Rites of Passage?

Today I got my first traffic ticket - apparently I turned left at a no-left-turn intersection. Luckily for me Margot (visiting Pediatric ID fellow and former HF peds coordinator) was in the truck with me and helped me be calm. We followed the police officer to the police stand, where we gave him 70,000 kip. Unfortunately, they were all out of bills, so we were unable to get a receipt. (IE: he will split the money with his supervisor.) I am left just feeling lucky I haven’t gotten a ticket before now - I didn’t even see this no left turn sign (apparently it was on the right side of the road; to drive here one violates traffic rules on a pretty much daily basis, (or risk interrupting the flow of traffic and confusing the other drivers) so even if I had seen it, I don’t know if I would have followed it. I’m also glad that after this week, my need to drive the truck should be pretty minimal. The steering is still weird after a couple steering failures (at very low speed) this spring, and I think it’s just ready to retire. I wonder how it will feel to get into Gordon, my geo prism, in December after driving an extended cab Isuzu with a topper for a year - probably pretty weird. I suspect my transition back to American traffic patterns may be just as hard as, or even harder than, my transition to Lao driving was. We shall see. . .

Today Novalinh and I also fixed the phone at the office without any help! Yay independent women power! The phone in Novalinh’s office (in the downstairs of my house) has been working only sporadically for about the last month - sometimes not having a dial tone and then often hanging up on people mid-call. But the fax machine is still reliable. I bought a new phone in Thailand a week ago, but that didn’t fix the problem. So I’ve been thinking about next steps. We were about to give up and call the repair man when it occurred to me to actually open and check all the connections - if it was a wire problem it should never work, so it must be a connection problem, right? The phone line comes into the house and then is split to the fax machine in the living room, and one cord goes over to the office. I had jiggled the wires going in and out of the boxes early in the phone- not working period, but not actually opened them. (And of course I’d unplugged and re-plugged all available connections.) So we opened the one in the office which looked fine, and then the one in the living room where I discovered one of 6 wires had broken and become disconnected. So Novalinh and I fixed it - I showed her how to safely use scissors to strip the insulation - she wanted to use a kitchen knife and her thumb - and we wrapped it around the little terminal and screwed it back in (using my small Phillips head screwdriver from the multi-tool I bought at REI the day I left Denver.) And the phone is working now! So hopefully we saved a few tens of thousands of kip to have someone from the phone company come out. Maybe it’s silly to be proud of such a small accomplishment, but at home I don’t know if I would have solved the problem on my own - I would have asked an electrically inclined friend to take a look at it. Here, I’m probably the HF staff with the most electrical experience of anyone (thanks science fair projects!) and was able to use logic - though it took me long enough - and basic fix-it skills to do it on my own.

I’ve been in Laos for more than a year now. My one year anniversary of life in Laos passed quietly on August 22nd, while Brent (a friend from residency) and I were in Luang Prabang. I didn’t even realize it was an anniversary until the next weekend when my Dad pointed out that I had now been here for more than a year. And now I’m getting ready to come home - the last few weeks have been a whirlwind of planning for when I am no longer teaching (making sure the residents have teaching arranged), getting things ready for the new coordinator (Emily) who will arrive while I am out of town at the end of October, updating sign outs, and planning my travels between now and December, when I come home to Denver. On Saturday I fly to Udomxai and meet up with Leila, and then we’ll go on together to Pongsali - one of the far northern Lao provinces, and one of the hardest to get to. From there, Luang Nam Tha, Muang Sing, Huay Xai, Mae Sot Thailand, and meeting up with my MN friend Ken in Chiang Mai, from whence we will return to Lao and do some ecotourism in the north, and pass through Vientiane again in mid-October on our way to Vietnam. I’m going to be quite the nomad for the next few months. I’ve also been trying to meet with all the relevant teachers, administrators, etc to discuss plans for the next 3 months, help the ID ward get started writing a fellowship curriculum (because I’m an expert on curriculum development. . . um, not.) and make sure the office will continue to function in my absence. So things in sleepy Vientiane, in the Lao PDR (Please don’t rush) have actually been pretty busy for several weeks. We’ll see if everything gets done . . . and I’ll try to blog at least once more before I go off into the wilderness.

Oh yeah, yesterday was the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I managed to almost completely avoid the coverage of the anniversary, just as I managed to pretty much avoid the 24/7 news coverage 10 years ago (I was in Budapest, Hungary studying abroad in September 2001.) I have been lucky to be in a place where I choose how, when, and how much to access US news at both times. Maybe I’m insensitive, but other than New Yorkers and people who lost loved ones or friends in the towers and planes, I’m not sure putting a lot of emotional energy into this anniversary is useful. Rather than focusing on how we were victimized 10 years ago, shouldn’t we be worried about the problems our nation and the world are facing right now? Shouldn’t we be working on economic recovery, universal health care, and thinking about the 2 wars that we started in the aftermath of 9/11/01 and what in the heck we are going to do about them? I don’t want to deny that 9/11 had a huge impact on our nation, but I would like to see us looking forward and working towards peace, reconciliation, prosperity, and human rights rather than looking back fearfully and tearfully.