Whistlings in the Dark

Africia 
Somalia Photo Page
Sudan Photo Page

January 27, 2010   1030

The TV nabobs are all over the anticipated State of the Union address by President Obama this evening. He might as well stay home and listen to the exhaustive analysis of his address. The politics of the past year have worn me out politically. The conservatives have won - I give up. I received an invitation to attend a community get together to listen to the State of the Union address and support the President. I want to go but I am tired of the slog. I need Obama to come out swinging. I understand that he is a card carrying centrist but I would like him to lean more left politically, at least for the moment. I love where he is as a humanitarian and man with inclusive world views but just this once, I would like him to become partisan in voice. I will watch and listen and possibly attend.

January 23, 2010  0400

A woman was recently pulled from the rubble of a fallen bank in Port au Prince, Haiti because her husband would not give up and kept telling rescuers that he could hear her voice when others could not. I am saddened at the loss of life and difficulty that the survivors are about to experience in the aftermath. I have experience with medical care in a disaster and feel frustrated that I am unable to assist. I am not healthy enough to make the trip but hope that I can discuss the successes and failures that I saw providing healthcare to refugees in Eastern Sudan and Somalia in the early and mid 1980s. I have recently culled through hundreds of photographs taken during the nearly two years I spent in East Africa and will be putting a lot of them up over the coming weeks and months. I hope anyone viewing these photos will forgive this indulgence but most of these photos are really cool.

January 19, 2010  1705

I am sitting in the admissions area of Sequoia Hospital waiting for Patricia to arrive by ambulance from the coast. I am worried about her and my frustrations come out in the form of anxiety about our future. We have been living on the edge for the past six years or so but these two hospitalizations will throw us over into the abyss. Patricia has insurance, Blue Shield, but there are so many exceptions and share of costs involved that we may have done better attempting to negotiate with the hospital directly. I may have backed out of the political arena but I am still deeply affected by its goings on. In circumstances like this, I find it incredible that conservatives can so easily get people to vote against their own interests.

January 19, 2010  0330

After nearly three days in the ICU at Stanford, I was sure that I was not going to leave the hospital alive. This heart attack really hurt. I mean chest pain that felt as if someone were attempting to rip my heart out with bare hands. I learned the definition of conceding to the system. If the nurse said turn, I turned. If the doctor said I needed this or that I gratefully went along with any procedure, hoping for a good outcome. I lived but lost the use of my kidneys and had further damage to an already mangled heart. 

While in hospital, I had lots of time to review both my past and possible future and made some promises to myself - this blog is one. I came to those promises with the help of my ICU roommate, Ken. A highly intelligent and interesting man in his own right, Ken had that magical ability of being able to bring out that which is most interesting in the people he comes in contact with or talks to. Ken got me to expound upon all that I find important and to promise to find a way to express my opinions to the universe. He pushed the concept of a blog and got me to promise that I would give it serious consideration.

My main focus was to be on the issue of health care - I am a firm believer in a Medicare for all system. In my opinion, the health insurance companies are leeches on the health care system, sucking off nearly 30% of the dollars available and providing not one bit of healthcare. After my hospitalization, I went to a local town hall type meeting with Jackie Speier, joined with other Obama and Speier supporters on line and did my fair share of emails, calls and letter writing. I have since gotten quite disillusioned with both the Democrats and with the legislative process that they so adroitly allowed to get out of control and slip through their fingers. I now just pray that the Democrats can pull this rather weak current bill out of the fire but I am backing out of the active discussion.

As long as I can remember I have looked out into the world and wondered what I could do to help in areas of strife and disaster. I was trained as an Army Corpsman during the Vietnam era and then as a Registered Nurse and was touched by the images coming out of Thailand during the Khmer Rouge period. I volunteered to work at one of the Cambodian refugee camps erected in Thailand on the border with Cambodia but was rejected because of my lack of Neonatal Intensive Care experience. The general Cambodian refugee population was left hungry and living in appalling condition yet a few dying children were given state of the art intensive and very expensive end of life care.

My name was now on various lists and the opportunity came as all those incredible pictures of bloated bellies of African children hit the newspapers and magazines. Before I knew it I was off to Somalia, a country I had never heard of, with a relief team of nurses and doctors, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area.

I was a typical American wanting to help. I knew nothing about tropical medicine. I knew nothing about disaster medicine. I knew nothing about community health concepts, especially as done in developing countries. Not only did I or my comrades know nothing about what we were getting into, we did little more than look at a map to study up for our duties. 

We relied on our belief that we already knew all that was needed to know to bring medicine to the third world.  The head of the agency we worked for was too involved with the hysteria that normally surround an emergency of this order to care about or even attempt to educate the team as to our specific jobs or the special needs of bush medicine.

We came to Somalia with duffel bags crammed full of donated antibiotics, concentrated food stuffs and mail for the people already there. After being picked up at the airport by the agency's representative in Mogadishu, we are finally given a couple of days of orientation by the United Nations head of refugee relief. Here, we were told the unexpected - our job was not to treat the ill but to train the refugee population to take care of it self through a group Community Health Workers.