The Inside of Our House

We are living in a great old French Colonial house in Phnom Penh -- or maybe camping out is a better term in that our household furniture remains in the grip of the Cambodian Customs Service (absent the "Diplomatic Note" that will free our car from customs), the problem is that our car is in the same shipping container as our furniture, ergo, no furniture (and no car).

So we have bought enough furniture locally to get by. This first photo is our bedroom. In it you can see our truly amazing Cambodian bed, which is estimated to be somewhere between 75-125 years old. While it is hard to tell from this photo it is composed of two mahogany planks, each 30 inches wide and about 1.5 inches thick, laid across two mahogany feet. To truly appreciate this I would have you go down to your local lumber dealer and ask him for a piece of immaculate mahogany 7 feet long, 30" wide, and 1 1/2 inches thick. After they stop laughing you'll begin to appreciate this bed.

The bed is tastefully accented by the steel garment racks covered in raw canvas purchased at the D.C. Wisconsin Avenue Container Store. I'm not sure how long we will continue to use these (they came over in our air shipment) but they have been nice in the short run. To put the next paragraph in visual context, the garment racks are over 6' tall.

You can see the 14 foot ceilings of a pre-air conditioned house, ceiling fan in place (sadly not one of the pre-war art deco French versions that look like something Daisy Buchanan would have used to make sure she never perspired). Not in this picture, but just off to the left, is the air conditioner outlet that lets us sleep in comfort.

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Living in tropical climates you learn a lot about thermodynamics. The first days I was sleeping in this room (Kathy was in Kenya visiting Stefan) I put on the air conditioner and the fan. And the temperature in the room never dropped below 84 degrees Fahrenheit. Then one day I forgot to turn on the fan while I was downstairs having dinner, and when I walked into the room it was 76 degrees. It turns out (duh!) that cold air stays in the bottom of the room and hot air rises, and by putting on the fan I was mixing them, and raising the overall temperature significantly.

All of this makes me look amazingly anal retentive unless you realize that, by chance, the travel alarm clock I use has a thermometer on it. Also, 84 degrees with the breeze from the fan and 76 degrees without the breeze feel about the same. Not sure where that leaves me.

This next photo is looking towards the bottom of the stairs (the bedroom is upstairs). We bought a patio table which will soon move move outside to the patio, but in the meantime is serving as our dining room table. This section of the house has no air conditioning, the window to the right is wide open (screened) to the elements. There is both an overhead fan for normal days and a large circular fan (bottom right of the picture) for hot days to keep us cool while we eat.

This next photo is of our main downstairs room, which will eventually (see customs clearance above) have the formal dining table and our living room furniture. It runs the whole length of the house and opens out on to a small, raised front patio. I may be odd but when I stand in it I just feel like I need to have a gin and tonic in my hand to complete the picture. You can see that we have bought one rattan lounger, which I thought would eventually end up outside on the patio, but which Kathy has decided will be our television watching seating (our television to be is in our shipment caught up in customs). It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if this last vision is true we will need a second rattan lounge chair, and it won't surprise those of you who know us well that a second is on order from the Indonesian furniture store that sold us the first lounge.

This last photo is a close up of our tiled floor. As you can see it is pretty ornate. I tried to explain this to Kathy when we were back in Luray packing up to come here, but nonetheless we have 9 Persian and Moroccan rugs on their way here. It is going to be interesting to see how many are actually used, Kathy seems pretty insistent that we put some down, I am having trouble picturing the clashing patterns. We'll keep you, dearest readers, posted.

Next, the outside of the house.

What Can I Say?

I'm a bad blogger. Good bloggers manage to post 3 or more posts a week, no matter what. That way beloved blog readers keep checking in to read the posts. I, on the other hand, go months at a time without posting anything. Leading beloved readers to wander off to whatever corners of the internet keeps them interested.

In my defense I could say that I have been busy. Even very busy. That I spend an unbelievable amount of my time going to meetings in which I have no desire to participate. But that as a distinguished, senior public health professional I have to go to such meetings, or risk embarrassment to all that I hold dear (that is, more or less, the way it has been explained to me).

Maybe I have to figure out a way to write blog posts while I am being bored out of my mind at said meetings.

