Dhaka Community Hospital (DCH) and four foreigners

(snippets from personal journal, 1/29)

Woke up surprisingly refreshed this morning, breakfast was brought to my room. Paratha (kind of like scallion pancakes sans scallions) and fried eggs with the yolk runny. It was delicious. My travel nurse probably would not have approved of that meal, but hey, here I am and no salmonella poisoning still!

I met Mostofa, Jabed (Bidut), and Mahiuddin in person. They are the people who I will be working most closely with, the ones most involved with the Wilson arsenic mitigation project.

Mostofa will be my direct supervisor—we have gchatted and Skyped much, he has admonished me for staying up til 2 am in Cambridge—he is a nice man, sincere, has his MBA from a college in Pabna district and works with DCH disaster management also. They’ve sent teams to MyanmarPakistan for the earthquake. We’ll work closely on the arsenic mitigation project.
for the cyclone last year (?) and also

Mahiuddin works mostly with the David Christiani and Molly Kile on the Harvard School of Public Health project which deals with biological aspects of arsenicosis. He is a biochemist, and introduced me to Sukchander and Joya, two women who work in the environmental chemistry lab at DCH. Joya and I talked for a while: she is recently married to her sweetheart of ten years. I may have cited her paper 183234 times in my final anthro(1825) paper. Word.

Jabed has the nickname Bidut, which means electricity. I wrote in my notebook what he does but can’t remember at the moment.

They took me on a tour of the hospital. It is, in comparison with Boston Medical Center and Pomerado Hospital etc. dirty and crowded. The wards for the non-paying patients are completely public, no curtains, no partitions, on some occasions two to a bed (or maybe that was a family visitor who decided to lie down, hard to tell). Khan, who took me on the tour, showed me a TB patient who lay literally 5 feet away from a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy. It was shocking.

The waiting rooms have a stench of disinfectant, that smell I hated as a kid. In the US, we’re used to high-tech gurneys and beds that are equipped with a beeping array of buttons and controls. Here the gurneys are about 18 inches wide, a rudimentary metal frame with vinyl padding on top. One gets the sense they easily careen out of control. The beds are basic metal frames, no way to sit up, no controls. All this is indicative of the quality of care: I heard from David, a volunteer from AusAid (from down under!) that nurses scribble medical notes in every which corner of a patient’s chart, often neglecting to inform the doctor of potentially dangerous conditions like high blood pressure. According to him, the nursing education is completely rudimentary, and they lack basic skills. His job here is to beef up that education.

The Aussies are very nice, and invited me to the Australian Club where they go to drink and relax every Thursday. There are two of them: David who does nursing education, and Michael, who teaches English to the hospital staff. They’re both here funded by AusAid, and are part of a group of about 30 in Bangladesh. Steve is another Westerner here. He is a masters student at a joint University of Copenhagen/some Swedish uni program for disaster management. He’s here researching for his dissertation, and has been living in developing countries such as Vietnam and Myanmar for the past five years. He’s very nice, smiles a lot, sincerely interested. I took him for Danish but then he revealed he’s actually a Torontonian. Rach, your kind is everywhere!

It was so comforting to be able to speak English at a normal speed and make jokes with people. It’ll be a nice balance to have them here. Would definitely like to join them at the Australian Club next week, and maybe will branch out to the American Club. Somehow, I don’t think there is a Chinese Club. The Aussies and Steve are traveling to the mangrove swamps down south where there are tigers next weekend. Maybe I will go!

Called Prats’ mom who was so sweet. I will visit her home for lunch tomorrow, am excited.