One Week Left

I can't believe that in 8 days I'll be back on US soil. So much to do before then. I need another month. Do you think they'll reschedule Christmas, my parents' anniversary, and the end date of my visa in order for that to happen? Probably not, so I guess I should be glad I just have to keep up this pace for another week.

Getting stuff done in KG is very different than in the US. For example, scheduling. No one likes to do so in advance. So you call for an interview, and they tell you to call back on such and such a day to see if they'll be free, and then they ask you to come in RIGHT NOW and you're on a minibus on the way to a village near the Kazakh border.

Today I almost throttled my RA when she was half an hour late meeting me at the station for the bus to Chaldovar, which is at an entirely different station than the buses to Kara Balta, despite the fact that the bus to Chaldovar goes THROUGH Kara Balta. There's basically one road west, and every place I have to go is somewhere on this road. So I was standing in the snow at 7:30 AM and watched two buses leave while my feet froze. The bus we eventually got on had no heat, and then just randomly stopped for a while, so by the time we got to the clinic where they were expecting us, which should have been a two hour trip, it was 10:30, I was losing all sensation in both feet, and the doctor was on her way out the door to a meeting somewhere. We did get to talk to a bunch of nurses. They didn't want to be recorded, which makes my job much harder because I only have notes and not transcripts to rely on, but boy did they let loose. Their attitude was basically "Family medicine sucks. Good if people aren't going to fund us any longer, because all we get is more work, not enough money, and maybe they'll go back to the old way" (They won't. There's no money for the old way).

Tomorrow I was supposed to go to a meeting of the heads of the Village Health Committees in Panfilovka, then rush back to Bishkek for a meeting at 2 with the Director of FOMS, which is sort of semi-analagous to Medicaid. Sort of. But she called and asked to switch to Friday at 10, so now it's the head of the cardiology institute, and I can't make it to Panfilovka at all, because another department head at MinZdrav wanted to meet today, but agreed to tomorrow at 10 instead. So my poor RA gets all the VHC people. That will actually be more interesting than what I'm doing, but it will mostly be in Kyrgyz, while my interviews in the city will be in Russian, so there's no choice in who goes where. Plus, in a hierarchical society like KG, one can't really send one's RA to meet with the MinZdrav types. It's bad enough that I'm not showing in person for the VHC people, as often outside of the city, people enjoy meeting foreigners. Some guy on the bus this morning asked me to come visit the kids at the juvenile detention facility he works at, but my schedule isn't going to let that happen before I go. So hopefully things will go well for IT (those are my RA's initials, I'm not referring to her as a giant it thing) and if anyone really wants to meet me in person, I'm in Panfilovka all day next Tuesday.

So, sometime between meetings and so on tomorrow, I need to do my Kyrgyz homework, because I thought I was going to be on a bus to Panfilovka at 8 tomorrow so re-scheduled class for 5 PM. And then I have a goodbye dinner with a couple of friends at 8:30. And then class on Friday at 8, so I can make my interview at 10 and then go harass a Family Medicine Center into letting me interview their staff on Friday, Saturday and Monday. Also, I should really check on my whole transit visa situation, because I may need to spend some time online at the Russian Embassy if I want to make my plane to the US in Moscow rather than being held in a transit detention center.

So far I've got interviews with around 50ish people, although not all separately. So I should have 70-80 respondents by the time I'm done, if things continue to go well. It's very difficult to evaluate who is speaking openly and who is putting on a good face for the foreigner, as there is a long tradition of that here, and many people remain unconvinced that I am not from an organization, MinZdrav, or some other group that wants to judge them. And when I do convince them that I'm just doing this on my own, they have no idea what the point of me is. But I do think that the time I've spent going back to places again and again, getting to know people, getting to know the country, not having to go through a traditional interpreter (when we work in Kyrgyz, IT summarizes in Russian at points for me. While many people don't feel comfortable speaking Russian, most understand, and will often interrupt to expand and clarify, which gets me much more information than if she were to translate into English), and so on do give me a different perspective from what most international types can get, so I'm hoping that I can say something interesting and perhaps even useful in my dissertation.

Um, that's all for now. See, I left you alone for so long that now I'm making up for lost time with lots of detail about my exciting and glamorous job: long bus rides on smelly freezing minibuses, hanging out in unheated clinics with people with TB and the flu, and writing lots of notes.

Also, Happy slightly early Birthday to my eldest sister!