Anyway, it is Sunday afternoon in the week leading up to the Khmer New Year (Tuesday-Thursday), which has about the same effect on Cambodian life that Christmas week does on American life, so no more meetings for a little while, and time to post, so after the drought...

the monsoon....

See, that was a S.E. Asian reference, no monsoons to be had in Virginia or Maryland. Maybe there is a reason for you all to check in to this website every once in a while. Or maybe sign up for the RSS feed, that way the intertubes will tell you when I have managed to post something and you won't waste your time checking in.

P.S. As another free hint, if you double click on the photos they get bigger, showing you more detail of the documentation of our exotic lives. No photos in this post, but more coming at you soon.

Squeezing in February Posts

Saturday night finds me alone in a hotel room while Kathy is off celebrating Stefan's 21rst birthday with him in the Masai Mara (Kenya) looking at lions and giraffes and who knows what else. Which is good news for avid followers of the blog since here I am belatedly posting (that avid part would be 3-4 of you from what I can tell) instead of out living up the Phnom Penh nightlife with my lovely wife.

I should have had a lot of pictures to post from my trip this week to the western border of Cambodia (that would be the Thai border for those of you a little shaky on your S.E Asian geography), but inexplicably the camera battery that I very carefully recharged before heading off proved to have no charge whatsoever when I pulled out the camera, I swear...and the dog ate my homework too. I should note that if the battery had worked you would have seen photos of working elephants, not is some namby-pamby game preserve like in Kenya, but being used as beasts of burden. Elephants seem to be sort of the Caterpillar equipment of Cambodia, if you need something big moved, you turn to elephants. Only they don't paint them yellow so you have to keep an eye out to see them. Anyway, you get no photos, only narrative.

Which is more work for me, if you really think about it. So that dog story may have some validity.

Cambodia doesn't look very big on a map, but it turns out it takes a while to drive around in it. The roads were actually pretty good, a huge upgrade from years past (I'm told), but they are only one lane in each direction and there is a lot of traffic that varies in speed from oxen to Land Cruisers, and the slower speeds tend to trump horsepower (this would not be a country where you would get much use out of a Porsche).

So I took a 3 day trip out to the Western border town of Poipet, which turns out to be a really, really low rent version of Las Vegas. Seems that neither Thailand or Vietnam permit gambling and Cambodia does, so Cambodia is the Nevada of S.E. Asia. Poipet, smack on the Thai border, is filled with Thai-owned casinos sitting on Cambodia territory. The funniest part is that the casinos are actually located between the Thai customs checkpoint and the Cambodian checkpoint, instead of a no-man's land like between most border offices it is a free-gambling zone. The Cambodians are clearly not too worried about smuggling because if you are in a car with Cambodian plates you are not even stopped as you drive into the no-man's land (we spent the night in one of the casinos, there wasn't any other choice). And coming out we just sort of indicated that we had spent the night at the hotel (one of about a half-dozen) and they waved us on back into Cambodia. I don't know how you could make money smuggling stuff from Thailand to Cambodia, but if I stumble across it I'll know how to do it.

I do know how you can make money smuggling stuff into Thailand. There was an article in the Phnom Penh English-language newspaper that described an argument between the new customs director of Poipet and a group of handicapped vendors. Apparently for years these handicapped vendors have collected grasshoppers and grubs on the Cambodian side of the border and then wheeled across to the Thai side where they can sell these delicacies for far more than they can in Cambodia. I can't explain why insects and grubs are more highly valued in Thailand than in Cambodia (though it is going to make me examine my food a bit more closely the next time I am in Thailand) but the profusion of handicapped vendors comes from (sadly) all of the landmines and other unexploded ordinance that the U.S. left after the Vietnam War. One of the weird lessons of the Vietnam War is that is was a lot better to be on the other side of a declared war against the United States (i.e. Vietnam) than to be on the other side of an undeclared war (i.e. Laos and Cambodia). Turns out the rules of engagement (don't plant land mines indiscriminately, don't bomb schoolhouses or churches, etc.) only apply to countries on whom we have officially declared war, in undeclared war anything goes.

So, hooray for Obama setting a time line for pulling out of Iraq.

