Varanasi Green

A friend in Varanasi is using old cooking oil to partly power his motorbike. His wife writes about it at their blog.

I haven't tried to do a link before, so we will see if this works!

Go Lee!!

http://seekingtoglorify.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-my-husbands-motorcycle.html

Which of the Seven Dwarves are They?

The Disney Version of the old Fairytale, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves", gives the names of the seven dwarves as: Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy and Sneezy.

Amy and I were discussing this recently, and decided that -- if we had to pick one of those names for each of kids --we would probably choose the following...

Nora Grace: Happy.

Miriam: Grumpy.

Samuel: Sneezy.

Elijah: Dopey (you should see him when he wakes from his nap).

So what which of the seven dwarves are your kids?

Busy Week

Got back from Thailand to a busy week. Two lectures to give, several patients piled up, another guy in the hospital and needing a lot of time, visit from a cousin, meetings, behind on email.

I guess we all have those weeks.

Troubles with Crawling

Elijah is, at seven months, learning to move around. I hesitate to call it "crawling", as it sure doesn't look like crawling. Somehow, he gets from here to there, but with a method that is hard to describe.

He primarily goes backwards. Being of the prodigiously buttocked part of the human race, it is hard to see where you are going when scooting backwards. This results in problems.

And all to often, he ends up stuck. Which is frustrating. Good thing he can communicate that well.

Is There a Godly Way to Humiliate Someone?

I recently got into an extended conversation with several (western) Physicians who are also teaching in various medical contexts overseas. What do we do with cultural aspects of medicine that are different than our own culture?

The two aspects of this that we talked of most were:
Should you tell a patient that they are dying (if they have a terminal diagnosis)?
Should we humiliate medical students when they should be doing better?

A little background on the two… In the West, if a patient has Cancer and will probably die, we tell them that. We know detailed odds of death and life, and freely share this data with the patient with the diagnosis.

In Asia (and other cultures), local Health Care Providers may never tell bad news to the patient directly, and often paint a rosy picture of a diagnosis.

For the other topic, that of humiliation, in the West, we are not supposed to humiliate our students. But in the East, humiliation is one of the most common ways of teaching, demeaning those who don’t know the answer, debasing those who didn’t study what they were supposed to study.

So I am a Western Physician in the East…
Should I tell a patient that they have a terminal illness?
Should I humiliate my students who aren’t studying what they are supposed to?

Some of the Western Physicians newly arrived in the East wouldn’t tell their patients about their terminal illness. Those who had been here longer talked more about how important it is to tell them in the best way. We need to tell the truth, we need to tell them what the biopsies, x-rays and tests showed, but there is a way to do it that is appropriate to their culture. We may never use the word “death” or “cancer,” but we can still communicate those things. We assure them that we can help with symptoms; we assure them that we will not abandon them, we offer prayers… There are many things we can do and say, we can say it in a culturally appropriate way, but we do tell them. We do not just say, “Everything is going to be just fine.”

So we hashed through that in a reasonable way.

Then we moved on to humiliation. Everyone agreed that we saw it all around us in teaching here. No one liked the word, “humiliation.” We had a hard time figuring out how to persuade students to actively engage in learning without humiliating them, when they were used to having this fear over them.

So how do I teach? If I do not act like the “Big Man Important Doctor,” my medical students tend not to respect me. After almost 20 years of clinical practice, I clearly know a lot more than they do. But how do I get them to learn? If I ask them to look something up, they tend not to. So should I humiliate them if they don’t do the assigned reading? That is what the other local Physicians do.

So I am looking for godly, helpful, Christian ways to encourage students to embrace learning, without overt humiliation. Or I am looking for a godly way to humiliate someone. :)

Nora Grace has an Announcement...

Amy has been curious about Nora Grace's eyes for some time now. So having access to a good eye doctor, we got her eyes checked. Turns out she needs glasses.

She is pretty happy about it overall. She likes things that are new and different. And I think she can see better.

Amy, being the wise woman that she is, got a second pair made (very cheaply). We both have wry memories of our own adventures with spectacles in our gradeschool days.

Pomegranates.

Sam likes Pomegranates, and knows them by name, both the English name and the Urdu name.

He has good taste... pemegranates are very good tasting and good for you. The seeds, which sometimes get some bad press, are not a problem for him.

What is strange to me, is how long I lived in life before I tasted a pomegranate. I think I was at least 30 years old before I tasted pomegranate for the first time. I was well into my 20's before I knew how to pronounce the word.

Which is kind of funny, because of how much I like the Bible. I love to read the Bible, and pomegranates are a common fruit mentioned in the Bible. But I didn't know how to pronounce the word, and had never tasted it.

Once again, Sam is growing up different than I am.

Monkey Business

We were at a Church Service yesterday, when our four year old Miriam saw a friend of hers sitting in front of us, and begged to go and sit with her friend (also conveniently named Miriam). The Moms talked it over and decided that they could sit together, as long as there was no "Monkey Business".

Sounds serious.

When I was a kid, "foolishness" was the worst case thing to get in trouble for.

There were various phrases and words that Mom and Dad would use to describe our steadily worsening behaviour, but if Mom or Dad accused us of "foolishness", we knew we were in trouble. Something had tipped the scales, and we were really in trouble.

So I made sure that Miriam understood, that in addition to "Monkey Business", "Foolishness" would also not be tolerated. On pain of time outs.

Oh yeah, where I am at..

If you need to get ahold of me emergently, I am at Suan Bua, Chiang Mai, Thailand.

"Out of Station"

We are heading out of Varanasi for two weeks. American doctors are required to have lots of Continuing Medical Education, and there is a chance for me to get 40 to 50 hours in Chiang Mai, so off we go. I will get recertified in Advanced Cardiac Life Support also.

And eat well.

I can use a break. Between finishing various projects, and working on paperwork for re-patriation of a mentally ill US citizen in our fair city, I am tired. Looking forword to a couple of weeks outside of the current city.

Will still try and post occasionally. WHo knows, maybe I will write a lot.

As Good as it Gets...

Hey all, here is a recent family photo. The more people you get, the harder it gets to get everyone looking fairly photogenic. Lucky for us, we're all good looking. :)