Stay Tuned

Over the next month Meg and I will be blogging about our experiences in Kijabe, Kenya.  We have been planning for almost a year for this trip and we are thankful that it is finally here.  Megan has spent many long hours and sleepless nights preparing and I have confidence in her thoroughness.  We are very thankful for our family, our friends, our church, and the folks at my residency that have given of their time and resources for this to happen.  First hurdle, 18 hours of flying from Detroit to Amsterdam to Nairobi then finally a one hour drive to Kijabe.  

A couple quick facts
-The time difference from Central standard time to Kenya is 8 hours
-We will be missing exactly 3 Alabama football games.
-12 vaccination shots among the 3 of us.
-72 pills for malaria prophylaxis
-At least 100lbs of luggage
-30 pulse oximeters donated by UHS for use in the operating theatre in Kijabe
-7 night of call in Kijabe

Roll Tide

Nick Saban is a genius.  As a lifetime fan of the Tide winning number 15 (or 9, we still have the most no matter how you count it) is awesome.  Around the sports world there are very few teams as dominant as Alabama.  Nick Saban has everything to do with this.  He is a dictator that has micromanaged everything down to the meals served at the combine.  I am proud to say that the graduation rate for the team is higher than it was in previous years.  I hope that Saban is really as dedicated to the good of our players outside of football as he says.  I hope even more that the pursuit of an elite program does not trump honesty and morality like it did at Penn State.  Can you be a fan after that without worrying about what happens behind closed doors? 

Saban is predictable with the media.  He says the same thing over and over again talking about the process and dedication and doing your job, etc. etc.  Oftentimes he sounds like a compilation of motivational quotes spliced together at random.  His players sound just like him too. A prequisite to seeing the field during the game is "buying into the system".  It kinda sounds like brainwashing when you here them talk, but I think it is more that they have a mission and they trust their leader.

I wanted to share the two Saban paraphrased quotes that I think are worthy of some thought: 
"It is human nature wake up in the morning and ask what do I have to do today to get by? What is the least I can do to not fail.  But if you want to be excellent you have to work in a way that no one else around you is." 

"Excellence is not something that you can keep once you achieve it. If you want to be excellent and continue to be you have to work for it everyday."

Good words.  RTR.

Compassion (Part 1)

My thoughtful wife gave me a book called Compassion by Nouwen, McNeill, and Morrison for Christmas this year and I want to share my thoughts on the first twenty pages or so. I decided to start underlining some in this book on the advice of an older man. He said that with the proliferation of digital readers, our home libraries will no longer be repositories of our thoughts for future generations since theses machines seem to wear out faster than the leaves of our dusty old books. But here I am leaving my thoughts in cyberspace.

Several quotes from the book on the idea that competition is the opposite of compassion: 
"Our whole self is dependent upon the way we compare ourselves with others and upon the differences we can identify."

"This all-pervasive competition, which reaches into the smallest corners of our relationships, prevents us from entering into full solidarity with each other, and stands in the way of our becoming compassionate."

"Jesus requires us to unmask the illusion of our competive selfhood, to give up clinging to our imaginary distinctions as sources of identity, and to be taken up completely into intimacy with God. This is the mystery of the Christian life: to receive a new self, a new identity, which depends not on what we can achieve, but on what we are willing to receive."

Medicine is centered around power.  Most of my relationships growing up were about who had the power.  Marriage is often portrayed as a struggle for control.  Many parents see their relationship with their children as a power struggle.  Politics is power brokerage writ large.  Thinking how to relate to the world without competition strains the imagination. The way out of this paradigm of having to win is seeing our identity not in our imaginary distinctions but in being able to find a place of identity that is not as frail as ours.  The imagery of rebirth in the new testament (appropriate for this time of year)  is the entrance into a new world where compassion is the new modus operandi and solidarity is preeminent.  I hope my New Year is characterized by compassion- the ability to see others as more important than myself. 

Christmas traditions

Being a young family we want to start good Christmas traditions. Here are some ideas half-implemented or just considered: 1. Listen to Christmas Carol by Dickens (and read by Jim Dale) 2. Give to the organizations and people you have thought about giving to all year 3. Put Elf on the Shelf all around the house without the accompanying bad story 4. Contemplate the holidays with advent readings 5. Keep the holidays rich without letting them become hectic 6. Eat delicious goodies especially hello dollies 7. Give these goodies to neighbors 8. Watch Elf, Grinch, Charlie Brown, and Family Man 9. Go to Christmas Eve service 10. In Memphis- Starry Nights at Shelby Farms and Zoo Lights 11. See family and try to make the holidays better for everyone else 12. Drink eggnog 13. Reading a book about the history of Christmas hymns 14. Invite over non-family without holiday plans 15. Watch college football 16. Give homemade and thoughtful gifts to family (Meg does this very well!) 17. Give homemade and thoughtful gifts to people who aren't expecting anything 18. Make a craft with the family (if you are a Dalgo make it a competition) 19. Make a birthday cake for Jesus 20. Many more, and hopefully more creative and generous, to come