Anyway, to get back to my story the new Director of Cambodian customs at the Poipet border crossing is apparently allowing his staff to hit up the handicapped insect vendors for about 20 cents a kilo which seriously cuts into their profit margin. Apparently insects and grubs are not on the official list of things to which a tariff applies, so the handicapped vendors have the law on their side (not to mention public opinion). We'll see how it plays out.

Anyway, I have more to post on other things I saw, but this post is already pretty long, so bye for now.

Sunrise over the Tonle Sap

Here is a video taken out of our hotel room window looking out over the Tonle Sap River (this side of the point of land) where it merges with the Mekong River (the other side of the point of land and the dredge). I apologize for the jerkiness, I'm just getting the hang of this Flip camcorder.

Stefan's Blog

While the idea of thisblog was that the whole Grundmann/Krasovec clan would post to it you can see that to date it has mainly been me (Christophe) posting. Stefan is in Kenya volunteering at an orphanage and is posting to his own blog along with his friend Frost. If you want to keep up with his life you can read his blog at http://dartmouthinkenya.wordpress.com

Phnom Penh for real

Kathy and I have now been in Phnom Penh slightly short of a week, we're staying in the same hotel I stayed in last time for the month of February, in March we'll move into our new house, an updated French Colonial a mere 3 minute walk from my office. The view from our one-bedroom suite in the Himawari Hotel (think of it as a slightly fancier Residence Inn) is an upgrade from my last posting, we now look out over the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers, I'll try and post a short video I took from our bedroom window of fisherman seining for small fish early this morning.

The time change seems to have caught up to me this weekend, after a pretty busy week at work which I handled fairly well considering we'd just arrived Monday evening, I find myself dragging around this weekend. Kathy is out with a friend getting a massage, manicure and pedicure which is what recharges her batteries, I'm just up from a 2 hour nap which seemed more likely to recharge mine (that may not have been the right call since I'm still a bit logy).

We have a work plan due to USAID for our whole project, which is creating quite a bit of work for me since to work with our team to come up with a work plan I first have to understand what the project has been doing and we seem to have done (and want to continue to do) a lot of different things. One of my jobs is to put a coherent strategy around those various pieces. On top of which Cambodia is undergoing a lot of changes in their health sector, which seem to be progressing at varying speeds with varying success, to try and understand it all is going to take some time. In the mean time I'm reading a lot of documents. one thing you can always count on development agencies to produce.

First post from Phnom Penh

What can I say, I 'm a pretty lousy blogger. In my defense, I'm a better blogger than any of the other 3 people on the masthead (that would be one Krasovec and two boys for those slow on the uptake). I still have a lot of stuff from Kathy's and my trip to S.E. Asia and China to post, including some truly cool pictures from the Olympics (Usain Bolt is fast even in tourist photos), but for now you get my first posting from Phnom Penh, my current location and our future home.

To bring you all up to speed, I have left my job with the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and gone to work for a non-governmental organization called University Research Company, LLC. Which is to say a consulting firm, or a beltway bandit, depending on your take. They clearly are a discriminating and intelligent organization, they hired me, after all. I am starting a job as the Chief of Party (United States Agency of International Development talk for boss) of the Health Systems Strengthening Project - Cambodia 2 Project (HSSC 2). I am actively working to come up with a new name - I don't do sequels.

The project works to support the health system in Cambodia, primarily by focusing on the quality of care and the support structure for peripheral service delivery for the government health system. We also work a bit with other NGOs and private providers. I have a projected staff of 60 (which seems a bit much), 40 of whom currently work on the current project.

From my first week here this seems like it is going to be a nice place to live. I am here for two weeks (one week down, one to go), after which I'll return to the (currently freezing) Shenandoah Valley to pack up, after which Kathy and I will move out here for the next 5 years. Phnom Penh is a much more vibrant place than our previous overseas postings. It is full of restaurants, lots of night life, and there are a lot of interesting places to visit in the immediate vicinity.

I have taken some photos (I can't say that I have strayed far on my photojournalism, other than the first photo, these all come from the grounds of my hotel). This first photo is taken from the window of my current office. It shows life in downtown Phnom Penh. However, we are about to move offices. And, luckily for me, it is an upgrade. My new office will look out over the royal palace. But in the meantime, this is what I see. As you can see, not too many high rises.

