Hope and Healing
Mark and Peggy are two physicians from New York City who have taken a year off the grind of academic medicine to travel the globe. After six months of travel, they will finally land in Liberia, where they will work as volunteers. (Interview with Mark and Peggy)
Features
Reformed curmudgeons
We're officially into our last week in Liberia, the last week in a year away from what used to be reality. Sunday, we'll be on our way back home, retracing the steps we took nearly five months ago when we came here. Monrovia. Abidjan. Brussels. New York.
There will, I predict, be plenty of things that we'll have to get used to. Grocery stores (though you could make an argument against that in New York City). Restaurants. Traffic. Sushi. The lack of ready beaches. The ability to take showers that last more than two minutes. Cold weather. And cheese.
But, most of all, I think it will be exiting communal life that will be the hardest.
The etiquette of calendars
I had no plans of visiting Guinea. The trip to Robertsport was enough off-road adventure for one outreach. I thought.
But, the ship maintains a departures and arrivals list, available publicly (to the crew, at least). I was perusing the this list one day, bemoaning the constant exodus of outright amazing people, when I ran across my name. Evidently, I was leaving the ship on May 6.
I had no idea.
Multicultural Crash Test Dummies
There are eighteen bridges on the road to Robertsport. The twelfth has become a close friend.
Robertsport—or
Rawspoh, as it's pronounced by most Liberians we met—is a
once-beautiful town, on a still-beautiful beach, about ten miles south
of the border with Sierra Leone, and a three-and-a-half-hour,
hundred-mile drive north of Monrovia. Three and a half hours, that is,
if it's pulled off without complication. This being Liberia, however,
little occurs without complication.
Appearances can be deceiving
Perhaps we have been travelling too long. We finally made it into downtown Monrovia today. Sometimes seeing too many things makes you stop paying attention to the details. The city looked poor, but not war torn. Yes, there was trash lying in the gutters, people selling things out of baskets, and potholes determined to rattle your teeth. But at least the roads are paved. There was also a store selling Dell computers, another one called "Radio Shack," and the "Heineken store" selling Frosted Flakes, Lipton Peach Iced tea, and Splenda. Really, if you ignored the occasional UN vehicle and the abundance of barbed wire, how was this different from another third world country such as India?
A foray into Monrovia
The Africa Mercy is an incongruity. In truth, we're not roughing it here. The ship is new, the cabins are nice, the people are great, and there's even a Starbucks on board (the coffee mavens graciously donate their bean to the ship to keep us happy). Sure, the ship persistently rocks, ever so slightly, wreaking havoc on your semicircular canals and making you seasick even in your dreams. Sure, the food is—um—cafeteria-style. And windows are few and far-between on the floor we're bunking in. But life on this ship is not bad at all. (In fact, here are a few pictures of life on board. More—as well as pictures of the hospital—coming with the next post).
And it's nothing compared with the world outside. The ravages of war are evident everywhere.
Anonymity and cheese-grease
It's not horribly difficult to figure out where our affinities lie when you read this blog--we don't do a tremendously good job of hiding them (not that hiding them is our intent). So, it probably comes as no surprise that this last week in the city has been tonic to our travelled souls. Scary that an agglomeration of concrete, trash, and people too cool for their own good should serve as tonic, but it does.
The week has been an ocean of sushi consumed with wanton disregard for its heavy-metal affinities, thin-crust pizza folded in half and eaten while still dripping cheese-grease, overcrowded and broken-down subways (one might wonder if the A will ever actually work like it's supposed to--were one inclined to wonder about such things), soft-boiled eggs done just like they're meant to be, text message flurries, the arcana of Super Tuesday's contests, trips to Duane Reade, and meals with friends we haven't seen for months and will not likely see for many months to come.
From Northern Lights to Southern Cross
I'll be honest. We never thought January 18th would come. When we set
off for Iceland, the summer was still blistering, and planning as far
ahead as after Christmas was all theoretical. But as I start writing
this blog entry, it's officially the last day of our trip. Right now,
we're fresh off a whirlwind tour of New Zealand, firmly ensconced in
front of computers at Auckland Airport, and not quite sinking into the
realism of finality.
It's been a crazy trip—by the numbers, if
nothing else. We've traversed, by bus, car, boat, horseback, train, and
simple walking, 33,420.5 km of the earth (that's about 83% around the
world. It doesn't include the flights, which add another 41,485 km to
our tally, putting us almost twice the circumference of the equator.)
