Health Center Meetings

Tuesday was spent visiting with medical officers to determine whether having a diabetes program collaborating with the MoH programs makes sense.  First we visited with the director of one of the hospitals.  They only do inpatient and so did not feel a peer support group or general practitioner training was appropriate since their hospital mostly has specialists.  They reported seeing many people with advanced diabetes with complications like vision impairment and those needing amputations.

Next it was to the local health office which overseas the community health centers.  They were much more open to the idea of our programs, including possibly integrating some prevention curricula into their pre-existing school-based programs.  However, upon leaving, my colleague mentioned that we still need the national level MoH buy-in whose approval trumps what is done at the district level.

This evening I was invited along to dinner with the CD and his friends.  We went to a seafood restaurant (we had seafood last night and lunch today as well).  You pick your seafood from the freezer, and your vegetables from the cooler and they cook it up for you.  And like last night you sit in a covered area outside which is nice.  The fish and lobster, grilled eggplant, greens and a variety of spicy condiments were very good, though apparently did not agree with the CD's digestion.

Island Hopping

I am sitting near the equator in a beach front hotel in Balikpapan, East Kalimaten, Indonesia.  Wasn't quite expecting it but it's a great way to end this long trip.  My time in Indonesia started in a chaotic fashion even before arriving.  The itinerary of this last leg changed daily and when I was dropped off at the Beijing airport early Sunday morning, it turned out that I was left at the wrong terminal - but with shuttles running in between.  With a bit of rushing managed to get through all the various steps to get to the flight gate with time to spare.  I was met in Jakarta by a PH staff member and enveloping humidity. 

Monday morning, the country director (CD) and I set out at 6a to make our way through Jakarta traffic to the ministry of health for a meeting about our assessment.  We'd been invited by a diabetes sub-director to meet with the NCD director.  After several hours, chatting with the former's staff, we were finally informed that the latter was not available and had forbade her staff from accompanying us on our assessment trip (though we'd be told to bring our bags packed to get on a plane).  In the end, we decided to go to one of the sites anyway (where I am now) because our CD has many contacts here and it was at least one of the locations the MoH staff had pin-pointed as being a province where they would support our work.  

No sooner had we set foot in Balikpapan, and it became apparent that the CD is very well known.  He was warmly greeted by many of the hotel staff (where he was a hotel doctor), and when we went to the hotel seafront restaurant, an Australian voice called out his name and said "This man saved my life" (from thyroid cancer).  This trip is looking up.  Hopefully our meetings over the next few days will yield the outline for our project to be successfully implemented.

Bookends

This 3+ week trip started with giving a speech about NCDs and today the trip ended with a speech about NCDs.  Actually ended with two speeches. The first was a last minute request to give a welcoming speech this morning to help kick-off a health worker training on cervical cancer prevention followed by my NCD and its complications talk in the afternoon.  From what I can tell both went well.  I even had a brief interview with a journalist.  

This afternoon I had to myself which was a nice way to end this trip.  Did a little shopping inside a mall while a large, dark thunder storm hit.  When I came out a couple hours later, the once hazy sky was clear, the temperature had dropped, the humidity was gone and you could catch the rare glimpse of actual clouds and intermittent blue sky.  There may have even been a real sunset.  Tomorrow morning early I start on the third leg of this trip to Indonesia.  

Coming to the end

A fairly uneventful week but good none-the-less.  The highlights having been meeting up with my graduate school friend and former housemate FanFan last night for dinner and then spending the day on Friday with two colleagues hitting a few places they thought I hadn't seen. The last time I saw FanFan was the last time I was in Beijing, and the time before that was when she left Boston after grad school.  Since then she's been entrenched in the government working on internal communications about food safety.  Soon she will be finally starting a new position where she hopes that one day she might actually get to take a vacation.

Today started with a walk around the Olympic Park to see the Water Cube, Birds Next and the LingLong Tower.  The temps today reached into the 90's but it was tolerable to be out at that time of day briefly.  They then took me to an enormous lunch at a nice Szechuan restaurant.  This may have been because they learned that I like spicy food.  Afterwards, through horrible gridlock traffic we made our way to the Silk Market.  I wish I had remembered that I had been there before...in fact there is a blog entry about it back in Jan. 2008.  For those familiar with my dislike of shopping, you will not be surprised that I last about 15 minutes and that was only to be polite since we'd driven the whole way there.  Crowds, aggressive vendors, stall after stall of clothes which honestly did not appeal.  I'm pretty sure the only people who go there are tourists and foreigners - in fact, my colleague who has lived in Beijing for 10 years had never been there until today.

Beijing - so we meet again.

Beijing is hot.  Beijing is huge. Beijing is polluted.  But for some reason I feel far more at ease here than I did in Shanghai.  Possibly this is because 4 1/2 yrs ago I spent about 5 weeks in Beijing.  In fact, that trip is what inspired me to start this blog. Or maybe because moving on to Beijing signals my trip coming closer to returning to DC.

On Monday, two of my Shanghai colleagues and I boarded the high-speed train to Beijing. It made me think of the bullet trains in Japan - which I remember being even faster, and that was back in 1995.  Upon arriving in Beijing, I was handed-off to my Beijing colleague and the office driver who deposited me at my hotel.  Later I had dinner with some of the Beijing staff and then was dropped off at a nearby park - which I found is great for an early morning run.

Tuesday consisted of presentations at the office so I could learn more about the programs I support and they could hear about the projects I support.  I also ventured out to the Rotary Club of Beijing's lunch meeting.  Overall a good experience and I was awarded the farthest visitor gift as well as convinced them to give me a banner even though my club does not have on yet.

China = Disneyland + Vegas

My final week in Shanghai was rather uneventful.  Except Friday night when the American fellow and I went "out" in Shanghai.  However, instead of out, it was actually for an extended walk.  This was partly because she wanted to show me a temple that is sitting in the middle of modern sky-scrapers - it's a little surreal as you'll see in the photo. Turned out to be an exhausting evening (we took some wrong turns) but for my last free evening in Shanghai it was good to get out and see some things.

This past weekend, we tagged along with a group of rural medical trainee fellows who have just finished their year in Shanghai and will soon be returning to the far reaches of China.  We took a 5 hour bus ride to a place that translates into Thousand Island Lake.  The lake was formed in the 1950's when they dammed a river and flooded the area.  The size of lake is on par with the size of Singapore.  Before we got there, we stopped for a lakeside lunch, tour of a cave, toboggan down from the cave, and raft ride on a small lake.  Tourism in China is a finally tuned machine.  All the tour bus groups were shuffled through in a timely fashion - photo opts at appropriate moments which you buy afterward (I did not partake) and then  you are off on the bus again.  In the evening we ventured into the town of Chun'an which is on the Thousand Island Lake, and happened upon their Saturday night fountain show, the square where people were practicing public dancing, and a random fireworks display.

Day two was similar.  Several tour groups board each boat, you go to three islands.  Each one has different amusements that you can pay extra for similar to a carnival, or you can walk around and look at the scenery.  Easier said than done.  There are hundreds of people and each tour group has a guide who is screeching into an amplified microphone - often at the same time.  Between the crowds and the deafening noise, it was really quite an experience.  But my group was very nice, the time out on the boat between islands was pleasant as well.