This next picture is taken from the back of the hotel where I am staying now and we will be staying until we find a house. Just to the left of the photo the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers merge, this is the picture of the now larger Mekong as it works its way down to Vietnam and the South China Sea. The Tonle Sap is one of the few rivers in the world where the current changes direction. Most of the year is flows into the Mekong. However, when the Mekong floods during the peak rainy season, the Tonle Sap reverses direction and it fills the Tonle Sap Lake (which is huge, on the banks of which sit Siem Riep and Angkor Wat). During the rest of the year the lake slowly discharges into the Mekong.

This next photo shows Phnom Penh from my hotel room window (opposite the river view of the previous photo).

Another view from my window, showing three Wats (Buddhist temples) in the foreground and the distance. They take Buddhism seriously in this part of the world).

All for now, more later.

Quick Update

Kathy and I are in Beijing on the last day of our trip. Looking at this blog I realize that it has been 2 weeks since I posted, but I guess that means that we've been having a really good time and sitting down at a computer seemed too muck like work.

We managed to score tickets to last Monday's track and field events at the Bird's Nest, and had a great time sitting 18 rows up from the track and at about the 30 yard line (if there had been a football field). We had a great view of the women's pole vault competition where Elena Isinbaeva set a new world record and American Jennifer Stuczynski came in second. Note to all parents of young girls, if you want your child to be extremely fit and good looking to boot, I would encourage them to start pole vaulting. I'm not sure what it is but pole vaulters are hands down the most attractive athletes around. End of sexist remarks...

Anyway, I'll post the rest of the trip after we get home, I took a lot of pictures and we went to some great places (I cannot recommend Luang Prabang, Laos highly enough, the New York Times was right, it may be the best travel destination in the world (at least if you like bucolic, Laos doesn't exactly rock).

Speaking of bucolic, next stop, Luray.

Halong Bay

Kathy and I took an overnight trip to Halong Bay, which is in the very north of Vietnam near the China border and is a very striking place, deserving of its place as a UNESCO world heritage site (What with the stone pillars, Lijiang, Halong Bay and other, not seen, sites, UNESCO seems to have been very busy here in Asia, apparently they kept working after Ronald Reagan tried to get rid of them).

Halong Bay is unique for thousands of limestone islands, kind of bigger versions of the stone pillars in China, that dot a large set of connected bays. Kathy and I cruised the bay for 2 days on a modern junk called the Halong Jasmine. Very nice with air conditioned cabins and great food, I'd highly recommend it if you find yourselves in Vietnam.

The first picture gives a sense of the bay.

The second shows our junk amidst a bunch of islands, we had climbed 400 feet up one of the islands to get an overview of the bay (as with China, tourism in Vietnam can be a bit more physically strenuous than the American equivalent).

Sunset as we were cruising to our night anchoring point, the boat in front is the sister ship to our junk.

Sunset over Halong Bay, a beer in my hand, a tropical rainstorm coming up from behind us, life can be nice.

More later...

Hanoi

Kathy and I are back in Hanoi for a few hours before heading down to the beach town of Nha Trang. We spent the last two days taking a junk cruise on Halong Bay, but before I get to that I'll give you some pictures of Hanoi.

Hanoi is a nice combination of a modern Asian city (now 6.2 million people) with a somewhat slowed-down, French Colonial overlay. We stayed at the Metropole, first built in 1901 and a favorite haunt of Graham Greene, and it feels exactly like the sort of place that Graham Greene would have liked (albeit, now with air conditioning).

Hanoi is a city of motorbikes and bicycles, there are more and more cars, but still far fewer than most cities. This first picture captures the feel of the street, as a single woman bicyclist slowly moves as as scooters flash by.

The Vietnamese like to drink beer, and every afternoon at 5:00 PM open air draft beer parlors spring up on street corners. A draft of Bia Hanoi costs about 35 cents, and everybody sits around sweating lightly and drinking a good, and cold, beer. If the police comes all the tables are swept up and put inside, 5 minutes later all returns to normal. The kindergarten sized chairs just add to the ambience.

Some images are so graven into our minds that they seem almost trite. Cone hats and the double hanging baskets are deeply embedded into my memory, this picture needs Walter Cronkite's voice in the background telling us how the war is going.

