APR-C-9
MOVING ON, THE RIDE UP THE FORESTED
MOUNTAIN TO BAROT,
IN THE PRE-MONSOON RAINS,
AND A LONG HIKE FROM THE VILLAGE UP TO THE
“HOLIDAY HOME”
April 24, 2002
I am now in Borat, and settling in to the chill dampness of the high mountain valley above the roaring Uhal River as the first of the early pre-monsoon rains come along with the misty clouds crawling up the terraced slopes to the pine and rhododendron forest. The heavily terraced lower slopes are just at the peak of the rice season with the golden blonde of the ripened rice with heavy-headed stalks in the narrow terraces. This is the “Boondocks”—the only word in English from the Tagalog language of the Philippines, where the manicured steep slopes convinced American GI’s in WW II that they had arrived at the ends of the earth’s backside. This is the most intensely terraced place I have seen outside the Far East of IndoChina/Philippines/Taiwan, and bespeaks generations of labor-intensive economy; perhaps dating these boondocks back to prior to the Iron Age in their cultivation.
I slept late in the Sherbaling Monastery, thanks to a middle of the night wakefulness still hanging on to me from the half world-away jet lag. I was up and wakeful at 2:00 AM, so I decided to use that time by doing more reading in the “Dressing Station” the stories of an adrenalin junkie surgeon who is from South Africa, and flees as a refugee to UK where he goes through an endless series of anxious application sin trying a number of “posts” of six months or more in an attempt to secure a senior registrarship. He needs to get a Masters in Surgery to improve his chances, and goes to the USA to spend two years in research in the medical-industrial complex, where everything in the USA is cutting edge state of the art commercialism driven, he believes, while he goes through his peripatetic career, returning to a very mixed up South Africa then volunteering for a MSF kind of gunslinger role in the Kurdish Iraqi War on the front lines where he glories in the gore. It makes” on TV---whatever for? Having already spent a quarter century of my life in the ER environment, I do not need more of this verisimilitude to convince me of the drama of reality, and now re4ading his description of squalor and carnage, I am such a regular in the third world that another (with some overlap) quarter century of experience there has me saying—“Yes, and so?” to his descriptions of the extreme conditions of his surgical practice in remote and violent parts of the world.
The good doctor Kaplan tries to impress us that he has taken the high road as a selfless humanitarian above the petty fray of economic or zealotry interests of proselytizers, and has given his all for the hard-won craft of surgical skill, but it is noted that he cannot wait to get out and behind enemy lines doing dangerous recon work to assess the conditions in terrorist or freedom fighter insurgencies, in which he may operate at a primitive and unsatisfying clip for up to two weeks max before looking around for his next adventure. He blasts American medicine for being commercial, when he had worked hard at acceptance in the high end of the technology-driven sector for a first worldly niche among the academic and surgical leaders of the medical industrial complex—in vascular technology research of all things, and forsakes that, too, when he is not elected to the inner circle and runs of instead to suffer for a limited time under fire with the Kurds. When he tires of that (taking time to file copy as a journalist for a few newspapers for whom he writes) he takes an extended time to float around the South China Sea on a cruise ship to be looking after retired first worlders in debauchery while boozing and whoring along with the rest in the ennui of their petty pastimes. It is noted that when he is next off in Africa, it is along the Ressano Garcia Road I know so well from having traveled in the latter days of the Renomo/Frelimo civil war carnage since he is attracted to it out of motives far purer than those who wish to profit or proselytize—he goes back not as a doctor, but as a TV Film crew to document the plight of—what, the poor and ravaged people of Mozambique?—Nah! The plight of the wildlife shot up in the civil war since that is what would sell a film in the commercial market since everyone is fed up with African violence against poor people, but an animal film with dead elephant carcasses will always sell big.
But, it was a cold and stormy night, and I was already awake and had typed my one-page summary of yesterday’s events in the Sherbaling Monastery. I had done the clinicsw and the grilling of the medical students on their case presentations and also had seen the 108 stupas on the hill opposite the guest house under the flapping prayer flags, so I decide3d to try to get the book at least well begun, if not finished by the trip’s end. I believe this fellow Kaplan has made the rounds of talk show circuits and has been interviewed on NPR and other kinds of public media for a publicity blitz, and is said to be both literate and a humanitarian, and I may be able to compete on that ground as well as to understand what appeal his book has had.
