06-MAR-A-2
PRE-TRIP PREP AND PACKING PARTY LEADING
TOWARD TEAM TAKEOFF
March 1, 2006
What a good time with a great group! Derwood, it turns out, was at its best as the venue for the Packing Party, and everyone available showed up and spread the contagious excitement of the enthusiasm for this trip that has kept them sleepless all night in anticipation of this trip.
I had gone to GWU in the morning and sent forward to the Landes BioScience Publishers asking them what the status of my text on Surgical Endocrinology was, since they have had it sent to them in outline and sample chapter from for over a year without comment in response to my prior inquiries. I also tried to finish multiple projects in advance of my absence, including bills due when I am gone and the arrangements of t he goose/duck hunting trip and elk season in Colorado all coming due in the next week. I then left to go pick up some additional goodies for the party at Derwood, stopping at both Safeway and Giant to get it all the shopping out of the way and the food laid out. I am very glad to have taken care of the Game Room recessed lighting fiasco with the help of Rafael the previous day and could have all the “Mission Control Room” ready for the Packing Party. The group had got several suitcases donated they had said so that we would be able toke over half of the supplies from my mission room. It turns out that the suitcases were almost new and looked better than any I am currently using—I hope I might return with a few of them to make future trips with them to leave still more suplies.
THE GUESTS ARRIVE IN DERWOOD
FOR the PACKIGN PARTY
At a time when many of my classmates are struggling to get the time to study for the Comps, I am setting up as the party maven and about to disappear for several weeks. I thought of that irony as I laid out the party supplies. I saw an Expedition in the drive and saw Howell Simmons who had come early to talk about the goose hunt and tour the property. We went around the Game Room in which he was especially intrigued, and he became the tour guide for several subsequent waves of arrivals who had not seen Derwood previously. We briefly tried to coordinate that Arrivals in Edmonton and Grand Prairie Alberta on October 8, for a week long stay at GooseMasters Lodge and the duck and goose hunt there with the group that Hal has been hunting with for five years, and I am still waiting to hear from Donald regarding the integratoiun of the endocrinologyof this hunt with the beginning of the vist to Colorado for the Elk Hunt on the anniversary of his operatoin. It is Donald's 40th birthday this next week as I am gone in Rwanda and I am sending a letter with his birthday card in addition to the calls I have been leaving at his office phone and emails and letters sent there also, since the emails are often bounced off the home email address and no responses have come from any of the calls for the previously agreed upon plan for a garnad celebratoin of his one year anniversayry climgin Moun t Donald. I paid the deposit which Hal will add in to his, and we went back to our focus on the Rwanda mission as other guests began to arrive, also early.
Dennie Steinauer whom I know from the MCRRC came and took pictures with his big digital Nikons which he will be packing with us to Rwanda. I met Kathy Kelly, the kind pediatrician who has been to Rwanda and had also helped support Pastor Jupa, and carried a sheet of common phrases in the language –which looks exactly like an Nguni tongue—related to the Southern African languages like Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu and other relics of Shaka Zulu the conqueror of Southeast Africa with some Ki-Swahili dropped in. Maps laminated as place mats were brought by Susan Fellows who also brought four new suitcases in her new Toyota Avalon which I brought around to the rear of the Mission Control Room, noting its navigation system. Then came Joanne Bell-Hayns, who is an African-American Methodist minister, who has never been to Africa. I told here this is an especially exciting revelation in “Hybridity” being able to introduce an African-American to Africa which is a very special event for them experienced somewhat differently, but even more powerfully than by each of us. They had a chance to talk and we also looked over about four or five of the typical mission trips photojournalist albums I had selected on Sudan, Ethiopia, Somaliland, Malawi, and some of the students had attended the recent one in Mindanao, and a few pulled random missions off the shelf to look over.
Amy Fiedler, now a mid-way freshman and veteran of her maiden voyage with me to Eritrea had set up a “Books without Borders” system of collecting books for Eritrea and had lots of books and journals already with guaranteed shipment by a PFP container, when Georgetown gave her two dozen computers to go with them! Two other freshmen Netu (whose mother had called me and I talked with her at length to assure her as a conservative Indian parent of her daughter's safety and well-being, and where she would stay in each city and how they could be reached) and Niki Tank are going to be coming together, both GWU freshmen medical students of Indian heritage. I snapped photos as they wandered around in curious excitement with every new thing they encountered and very exhilarated at what would be coming next. Leah Berkowitz is my only junior medical student, with the seniors having been interdicted by Jim Scott because of their missing a class of his in POM (Practice of Medicine.) She showed me her Kodak photo album she had made up of the only Haiti mission that has been taken that I had not led, this one led by an entirely naive crew eighteen months ago before the State Dept stopped visas to Haiti for instability.
Julie Whitis and her friend Michael were real troopers. Julie worked in MTM (Microbiology and Tropical Medicine) and is a paramedic as is Michael, and they were the workhorses in sorting most of the supplies and packing them in a whirlwind of activity downstairs as almost all of the med supplies of the Mission Control Room along with the six MAP packs got loaded into several of the cars, all to be seen next at mass check in at the KLM counter in Dulles on Saturday afternoon. Jonathon Hanowell, a second generation trainee of mine, whose father Ernie had been a protege of mine, is eager to go on a mission with me and had signed up for the last Lingshed trek with his anatomy lab dissection partner Leslie Keck. He is having second thoughts about a surgery residency watching how hard his brother is working and how much disruption in his life the residency is causing, and he is asking me about Family Medicine programs in which he might still be able to operate a little. I advised him to also talk with Kevin Bergman and John Sutter about their experiences.
There were only four of our fellow travelers of the medical team and three of the professional camera crews are not here out of our entire entourage: Virginia, Joe Toplon, David Metnick, and Tim Harrison. All the others were here, ate and drank well (including some Thai Linguine that came along with Jonathon), heard lots of stories, were indoctrinated in cross-cultural taboos, and looked over lots of pictures, before working hard at getting the bags all packed and transported. It is going to be a good working group. Those not here for the packing party are assembling either at Dulles or along the way in and will all get together with us in action:
Virginia,who arrives tomorrow, got all her shots including yellow fever and Typhoid with Hep A and B yesterday and having bought toys music and cymbals and triangles for the music component of the mission. Joe Toplon is Keith Carr's son's Drew University classmate in Pittsburgh and is scrambling to catch up from being the last person in, having got the money from friends and only this weekend having gone to get an expedited passport; he will meet us at Dulles and be assigned a number of the bags we will check in in his name. David Metnick is Amy's friend and is a paramedic, also getting to Dulles in a group vehicle thanks to Julie. Tim Harrison is a flight nurse from Boston and will be going separately but meeting us in Nairobi. The two videographers are already underway, staying in London with the sister of one of them, but they will accompany us through the Kigali phase and go on to Mayange, the Millennium Village Project a long drive from Kigali, but will not be going on with us to Gisenyi. Stephen Katz is the Norfolk Pilot press photographer who took such telling photos of us in Eritrea, and these pictures are now the cover shots for the PFP brochures and annual reports.