Who and where am I?

The last few years have been a bit challenging in terms of claiming residency; I have a New Zealand passport, an Australian mailing address and bank account, and a backpack. I usually put that I am a resident of New Zealand, even though I was not entitled to vote as I hadn't been in NZ for the requisite number of days in the last 5 years.

Now I am about to sign a contract to work with International SOS. I was first approached about the job, while I was in Israel/Palestine from an ex-boss now based in Dubai, who passed me onto the Human Resource person in Zurich, who arranged a phone-meeting with the Regional Manager who is based in Melbourne, who then emailed the Regional Medical Director in Ghana, and the ex-boss in Dubai and someone in South Africa, while the HR person in Zurich will pass me onto Human Resources in Singapore to do the contract and SOS Sydney to arrange my pre-employment physical. This is truly International!

Succumbing to the blog

It's been pointed out to me that it would make sense, given the number of sillinesses I get up to, that I should keep a blog, in order that anyone who is vaguely interested in my sillinesses can follow them at their leisure and I can update with poignant vignettes, tales, stories, anecdotes and the like on a regular basis.

This first entry is to set the scene:

I have now spent 5 years of my life lugging an aging Kathmandu backpack around the world. My backpack and I spent 21 months in Vietnam. My backpack hung out in my room most of the time while I caught xe om (motorbike taxis) all over Ho Chi Minh City setting up an infection control programme at a surgical hospital, teaching English, going on ward rounds at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, working at International SOS, doing my Masters and drinking a multitude of
cocktails, chewing on chicken feet and attempting to communicate in a language with 8 consonants and about 60 tonal vowel sounds.

I then moved to Nigeria to live in a 3-star holiday resort/expatriate residential compound in the most filthy, polluted, violent and debauched city I have ever visited. In between plane crashes, shootings, bus crashes, helicopter evacuations, cases of cerebral malaria and STD checks I managed to get in some goat head stew (trying hard to look coquettish as I nibbled on a goats ear), some tennis/squash, a number of Star beers, and some mighty fine photos of agama lizards.

After Nigeria, the call of the wild took me and I became what I always wanted to be - an MSF Doctor. Flying over the mountains in a Yeti Airlines flying-bus, and walking for 10 hours over mountains, along river valleys and up mountains barely prepared me for the isolation of working up a mountain, with limited electricity and patients that walked or were carried for hours - days to reach us.

Subsequently I went to the Jaffna Peninsula, in Sri Lanka, occupied by the Sri Lankan army, and cut off from the rest of the country and the world. Everything from bus crashes to conflict related injuries kept the surgical team busy, while I dealt with suicide attempts, snake bites, scorpion bites, difficulty in breathing and chest pain, and coordinated the field base regarding security and logistics.

2007 was the year of many moves; after Sri Lanka I found myself in Almaty, Kazakhstan doing a locum, then flying with Azal Airlines (Azerbaijan's finest) to Baku, Azerbaijan to look after pampered expats and understand the subtleties, or lack thereof, of vodka.

I came back to my base of Monbulk, Victoria (thanks to Brig and John as always), and arranged myself a job in Occupied Palestine Territories which necessitated a trip to Paris, a trip back to Azerbaijan to fill in time, back to Paris and onto East Jerusalem, in time for the post-Ramadan Eid festival, Christmas and snowy winter months. The sight of snow on the Dome of the Rock is a dramatic image of incongruous nature melding with centuries of religious conflict. The 8m high wall running around and through West Bank segragating Palestinians from their families and their agricultural land is also pretty evocative.

Now I am in Monbulk, resting and bonding before going home to NZ for a month and then making my way to Ghana for 2009. Watch this space......