All in all, Hanoi is a lovely city, I can see why it is Kathy's favorite city in the world, I could easily see living here (now we jsut need someone to offer us jobs here...). This is a picture looking across Hoan Kiem Lake towards the Old Quarter of Hanoi, a rabbit warren of little streets and shops, selling everything anyone could want.

Lijiang

I've shown you kids and old ladies from Lijiang, so maybe it is time to give you a little sense of Lijiang. Lijiang is located at the tail end of the Himalayas where they sort of peter out on their eastern side, it is at about 8,000 feet altitude. It was hit by a large earthquake about 15 years ago which pretty much destroyed the town except for the old quarter where all the houses were built of wood and somehow managed to ride out the quake. At that point someone realized that old Lijiang was pretty cool and that maybe they should make some attempt to keep it around, an uncommon idea in China where almost all towns and cities are being rebuilt at a frenetic pace (I've read that 70% of all tall cranes and 50% of all the cement in the world are in China, and when you are there both estimates seem low).

Here is a peak into a courtyard in Lijiang, most of the houses are built around open courts.

It had a lively market, and when we walked in the first thing on display were copper pots. If it were easy to ship home 200 pounds of stuff from Lijiang I would probably be the proud owner of various copper woks, hot pots, and other stuff. As it was I just lusted...

These women were selling walnuts, the baskets are filled with whole, shelled walnuts. The women in the back with a cleaver (a very sharp cleaver) is taking off the outside shell with 4 precise whacks, something I would not have thought possible if I hadn't seen her do it about 20 times. Not one crushed walnut to be seen. The local restaurants served the walnuts lightly fried and sugared, they went great with beer.

This gives you an overview of old Lijiang (though I just realized that this is the part made out of stone and concrete, rebuilt after the quake to look just like it had before). The streets are narrow and no cars are allowed, it is sort of a non-watery, Chinese version of Venice, I guess. It is surrounded by snow-capped peaks (even in Summer, we're told, due to glaciers), but it was overcast the whole time we were there so we didn't get to see any peaks, we'll have to go back someday.

Old Ladies in Lijiang

Well, we're 3 days into Hanoi and I'm still blogging about China, the good news is that I'm not spending much time in front of my computer, which sort of equates to work in my head, so I must be on vacation.

Anyway, to accompany the pictures of kids, here are some pictures of old ladies. The first women was carefully picking out which vegetables to buy, older men and women clearly spent more time doing this than younger customers.

This women was selling live fish and eels of various sorts, and was doing a lively business.

This woman was walking so determinedly through the market that I had to take her picture, even if only in profile. She was wearing a bandanna-like face mask over her face to protect her from pollution, a common site in China (though there was no pollution to speak of in Lijiang).

This was another common site, 2 women (or men) walking slowly together doing their morning errands. They are walking in what I think of as the distinctive Chinese style (at least for older Chinese) with their hands clasped behind their backs. Kathy and I could crack up our colleagues just by imitating this slow-gaited walk.

Kids in Lijiang

Kathy is big on me taking pictures of either kids or old people, not sure what this says about her, but it makes for some good pictures. We spent two days in the mountain town of Lijiang (of which more later), and here are some pictures of kids.

These three were on some sort of school assignment where they were asking tourists (both Chinese and non-Chinese) to write their names down in a notebook. A young teacher was silently following them around as they did it. No explanation was given for the military dress. The boy in the middle was quite happy until the moment the photo was taken, I was quite surprised out the outcome.

These kids were in class learning to write, a quite complicated task in China given the thousands of characters one needs to learn.

This was the very happy child of a vegetable vendor in the market.

Another market vendor's child, he is already learning how to go to work picking up garbage.

Odds and Ends

As you can see, I've been fiddling a bit with the layout of the blog, and I found a layout that uses the full screen width, which I like better than the narrower layout I was using, so, thanks to Google Bloggger, presto, a new look.

Another impressive part of Blogger is that it appears to be adapted to half of the languages known to man. When I was in China all of the instructions appeared as Chinese ideograms, and here in Hanoi they appear in Thai, luckily I've learned that if I hit the uppermost right hand corner it sends me back to post in our blog with English back as the primary language. Truly revolutionary I think, when people the world round can easily post their whims and ideas into a free market of thought. I wonder when they will get a Burmese version out...

