Latest
Self Portrait with Tropical Vegetation
As you may have noticed, I tend when alone in a place to take a
self-portrait, which of course usually ends up looking a bit
idiotic…though at least this way you know I was really there and
it’s really me taking the shot. About three weeks ago — same weekend
as most of these other shots — I braved a new bus line to an area far
north in the city, where I’ve not previously been. How, you may ask,
did I choose this neck of the woods: by looking at the map and picking
what look like park farthest away from where I live, of course!
Sometimes I feel a bit pinned down in one spot, since work is pretty
consuming, and I live a short walk away from where I work…so it
becomes too easy to walk a path between my house and the office and
rarely look up and see the sky.
As you’ll see, the park was well worth the visit!
Dinner Chez Moi
Following this note will appear several shots of my expatriate
colleagues at a dinner party on the terrace at the house I live in the
— the house where we do all of our team parties, since it’s the only
house with good space to entertain. Parties like this are not uncommon
— potluck, everyone brings something, and we all sit around and talk
about the week, and what the coming week will bring, what’s
happening in other missions, and life in general. I’ve felt very
fortunate to have a really good group of people to work with
here. You may remember an earlier picture of the baby girl — Marta,
whose parents Stefano and Katja also show up in some of these
pictures, though she’s also shown sitting on Laura’s lap sometimes.
Stefano’s fieldco of the AIDS project, and Laura’s a nurse there;
since we (plus Katja) are the strongest English-speakers in the group
here in Nanning, we often end up talking together or going out to
dinner together. They’re all great people, and I’m going to miss Laura
a lot when she leaves — in less than a week! 😦 This party sort of
honored the arrival of a new medical coordinator, who is replacing the
young woman with the big smile that you’ll see in the solo shot. We’re
all missing Selina, who left this past week after more than two years
working here in various capacities and being one of the driving
spirits behind our projects here. I sure hope no one minds my posting
these…. 🙂
Greetings & News
Howdy folks. I’ve been working for a bit more than an hour at this point and have only managed to post two photos, sadly the two I least needed/wanted to post — but the way I try to work is I put the up first the ones I want to show up last on the current posting — since they go chronologically, if I’ve got 30 photos (which I do) to post, I put the least important ones up first, and save the best for last…so that they are the most recent post when I’m done.
But, by way of “slice of Paul’s life,” here’s what’s happening. I have to post these from the one office computer that has internet access. This means I store the photos on my own computer, and then put them on a stick and bring them to this computer. Four times now, I have moved back and forth between the computers with my stick: either copying and pasting, or opening and saving as, each of the photos I want: I’ve got some pics of a group dinner at our house with most of the expat team; I’ve got pics of me at a lovely park here in town; I’ve got some lovely street-scene pics of here in Nanning. Each time, they seem to save fine on the stick and I can even open them…but when I get them over to this computer, poof, they’ve become corrupted.
Since I got here at 9:00AM and it’s Sunday, I was alone and it was quiet at first. But now other folks have shown up, and frankly at least one of them is rather lingering by the computer…and between that and the frustration, I’m going to give up for now, and go home to have some breakfast and read. I spent much of yesterday doing various bits of work to catch up for the fact I was out sick 1-1/2 days this week; and life is made more interesting — and exciting/rewarding — by the fact that we’re sending a big truck full of supplies (sanitation, shelter, medicine) for flood relief in an area of southeastern Guangxi where there have been massive floods, with apparently millions of people displaced from their destroyed homes.
It seems quite possible we’ll do not only this three-day relief and exploratory mission, but there’s a chance we might launch a longer term (three month?) general relief effort, with a new team of expats that would come in, and some new national staff as well. So this could make my life even more interesting and busy in the coming months. For now, I was supposed to be on a flight to Beijing today, for advance planning of our move there; but since most of the office is clearing out for the relief trip, I’m staying behind to coordinate things, and to complete the transfer of some accounting work from my desk (coordination) into the hands of the AIDS project itself. Aftger they all get back, on Tuesday night, I’ll head off to Beijing — Wednesday morning. A few days of checking out the options there, then I’ll head off for my week of planned vacation, after which I’ll finally spend some more time with our Baoji project — the one of which I posted some pictures earlier in the blog. Sadly, I’ve not been up there since then, and I’m supposed to go every five or six weeks.
Things are definitely busy! Anyway: there are some great photos I hope to post before I leave for vacation, but if I fail, then I shall try again in August. At which point I should also have some pictures of Gansu and Ningxia, Buddhist cave art, Daoist sacred mountains, and Tibetan monasteries. I’ve heard this week from two friends who tell me they’ve been regularly keeping up with me through the blog, and this warms my heart — that’s precisely why I maintain this. (Thanks, Connie and Mike!) A challenge to life with MSF is that one is so far away, and — as I’ve now reported — communication can be challenging. But I’m committed to this blog for as long as there are friends and family (and, hey — I welcome new friends, especially ones who are cute and single… :-)) out there reading, I’ll keep posting. Sorry so few pics this time.
More later, and much love. I hope my friends are about to have a lovely Sunday back in the US. And special thoughts are going out to my friends in London, none of whom are likely to read this since I know you all have busy lives. But I’m thinking of you — Peter, Tracy/Jon/Jacob, Pete L. and Tim…
Love,
PB
Big Bug
I close with two small snapshots of daily life at home for me. The
first greeted me outside my door one morning upon waking up. Yes, as
you saw in the walking tour, we do live in an embarrassingly large and
luxurious house, but it’s still the tropics and still a developing
country in all the good and challenging ways. We’ve got lizards in the
house often — which we welcome since we sleep under mosquito nets; we
get more flies and bugs than I can describe. And one of the wonders of
Nanning and southern China in general are the HUGE and gorgeous
butterflies that flutter everywhere. This one’s a moth, with a body
the size of the palm of my hand. I did not see it with wings open, but
it was beautiful. Less beautiful are the gigantic spiders (legspan
bigger than my hand, body size of thumbtip) that appear on the walls
occasionally. Then I’m glad of the mosquito net. I have NO idea if any
of these spiders are venomous. Oh well.
