I finally started to meet some of the NGO people around here. I’ve developed quite a strange perspective about them, mostly because they don’t fit any other stereotypical traveler I’d encountered so far. First of all the NGO worker, unlike the budget backpacker, has the money to spend on decent hotels and meals. Case and point, we were having dinner with The Professor at his hotel a few hours after arrival and during a discussion about malaria, a Canadian aid worker rolled her eyes and said “oh, I wouldn’t worry about Malaria, just be sure to keep your air conditioner on. The mosquitoes become lethargic under 21 degrees.” Yeah, I know. She was 28 and pretty until she opened her mouth, then she invited herself to our table and wouldn’t stop talking about her condo in Bangkok (with her eyes closed). I've just been so used to Israeli travelers fighting tooth and nail to stay in the absolute worst hotel for virtually no money, it's a little strange to see a rich white girl unable automatically assuming that we had a hotel with air conditioning.
But tonight I got to really appreciate how much more educated the Westerners are here than anywhere else I’ve traveled in Asia. In my guest house alone, for example, there are three medical students, two law students (one at NYU), a doctor, and it seems like everybody else I meet is either a graduate or PhD student writing their thesis in Public Health. At the bar, I met up with two of the medical students who work at the clinic (both from Liverpool), and got a further appreciation for the relative strength of the USC medical curriculum. They were good people, don’t get me wrong, but they somehow got by without ever learning Anatomy, Physiology, or anything else important until they got to have a case presented with it. Somehow they started their clinical rotations with less than one year of didactic training. Nevertheless, within a few minutes of arriving at the bar, I was engaged in some of the worst, most interesting, embarassingly scientific discussion about "doctor stuff." It's a conversation I got so used to having that I didn't even realize I'd been going through withdrawal until the opportunity came to come back to it. We were on fire. One girl had a paperback British medical textbook that essentially was a "what you need to know for the test" about everything there was to know about medicine, in extremely concise terms. I was so impressed by it that I couldn't help but excuse myself from the conversation to review material from the past year. It makes me a little frustrated I didn't bring anything like that here, and even more frustrated that I wish I had.
There was a newly graduated English doctor there who I spoke to for a while. Very cool guy, but are also absolutely overwhelmed at how little he can help in the face of these medics who have less training than nurses, but have learned so much more about tropical disease than any doctor from the Developed world would ever encounter. In any case, the fire sparked again and I found myself deeply engaged in dorky conversation, but learning and teaching with a fury that I'd completely lost during the last two weeks of intense studying for the cumulative exam. But I wasn't the only one who was glad to rekindle that fury. The doc, or recent grad to be more precise, offered to be my private tutor for any subject I wanted, as it would really help him fully understand the concepts. I told him I'll skipping a week of Cardiology (a 5-week course) to go to Burning Man, and it would really help to learn some of it before I start. He seemed happy about that, but I passed it off as late night drunken conversation. Instead, I offered what I really wanted to do: shadow him around the clinic and have him explain cases to me. This way I could pimp him for information, he could teach me what he knows, and most importantly, I'd get to weasel my way into the a clinic that otherwise wouldn't have room for me. We set a date for him to show me around on Tuesday. We’ll see how things go.
I realize I never introduced what I'm doing here or how I got here. I started writing that entry in Word, but was somehow so spun around by the jetlag and the whirlwind of introductions, meetings, and discussion that writing a blog was the last thing on my mind. I'll finish that up and publish it shortly, but for now I'll sum it up as saying I met this professor at Oxford (with an added professorship at Columbia) and this girl from Texas, and the three of us went around meeting all these heads of governmental and non-governmental organizations for a week before settling into what it was I'm going to be doing here. The end product is a survey I'll be conducting at the local refugee clinic, studying traditional medicine use among migrant workers and refugees, so that I could present this information to the clinic to help them decide whether they could use an herbalist among their staff. There's a much larger story behind all this, but I'll get to that all later.
Oh, and I ran into Shogo on my second night in Chiang Mai. Anybody who knows who Shogo is would think that's funny. It's funnier that, despite being surprised to see me, he still spent all of his time hitting on girls (unsuccessfully). Actually, better than that I ran into Shogo and then later ran into the same girl that called the police on me because she saw me leave the club with another girl one year and a half before, the last time I was in Chiang Mai. Her new boyfriend was there, and after everything was said and done she was happy to see me and things were good, except that she'd gone off the deep end with alcohol when I saw her, and I later heard she'd lost control of the bar that she used to own. That was her livelihood. Now she has her boyfriend to depend on. He's and American, extremely cool, and slightly bummed. Glad I got out of that one... Another great night in Chiang Mai.