Speaking of language, you haven't experienced language until you've read Chinglish, the literal translations that the Chinese use on signs all over China. Some examples:

"Beware of the landslide" - beneath a stick drawing of a man slipping on a wet floor (I mean, I know I'm a bit overweight, but a landslide?)

"Warm and Fragrant Hint" - the phrase frequently used before any behavioral request, like "Don't grind out your cigarette butts in the carpet"

"Baoshan Airport Chagning" - I think they met "changing", and were using it as we would use "exit". But this is pretty surprising considering that the freeway it was on was one of the most amazing feats of engineering I have ever seen, miles and miles of concrete cantilevered off of the side of near cliff faces, essentially bridges. Untold tens of millions of dollars (or hundreds of millions of Renmibi) to build the road and 50 cents for the sign translations.

"Genitl Emen" - signaling the way to a male toilet

Speaking of toilets... China may be booming and halfway to taking over the world, but they have to be close to dead last in toilet facilities. It is absolutely amazing how foul the average Chinese toilet manages to get over the course of time, say a day or so. I suppose it has something to do with their fondness for "night soil", i.e. fecal waste has been used a fertilizer in China for centuries. So they don't believe in pit latrines, your average rural Chinese toilet just rolls the waste out the back for easy collection by local farmers. And they still have a strong preference for squatting over sitting, so even modern sit down flush toilets tend to be disgusting because many of the people that preceded you squatted on the rim instead of sitting down.

I figured you would all want to know, remember, I wrote a page and half about Moroccan bathrooms in one of our Christmas letters a while back. It seems that toilets are something I keep track of. And you readers reap the benefits...

The "Stone Forest"

It has been a while since we've posted, and we're now in Hanoi, but I am going to try and catch us up over the next 24 hours or so. Last Monday we traveled from Kunming to Mi Le for a retreat, and we just happened to drive by the biggest tourist attraction in Yunnan Province, the UNESCO-anointed natural wonder of the world, the Stone Forest. The Chinese are really into being tourists, and they like natural stuff, so the Stone Forest is a big winner. It was as crowded as Disneyland, which you can tell from the picture below if you look closely at how many people are crowded onto the observation tower/pagoda.

The Chinese make Americans look like slugs when it comes to getting around such sites, this one was laid out in a way that it was about a 2 mile walk (minimum) to get around it, and that involved walking up and down hundreds of stone stairs. And everybody does it, teenagers (much less jaded than their American counterparts), ladies in high heels, really old grandmothers and grandfathers, I mean, everybody. Pretty impressive. The forest was formed by water eroding the limestone at different speeds, the following picture shows a pillar that had an official name (I forget what, something poetic) but it caused a lot of snickers and chuckles and everybody took a picture, because it doesn't really take a poet to figure out what it really looks like.

Between the rocks they did a very good job maintaining the gardens.

And more pillars, this was a big place, probably a mile square. The surrounding countryside was covered with smaller pillars, but for some reason they were really concentrated in this one area, much to the delight of thousands of Chinese tourists.

Tomorrow, Lijiang.

On the Road in Dehong and Tenchong Prefecture

Our first week in China was spent on a field trip with the Yunnan AIDS Care Center, the group that we fund to do PMTCT (Prevention of Maternal to Child Transmission of HIV) work in 6 counties in Yunnan Province hard up on the border with Myanmar.

This first picture shows us all in Luxi, the Prefecture seat of Dehong. The group includes those of us that flew in from Kunming and local representatives from the MCH and General hospitals. The director of the Yunnan AIDS Care Center, Dr. Zhou, is two people to the left of me. His wife, Dr. Chen, is in the red shirt over my shoulder.

The Chinese are really into cheesy touristy stuff. We had dinner in a Dai restaurant (an ethnic minority that lives in this area) and they hauled everybody up to dance afterwards. Here our translator, Haoyu, cuts the rug.

Just to show that we do some real work, at least some of the time, this is a support group for AIDS and intravenous drug user (IDU) orphans. Most are living with their grandparents and the local village doctor brought them together so that they would see that they weren't alone. They learn to sing and dance, and do various handicrafts when they meet. The girl int he middle (in the yellow jacket with blue and white trim) is HIV positive and has been on ARVs for the past 2 years. She never stopped smiling and laughing, it really puts one's own problems in perspective.

