connecticut to hike, stay with friends in Providence
Nov 23 - Visit friends, have friends visit from Boston, stay in Providence
Nov 24 - Bus to NYC, lunch with a friend, dinner with another friend, stay with a friend
Nov 25 - Relaxing walk around NYC day, stay with same friend
Nov 26 - Parents pick me up and drive to Long Island to visit Grandparents, spend night there
Nov 27 - Thanksgiving with the family!  See some cousins I haven't seen in 5 years, take ferry to New England, sleep in aunt/uncle's house in Boston
Nov 28 - Arrive in New Hampshire!  Stay with family
Nov 29 - Climb mountain with snowshoes.  Stay with family
Nov 30 - Drive to Boston with relatives, stay with family.
Dec 1 - Bus to Philadelphia, cat/house sit for a friend
Dec 2 - Relaxing walk around NYC day, see a show with a friend, stay in housesitting house
Dec 3 - Visit various people around Philly, stay in housesitting house
Dec 4 - Bus to NYC, see a show, stay with a friend
Dec 5 - Subway to the airport, fly JFK to SFO

Trains, planes, buses, cars, boats, feet, subways, and snowshoes were used as conveyance in this two-week visiting spree, involving living out of a 20-litre daypack and staying with friends and family.

This is a snapshot of my normal.  Of my life.  I don't get to say I'm going out of town.  I don't have a town to go out of.  I don't put my life on hold for two weeks and go have a live-out-of-a-backpack adventure, where I skimp and hold out until I can resume normal living.  These two weeks are not a vacation, a parentheses or a gap in normal living.  It is normal living.

I think that's the biggest difference between my lifestyle and that of most people.  It's hard to explain, but this trip proved a good case study.