I forget

Writing solidifies thoughts. I have done a lot of reading in my life without much writing and I think that is selfish. There are a lot of interesting things and people that I see, hear, and experience and to let them vanish into the emptiness that is my memory makes it feel like a waste. Here's a good example. A patient of mine today who has COPD told me that his primary care doctor of at least two years has never once laid a stethoscope on his chest to auscultate his heart or lungs. He also said, after a simple 15 minute discussion, that I was the first doctor to look at him during a medical interview. (His doctor stares at the computer the whole time.) Physicians do not treat the human body they treat the person who is body and soul. I am afraid that this physician is becoming the rule and not the exception in my field. It takes knowledge to know how to treat a number on a computer screen but it takes wisdom to treat a person. I hope remember this now.

New Mexico vs. Colorado

Tuesday and Wednesday were tales of two cities.

Tuesday night we were in Chama, NM a small railroad town that exists along the axis of one road. We met people from numerous ethnicities in this town of maybe 1,000- Israelis, Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, and Caucasians (even Yankees!). I talked to a lady who, once she find out I was going be a physician told me TMI: that she been married 4 times and told to me all about her relationship with her father. Also Chip, my dad's new best friend, was Rasta-looking guy whose eyes lit up when he talked about his high school age son. These folks were mostly poor but very close to each other. New Mexico is full of towns like this surrounded by mountains, cacti, and sagebrush. The Native Americans were friendly, hawking their goods but willing to engage us even if we didn't make a purchase. They said they lived in pueblos on their self-governed land so that they could have plumbing and electricity in their small collections of homes. My summary poor, arid, beautiful, and friendly.

Then as we drove north across the AZ-CO border things began to change. Suddenly there was grass and the ground rather than desert shrubs. The trees that were bushy in NM stretched into tall stately aspens and pines. Not only did the trees grow in size as we headed north, so did the houses. The adobe huts and trailer homes were few and far between and the log cabin vacation homes on hundreds of acres of land were around every bend. Durango is a small town of aroudn 15,000 with tourists probably doubling that. The town is idillyic- kids biking through downtown on their way home from school, snow covered mountains at the end of every street, and the Victorian/Craftsman-style homes are so well kept that my only conclusion is that the neighborhood association is run by nazis. We met a man named Rich in the Steamworks Brewery who was a chemist by trade who used his skills to help vineyards and brew houses perfect their fermentation processes. He gave us tons of local knowlegde that he had accumulated from his self-imposed 2 month vacation every year, sounds like France! All this to say, southern CO, Durango included, is a beautiful place full of verdant fields backed by unnamed 5,000 foot peaks with towering trees- almost perfect. I caught myself thinking several times- is this what the Native Americans thought heaven (or their version of it) would look like? Because I'd sure be happy if looked like this. The people here were not as effusive as in Chama, they spoke to us but it seemed like they were doing us a favor. The priorities here are the environment, outdoor activities, and culture. The population is not as mixed as in Chama, mostly white and mostly very fit!

There are great things about both places. My inner voice wars about which I like better. Do I chose culture and education over a place where there is much greater need but also more community? I think this battle is not unique to these two places. Most physicians end up choosing the Durango-type place for the sake of their children, but I think Chama can be a wonderful place to live too, it's just a different kind of education. Anyway, lots of thoughts but much more to see.

Just getting started...

There are lots of things to narrate already. Its amazing how striking the mountains, snow, and gorges are here in northern New Mexico. I thought this was going to be a more subtle beauty than the likes of Colorado and Utah, but this is impressive. We played the part of tourist at a millennium old pueblo in Taos where we bought gifts for our loved ones and ate what must have been a calorie-busting fried bread topped with cinnamon. After driving through flash snow storms we arrived in Chamas, NM where we met the locals at Foster's Bar (est. in 1881). It was great to experience their hospitality through their less-than-full-toothed smiles and recommendations for restaurants and lodges.

Deep thoughts: Language oftentimes is used to comfort humans in a big, big world. Rocks and snow-capped peaks don't describe the enormity or what I saw today. There are peaks innumerable that make me look like an ant, most of the mountains with snow on them would kill me to scale, and I think a "cap" connotes something much smaller than what I saw today. I think that we humans like to comfort ourselves that we have a lot more control over our destiny and environment than is actually true and language allows us to believe those illusions. Stand at the foot of a mountain, look at the ocean from a shore, and gaze at the stars and realize that you are small.