Roof-top view from Expat House in Muzaffarabad 

A Passage to India

With one-week of holiday entitlement remaining I will travel to neighboring India. It would have been nice to wait until the temperatures cooled and the monsoon season ended, but that doesn’t align with my work schedule and preparing for my departure from Pakistan.

India is a vast and diverse country and I know that I will only scratch the surface on this visit. Fortunately, my travel goals are quite modest, with my strategy basically being to see the Taj Mahal and then hang-out in the lower Himalayas.

My India holiday schedule is as follows:

- Saturday, August 26 – Fly to Delhi via Lahore.

- Sunday, August 27 – Visit Delhi.

- Monday, August 28 – Day trip to the Taj Mahal in Agra. Return to Delhi and catch the night train to Dehardun.

- Tuesday/Wednesday, August 29/30 – Visit Mussorie in the lower Himalayas. The town is known as the Queen of the Himalayas, though the mountain views are likely to be covered by monsoon clouds.

- Thursday, August 31 – Travel to Haridwar, on the Ganges River, and visit the temples, the ghats (river steps/landing) and attend a sunset ceremony at a Ganges temple.

- Friday, September 1 – Visit Rishikesh (where the Beatles once hung-out with their guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) and attend another sunset ceremony at another Ganges temple.

- Saturday, September 2 – Drive to Delhi and fly home to Islamabad via Lahore.

- Sunday, September 3 – Back to the office for month-end accounting.

Visiting our Hattian project in Kahsmir and Amjad, the project office administrator. 

Cholera Outbreak in Kashmir

During recent months MSF Holland has been gradually winding-down its activities in Kashmir. Projects were closed in Lamnian in June and in Leepa in July. A few weeks ago we handed-over our basic health clinics in Muzaffarabad to another NGO. Now all that remains for us in Kashmir is supporting the Hattian hospital and doing water and sanitation work in Muzaffarabad. The plan is to have only 5 Expats in Kashmir by September and by the end of 2006 to have exited the region, altogether.

Things in Kashmir have been relatively relaxed until there was the recent cholera outbreak. MSF first started treating a fairly small number of patients in Hattian three weeks ago. Now in Muzaffarabad, where around 22,000 people are still staying in camps, the MSF team is quickly setting up a cholera treatment centre on the hospital grounds, in cooperation with the ministry of health and other organizations.

We have reallocated staff to work on this and our logistics people are busy getting the centre set-up and arranging for supplies. Very quickly a lot of people have become very busy.

The mid-August Blog(s)

When I’ve raced in Ironman triathlons there was always a point in the day where the event stopped being fun. This generally occurred early in the marathon with about 20 miles still to go. I learned to just slog through that stage as best I could with the hope of re-discovering my enthusiasm (and running legs) upon picking-up the scent of the finish line.

I’m presently in a comparable phase in my MSF-Pakistan event. I’ve an incredible experience, but things have become fairly routine and I’m kind-of in slog mode right now. My successor has been identified and my Pakistan departure date of October 20th has been projected. I know the finish line is approaching, but with two months still to go it still seems to be far off in the distance.

Part of my slog includes coming-up with new points of interest for my blog follower(s?). The following is this week’s attempt:

· By early September we will have 16 Expats working in Pakistan. This is still a few more than the pre-earthquake number, but significantly fewer than the 60+ Expats we had here during the peak of the emergency response. I have now been in Pakistan for almost three months longer than any other Expat still here.

· My seventh and final boss will be arriving next weekend. Tom, an Australian, will be here for two years, which will provide much needed continuity for the mission.

· August 14th is Pakistan’s independence day and August 15th is India’s. Some of our national staff in Kashmir insisted that both days were statutory holidays for them. This claim was unfounded and I can only speculate that it was based on the theory that until jurisdiction over Kashmir can be agreed upon between Pakistan and India that they should be able to celebrate both national holidays.