I kept thinking of the essay I had scheduled myself to write last year” Three Small Pieces of Three Big Prizes”—since I had been working in the IPPNW (International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War) in the late ‘80’s, and worked in the mine-clearing operations in Mozambique in the mid-‘90’s with the World Abolition of Landmines group, and then along the way from the introduction of the group MSF (Medizins Sans Frontieres) from the LSHTM in London and its Dutch affiliate, (the most active and the highest percentage of participants for the nation’s physicians)—and each of the three organizations were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in succession. Then, Gordon Hersman in South Africa put together a recommendation to the Nobel Peace Prize committee in Oslo (not Stockholm) to suggest I be a candidate, so I became interested in the quite separate and unique Nobel Peace Prize. I also recognize the minimal meaning and maximum drama in such individual vignettes as those written about rather simplistically by Kaplan in the “Dressing Station”. So, perhaps I should consult how it is that such writings from others have made the wide audience that these pages have not—so I continue reading his rather captivating stories of what I believe to be rather common experiences—at least common for a certain echelon of the world-wandering professional helpers.
So, after reading a hundred pages of the book when I could not sleep, as opposed to typing this draft when I was so drowsy as not to be able to stay awake during the spell checking, I am working my way toward an Eastern “Orientation” for most of the rest of the summer—for which I will be out of time zone when I am back briefly in the Western World of Derwood in half of June and a brief part of July. As a consequence, I was late in getting up, and had to throw the stuff I had unpacked in a random order into the duffel bag and Action Packer I had opened up on arrival at the Sherbaling monastery. If I had known what lay ahead, I would have pulled out some of the warm clothing I had for the cold weather climb up the Kumbu Icefall of Nepal for the later part of today rather than just keeping the thin clothing of the hot Gangetic \Plain and record heart of the Maryland/Virginia countryside I had left in a rush upon departure. I got into the Mahindra Jeep and watched as we rolled up the next narrow set of switchbacks out of the Dharamsala region and into the Uhal River Valley of the high-forested region of the next clinic venue—Borat.
BORAT:
THE VILAGE AT THE CONFLUENCE OF THE
LAMBA DAG RIVER AND THE UHAL RIVER,
AND CHANNELD FOR THE HYDREL PROJECT
BEFORE CONTINUIONG AS THE UHAL RIVER INTO THE BEAS RIVER,
BORDERING PAKISTAN AND INDIA BEFORE GOING INTO
THE INDIAN OCEAN THROUGH THE INDUS RIVER
As we drove along, Yoshi—a Japanese-born US medical student holding
a digital video camera in one hand and a still digital camera in the other,
said to me, “We are going to a hospital, so of course, we can use the Internet
and the international phone service there.”
I responded, “Don’t count on it. I have worked in a number of hospitals
without electricity or phone or even plumbing and they still have to function,
so the hospitals of your acquaintance should not make you think that you will
be in the same kind of facilities, even those with inpatient facilities.” I
was right.
A Hindu woman with at least twenty rings in each ear and a dozen in her nose sat pensively at the turnstile as we made the turn into the Borat Road and into the steep slopes with the terraces. Over the terraces hung mists and the clouds that shortly started raining then rained hard. It is a rather spectacular valley, all part of that which was the Punjab, which built the highest hydroelectric dam in the Beas-Uhal River system, with a channel project that sends the water down to a power station a distance down mountain where the turbines are. I had seen dozens of power projects in the later new state of Himachal, which this became after the division of Punjab into three Indian states and the Pakistani partition part. The Punjab became J and K, Hiryana (where Chandrigarh is) and Himachal Pradesh. This power project is still part of the Punjab in honor of their start of the hydroelectric power projects. The two rivers that come together here at the village of Barot, with the Uhal River coming down from and the Lamda Dag River, which join here, to continue and the Uhal River as it flows to the Beas. The Beas River goes on past the Manali area and continuers to form the border of Pakistan and India and then into the Indus River and on into the Indian Ocean.
We had an introduction of the three physicians who will be working with us in the small clinics and the six inpatient beds above the clinic where there are no current inpatients and only one sister (nurse) on call, so as with African patients, the family has to keep the patient fed and cared for and is the primary therapeutic part of their hospitalization, so that the patient would be better off at home.
I marked the clinic site at BARO 32* 02. 21 N, 76* 50. 41 E.
This makes BAGS 33.1 miles at 203*, Chandrigarh is 91.9 miles at 182*, and DELI at 240 miles at 175*
I would tell you more about the patients and the Borat Clinic, but I am pinned down by this unusual heavy train which will keep me from making my way back up the steep hill to Holiday Home—my isolated cottage, where I still have my day pack, and bunk in with Yoshi at the lower cabin—without heat or hot water, but any port in a storm is welcome in the torrential downpour now being experienced and promising to go all night in a lightning, thunder and heavy soaking monsoon torrent—a full sic weeks before any such rain might be expected. Not only is my longitude a half way world out of whack, but the meteorologic world is also upside down at this moment. This never happened before we began using those bows and arrows, so I attribute all these perturbations in global warming and alternating cycles of drought and flood to the warms race—in this, the apocalyptic end of the Kali Yuga!