A belated post

It occurred to me today that I hadn't posted any photos from East Timor (for previous posts on East Timor, you could try here, here, here, or just try the archives for October 2008 and November 2008). Anyway, here a few photos. Please don't reproduce these photos without my permission.

The ambulance/mobile clinic that I spent hours a day in, visiting villages within a 3-hour radius of Dili:



Two of our volunteers preparing medications for distribution at a mobile clinic in Sare. I tried unsuccessfully to set up an outreach prenatal program here. We would sometimes bring a midwife with us who did prenatal visits, and I thought it would be possible for us to collect blood in order to do prenatal labs like screening for syphilis, HIV or hepatitis B. We ended up collecting 2 samples, then I ran into "political" problems with the lab in Dili. Very frustrating, but I'm still thinking about how we could make this work, though.



One of the kids in a village we used to visit every Monday, walking home from school:



My neighbours in Dili. I lived in a house with a group of nuns and university students not too far from the clinic. There were lots of little kids in the area who would follow me and ask me to take their photos. This is one of the many photos that I took that I actually really like:



East Timor is predominantly Catholic, and the day after Halloween is a national holiday. Everyone goes to the cemetary to tend to their families' gravesites. I took this photo at Santa Cruz, the main cemetary in Dili. In the center of the cemetary, there was a giant bonfire where people could burn offerings for people who died (especially during the struggle for independence) who have no known graves. One thing I noticed was how many tiny graves there were... many of them were for babies who were born one day and died the same day.



Not to be cliche, but here's the future for East Timor. Hopefully when this kid is older, East Timor will have a medical school again.



The theme for Grand Rounds this week is actually profit in medicine, and I think my career so far is a paradox when it comes to financial issues.

On the one hand, I hate feeling like family medicine/primary care is broken in this country. There's always buzz in the media about how we're facing a critical shortage of family doctors. Of the 30 or so residents who finished family medicine in 2008 in Calgary, nobody opened their own community practice and started accepting new patients. And part of the reason is because of the fee-for-service structure in this province.

On the other hand, if you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you also know that I'm willing to forego two months of income and pay entirely out of my own pocket to go halfway around the world and see a hundred patients a day, 7 days a week for a free clinic.

Bottom line, I guess, is that I'm in medicine for something other than the money.

Copyright Liana Hwang 2009