Worn out before getting started

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Tweet By GEORGE ROBERTSON, M.D. I woke up at 3 in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep so I walked a few feet from my hotel room on Jasmine Beach to the pier to take in the star show. The Milky Way was so dense with stars it looked like a cloud in the southern sky. The Southern Cross had begun its march across the horizon and now was tilted toward the west making room for the other millions of starts behind it to make their appearance before dawn. When it became light enough to walk I went to the beach and listened to the waves slapping against the white sandy shore. I looked for colorful shells and found a few small ones to bring back as reminders of my trip. By GEORGE ROBERTSON, M.D. I woke up at 3 in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep so I walked a few feet from my hotel room on Jasmine Beach to the pier to take in the star show. The Milky Way was so dense with stars it looked like a cloud in the southern sky. The Southern Cross had begun its march across the horizon and now was tilted toward the west making room for the other millions of starts behind it to make their appearance before dawn. When it became light enough to walk I went to the beach and listened to the waves slapping against the white sandy shore. I looked for colorful shells and found a few small ones to bring back as reminders of my trip. Soon the warm rays of the new day began sifting through the palm trees and I readied for breakfast and the workday routine. We would be going to Balingia, about a 45-minute drive the coast for a surgery and medicine clinic. Loading the old jeepney, a converted World War II Jeep now made into a crude bus, was a chore. Everyone crowded onto the hard bench seats as we slowly made our way along the narrow highway further narrowed by people and animals walking its edges. We mostly drove down the middle of the concrete to get past the throngs on both sides of the road. As Muslog we pulled off the main road onto an even more narrow side one. People were parked in tricycles, which are bicycles converted into a type of rickshaw taxi, along the concrete slab just barely wide enough for our bus. Watch out! There were electric wires lowly passing over the roadway and our buses had boxes of supplies stacked on the roof extending well above the low hanging electric cables. Several natives used as translators for the group jumped out of their seats inside and climbed on top of the bus to be able to lift the wires so that we could pass under them. It took 15 minutes to go the three blocks to the church where the first clinic would be held. Another 15 minutes and the supplies were offloaded, everyone making sure they had just their items and not the ones to be used on the second site some 7 km farther down the road. By this time, the metal seats in the jeepney were getting hard and my patience was growing thin, but we finally got to the personnel and equipment straight and started on down the road to the clinic were I would set up shop. I don’t remember ever feeling this tired at the start of my workday in the many years that I had been in medicine – but who knows, my memory isn’t what it used to be. Editor’s Note: George Robertson is a physician with Family Medical Associates, PC, in Lebanon.