Fungus gnats
What if I told you that you had the opportunity (operators are standing by!) to strip, in the rain, down to your bathing suit, squeeze yourself into an oft-used-and-seldom-washed, mildewed and odorific drysuit, dripping wet from its last occupant, immerse yourself in a pair of oversized, torn shorts, and water-socks with holes in them, just to shimmy your now-neoprened derriere into the inner-tube of a tire? What if I were to tell you that, thus-bedecked, you had the opportunity to join fourteen other similarly-clad tourists for a three-hour, claustrophobiogenic spelunk, 210 feet below the earth's surface, jumping backwards off waterfalls in pitch darkness, landing in fifty-degree, eel-infested, spelean rivers and ingesting—nasally— a fair bit of their water (and possibly a bit of giardiasis to boot...we'll find out in two weeks), simply to see the defecatory products made by the maggots of a fungus gnat? What if I told you that, after you were done, you were offered (It's free! Act now!) some tepid, watered-down tomato soup and a week-old buttered bagel (but only one). How much would you pay?
Twenty-five things India teaches you
These are the things we've learned while travelling in India:
1. The food here is spectacular. Navrattan curry, Rajasthani thalis, Goan seafood...you really can't do better.
2. The Don't-Lucknow Delhi-Belly, however, isn't. Nor is it confined to either of its two namesake cities. Don't we wish...
3. Hello is pronounced with an accent on the first syllable, and is immediately followed by a loud, staccato, Sa! This is prelude to any number of come-ons: Rickshaw? or Hash? or Where did you lose your hair? Often, it is also accompanied by a rickshaw-wallah planting himself directly in your path and tugging on your arm. This is a great way to attract customers.
Omelettes in Jodhpur and Lassis in Jaipur
We've hit a real travelling wall. Again. India does that to you.
Being enterprising, overachieving doctor types, we had been whizzing through India at a breakneck pace. However, the consistent three-hour train delays, the miasma of pollution that besets every city, the incessant noise, and the even more incessant touts finally wore us down. We decided to scale back on our travelling and, instead of trekking out to Jaisalmer, the westernmost tourist destination in Rajasthan, we have decided to stick with Jodhpur, Pushkar, and Jaipur.
Aghast
Varanasi defies superlatives. Which is a good thing, since I may have used up all my superlatives in my account of travel through Tibet.
But, I get ahead of myself.
Kathmandu to Darjeeling
We arrived in Kathmandu at the start of Deepawali (or Deepavali, or Diwali), the festival of lights. That very fact made us regret treating Nepal as only a stopping-through point on our way to India. The entire city was out, awash in color, candles, light, and hospitality.
The High, the Holy and the Hideous
The worst toilets in the world are above 12,000 feet.
But, then,
everything about the two weeks that have passed since our last post
from Xi'an has been in the superlative. The highest. The holiest. And
the most hideous.
Xi'an to Lhasa
Officially, it's the Qinghai-Lhasa railway (unofficially, it's the Lhasa Express),
and it first opened thirteen months ago. The highest railway in the
world it spends its last twelve hours above 3,000 meters. The
Canadian-designed carriages (first, you design the coolest cars in the
world, then your dollar beats ours. What's next? World domination?)
fortify the ambient air to 24% oxygen and each passenger's bunk has a
supplementary oxygen outlet. Unfortunately, you have to ask for the
nasal prongs, and we forgot to do so.
As Told to Tintin
Imagine, if you will, showing up in the run-down parking lot of a third-world country's long-distance bus station at 6:30 in the morning, being trundled into the back of one of many waiting Russian-made cars (after much intense haggling, sometimes devolving into pushing and spitting), and being driven across two borders to a completely separate country, whose relations with members of the first are very strained.
Now, imagine doing it to ten hours of Russian techno music. It's amazing how boring a synthesized back-beat can be. That was how we got from Bishkek to Tashkent, from one of the poorer Central Asian countries, through its richest, into its most cultural.
The kidney stone(s)
So... We're writing this from Bishkek, where our plan was to stay a
single night and then to head out to Issyk-Kul, the world's
second-largest alpine lake (second only to Titicaca, whose very name
can never be surpassed).
As has been typical of this trip, plans
were thwarted. This time, it wasn't a crooked Krygyz promise or a
slipshod Chinese travel agent. It was the kidneys.
Minority in Hegemony
It's our last night in China. Tomorrow, we're attempting to cross a
border that's 12,000 feet above sea level--where a couple of inches of
snow are expected--and that opens at noon for the first time in ten
days. And all we've got is a car to the Chinese side of the border. Wish us luck...
But,
what am I saying? We're not really in China any more. We haven't been
for the last week. We're in this bizarre other world.
Recent Updates
Home
I suppose it's time.I've been avoiding writing this one last post out of denial—if I write it, it me
How did they find us?
The Hindustan Times?Really?
Reformed curmudgeons
We're officially into our last week in Liberia, the last week in a year away from what used to be re
Bookworm
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The congregation of the sideshow
I have mentioned ward church in a few posts in the past, but I've never really written about it. Af
The etiquette of calendars
I had no plans of visiting Guinea. The trip to Robertsport was enough off-road adventure for one ou
Pita for 450
What does it take to cook for 450 people?I knew it was massive. We get fed three meals a day here. E
Will the real Mamie Kankor please stand up?
Yesterday morning we were expecting a 34 year old woman named Mamie Kankor to arrive for surgery. M