· My replacement will be Mario from Austria who has just recently finished working for MSF in Columbia for 1¾ years. We met last March during the Finco workshop in the Netherlands. Having an experienced person come-in will allow for a shorter and hopefully more efficient hand-over. I have no doubt that he will find things in much better order than I did.

· Luis, our Medical Cordinator from Columbia, has been recently joined by his wife Janeth and two-year-old son Juan. Juan is a cheerful, playful and outgoing little fellow and he and I have quickly become buddies. The fact that we can’t understand each other hasn’t been an issue and is possibly beneficial.

· Providing short-term coverage as our Logistics Coordinator is Begench from Turkmenistan. He is a dynamo at work and a great guy. A big sports fan, his favourite English soccer team is Chelsea (its owned by a Russian so he refers to the team as the Moscow club). He is also a keen hockey fan (“Ian, remember when the Soviets beat Canada 8-1 in the Canada Cup?…ha, ha, ha!”… “Ian, Evgeni Malkin has just disappeared from Mettalurg (his Russian team). Doesn’t he know that it isn’t the Soviet Union anymore and he doesn’t need to escape?…ha, ha, ha!”). Begench is also a former member of the Turkmenistan national table tennis team. There is a table at our house and Begench has been quite eager to practice (“I ‘vill’ be playing my ‘brewther’ in Moscow next month”). We’ve played only once so far and most of my points were courtesy of his errant serves. When I couldn’t succeed with my forehand or backhand I tried my old specialty and fired a couple of shots at his head. He just laughed and replied, “Ian, try more top spin…my point…ha, ha ha!”

An older photo from Quetta of Dave (the previous Project Coordinator who has recently finished his term in Pakistan), Lucky (who now has a home with a previous master in Islamabad) and a few of the MSF staff. 

All Quiet in Quetta

I’ve just returned from a fairly quiet yet interesting week at our office in Quetta. This was my first time back to Quetta since my April visit to present the new salary scales, which had almost started a staff revolt. It took a few months to sort through the various issues that arose, but it now “appears” that staff harmony has returned to its normal state. One of the things that I’ve learned about Pakistani culture is the need to show great respect towards the staff and their concerns and the final outcome is almost of secondary importance (I said almost). With the various HR issues seemingly resolved I returned to Quetta to a hero’s welcome (at least on the surface).

The following are a few other notes from my week in Quetta:

- The town of Quetta has quite a history, first as a fort protecting the trade roads to Afghanistan, Iran and India, then as the largest garrison in British India, and most recently as a springboard for the Taliban movement. Consequently, ensuring staff security is a prime focus here for MSF.

- I spent a few hours at the new MSF project at Kuchlak, which is about a 30-minute drive from Quetta. MSF is operating an MCH (Mother & Child Health) clinic and negotiating to provide outpatient support at a government Rural Health Centre. Gareth, the MSF project coordinator, is probably our busiest expat in Pakistan right now.

- We went out to dinner one evening in the centre of Quetta with about a dozen of our staff. There was good food, lively surroundings, and some pretty interesting looking people. I don’t think I would have felt very comfortable there if I wasn’t accompanied by about a dozen of our staff.

- When going through airport security the carry-on baggage goes through two separate x-rays and you are frisked twice (the metal detector always goes off). I unintentionally packed along my Swiss army knife but this went undetected. Perhaps this isn’t an area of concern as we are also provided with regular cutler for our flight meal.

- The MSF building contains the office on the main floor and the expat residence upstairs. On one day I didn’t even go outside.

- Gareth, Doctor M and I attended a meeting with a number of local politicians. There were about ten people in the office and periodically one of them would go to one side of the floor and start to pray. It’s always nice to know which direction Mecca is.

- Thanks to the wonders of the internet I was able to do my month-end accounting from Quetta. It got me thinking about the possibilities of working remotely from somewhere exotic like Thailand.

- Doctor M had us over for dinner with his family one night. An Afghan, who has lived in Pakistan for over 20-years, he is a committed MSFer and a serious carnivore. When he invited us he wanted to ensure that we were happy just to eat meat so that they wouldn’t bother to make rice. Doctor M is my kind of guy.