Self Care :-)
And yes, this is a teeny bit of showing off, although those who know
yoga will see how far short I fall in this pose. Last December, when I
knew I’d be leaving LA and losing my access to strong, regular yoga
classes with excellent teachers, I decided I had to commit to enough
classes in a short time to bring me to a level where my personal
practice could stay strong even on the road. My holy grail — what I
wanted to achieve in one month, before leaving — were two poses I’d
never had the confidence to master: handstand and forearm balance
(sorry, I’m bad at Sanskrit names). This picture shows me trying to
reach toward scorpion pose — a step beyond forearm balance, and my
ultimate holy grail. In true scorpion I’d be in the center of the
room, with my feet all the way down resting on my head.
Anyway, I throw this in here because 1) my very dear old friend Steve,
in Boston, asked if I’m able to take care of myself here, and this is
part of the answer; and 2) in case my classmate Michelle (or teacher
Cindy) from LA see this, I’m reminded of a nice talk over coffee that
Michelle and I had last year, where we talked about how we were both
trying to get to where we could do scorpion against the wall (like
this), and how she got turned around in her mind once on the pose, and
fell. I’m sometimes afraid that’ll happen, but this is part of my
regular practice now. Wow. Amazaing what we can do if we decide to.
Nanning Running Tour
(Note from October 2016 – I’m slowly updating all the older blog posts to bring all the photos into one post rather than one by one, as I had to post them when I had to email photos to flickr in order to get them into my old blog…they’re still very low resolution and tiny images, sorry…but at least the posts will be more coherent, and I’m finding some other photos that had gotten lost through the emails or the censors or whatever over the years…)
Since I’ve been showing shots of the more touristy and lovely parts of China — Beijing, Nanhu Park and dowtown skylines in Nanning, and Hong Kong — I wanted to give you all a sense of the contrasts between wealth and poverty, developed and undeveloped, that we see every single day in Nanning. I hope there will be more of these photo tours
later, if you like this — I admit at the outset that I may have gone overboard. But I find these contrasts and views and ways of life absolutely fascinating. Though the blog will show these as posting on
Friday, June 17, here in China it is Saturday morning, June 18. I took my little digicam along for my run on Thursday morning, since my running route presents a good number of contrasts that Americans and other developed-world folks would find interesting I think.
So herewith, Paul’s running tour of the southeastern corner of Nanning. I also note at the outset that I’m trying a new method of posting photos, which may or may not work as I hope. I’m sending batches at one time, with a text block that’s meant to accompany all of a group. If the blog works as I hope, the text will appear only once. I’m afraid, though, that the text may post with each individual photo. If this happens, I apologize and hope you won’t be discouraged from clicking onward to see the rest of the photos. As you know, I have no ability to access my blog itself and thus manage its presentation better, while I’m here in China. When I get to Hong Kong or elsewhere where the restrictions on web content are not applied, I may be able to fix this. 🙂
In any case I hope you enjoy these shots. They include me and my housemates on the steps of our house, and the house next door to ours, which has been under construction for a while. These are pretty glamorous — enough that I’ve been embarrassed to show our house until now, when I could give you some context for it. My housemates are
(left to right), Francoise (doctor at AIDS clinic, French), Laura (nurse at clinic, English), Manuel (country logistician in
coordination, French with Spanish Mom), and me of course. The other shots show the street corner just uphill from my compound, with the start of lovely big Green Mountain Park on one corner, a new complex just going up on another corner (the big pylons you see, and the woman with the wheelbarrow), and two other complexes on the other two corners.
One last note about the construction in our compound. I’ve said before that it ain’t the unionized crews we know in the US…these guys work from 6 or 7 AM until 7 or 8 or later at night. Often when it’s hottest, they do the hottest work until midnight – roofing and tar and stuff. And another interesting factoid: the construction crews live in
the house they are building. There must be running water brought in, since I don’t see them carrying water, but I do see them showering and doing laundry (yeah, they shower in the houses without windows and stuff) and hanging the laundry out to dry…and cooking dinner and watching TV on the mounds of dirt on the ground floor at night. Guess
that means they have electricity already, too, which makes sense since I hear them using buzz saws and stuff a lot, too. Anyway, it’s interesting, though dusty and loud.
The work continues well. We’ve just submitted our second-half budget reestimation (my first big financial job), which included our action plans for both projects and coordination for the balance of the year. I can now say that the coordination team (with me) will move to Beijing in the fall, so the AIDS clinic here in Nanning can grow up a
bit more independently — this is the more typical MSF model around the world. For MSF it’s been a bad couple of weeks: colleagues arrested in Sudan, kidnapped in Democratic Republic of Congo, the anniversary of the murders of colleagues in Afghanistan. We’ve all felt these losses and worries, since many of us know people who work
in these places. But here in China, we’re trying to grow our projects and continue to take care of our clients, and it’s nice we can do this in a climate without serious security concerns. And I continue to be very happy I’ve made this choice, though I do miss my friends and family.
Take care, enjoy the photos, and keep in touch.