This is the same group of girls dressed in Ching-Po ethnic clothing for a village HIV Awareness Festival later that evening. 6 or 7 dance groups performed, interspersed with educational messages and some singers, two of which were reformed IDUs singing about how one shouldn't use drugs (they looked pretty beaten down, even while singing, it was probably a pretty effective message).

The two counties we visited are right next to the Myanmar border so a lot of heroin passes over as it is smuggled to the China coast to spread around the world. Enough falls off the trucks to lead to a lot of heroin addicts which is what initially drove the HIV epidemic here, the scary part is that the epidemic is now spreading into the general population.

That's all for now, we're off to dinner. There are more picture posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/cgrundmann/DehongFieldVisit/

Sunday photos from Kunming

Kathy and I took a stroll in the neighborhood around our hotel this morning to shake off jet lag. So here are some scenes of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in Southwest China.

The local market a couple of blocks from our hotel. Sort of hidden behind the man talking to the vendor you can just see the legs of the local delicacy, black chicken, Mmm, we're going to be eating a lot of that over the next couple of weeks, the guest of honor always gets to eat the best part, the head and the feet...

We strolled through Kunming University, a rather idyllic setting.

From the university we walked over to Green Lake, along with thousands of Kunming residents out for their Sunday constitutionals. This photo is looking back towards our hotel, which is the building with the sort of flying sauce bar on the top.

And what would a Chinese park be without a group of people doing Tai Chi? What I have never figured out that is Tai Chi seems to be practiced solely by people over the age of 60, but everybody seems to know how to do it (this group was all moving together). Where and when do people learn Tai Chi?

So we'll be blogging away fairly regularly on this trip. We leave in a few hours for Luxi, the capital of Dehong prefecture. I'll take photos every day, and we'll post when we have an internet connection.

Life as it should be

Health Center in Assueme, Cote d'Ivoire

Friends and relatives have been known to ask what I do when I travel to countries such as Cote d'Ivoire. A lot of what I do can be pretty boring and revolves around the managerial and administrative aspects of keeping a large project moving forward (our HIV/AIDS program in CI is funded at about $15,000,000 a year, so it involves quite a bit of management to function, of which I contribute a bit, mostly the sort of higher level "are we going in the direction we wanted to go" sort.

But I also do things that are closer to where the real purpose of the work lies. The photo above is of a health center in norther Cote d'Ivoire right on the Ghanaian border. Kathy and I went there to see how they were doing implementing a Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) of HIV program jointly supported by Elizabeth Glaser and PATH (you can see the shiny new EGPAF car we drove up in). The site is run by a nurse-midwife who has a staff of 5 others ranging from nurses to a janitor. Not shown in the picture are two small houses to the right where the nurse-midwife and one of the nurses (male, older) live.

The site has running water and electricity and even, somewhat surprisingly, air conditioning (it was close to 100 degrees outside when this picture was taken). 30 women a month start prenatal care here and they each come in 3-4 times before they deliver. 15 or so deliver in this site each month. This number is lower than the prenatal care number because this site, located in a small village, draws some prenatal care clients from a larger town 6 miles away, and women from that town who go into labor in the middle of the night (as women are wont to do), cannot get transportation at that time out to this site, so they deliver in town at the local hospital.

All in all this was an impressive little health center: the staff was interested in expanding their services; the programs that we support were running well; they were eager for any advice that we could give them; and, they were committed to their patients. I wouldn't be surprised that if over the next year they didn't end up offering treatment services as well as PMTCT.

Uppity Children

Nico's post (below) goes to show what happens when you raise children to think for themselves. Mostly you get good, occasionally you get snide.

Kathy and I have been in rainy Abidjan for all of 3.5 hours now, we flew in circles over the center of Cote d'Ivoire for an hour before landing to avoid what was apparently one big thunderstorm. We watched the movie Juno flying down from Paris, it was a sweet movie with great music. You have to give Michael Cera props for being very good in two very good movies this past year - SuperBad and Juno.

More on Cote d'Ivoire later.