First Week

11th Aug.
Diary + Email entry.

Suffice to say its been a really eye opening week and half. People are so incredibly welcoming and friendly, to a level that i could not believe existed realistically. No pretense, no tiresome formalities or back biting...only a sense of dignity and hospitality that I find refreshing. And in the midst of such hardship. The second intifada (popular uprising against the day to day realities of life under occupation) ended in 2005, but still things have not really progressed at all since the time of the first peacetalks in 92, back when people thought things would resolve themsevels within the next couple of years. This level of stagnation and lack of progress has led to people being really skeptical about the future and whether things will change.

Yet they show a resilience and commitment to each other, in that they have not taken it out upon their fellow man. None of the crime you'd expect in such poor communities, but rather a real genuine attempt to maintain day to day life in the face of their struggles. I feel a hundred times safer here than I do in London!

I should say that its not as dire or as extreme a situation at all as I first envisioned. Ramallah is doing relatively better than the other West Bank palestinian cities. Other villages and towns are undoubtedly faring a lot worse, with clashes and strife against Jewish Settlers and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF; army) being the norm, but also just a much greater degree of poverty and lack of economic security.

Next paragraph is taken from what i wrote to neeraj and pranjal. I can't be bothered to type it all out again!

know i've got my politics and i was involved as much as possible
with the gaza thing
at my uni...
i
but due to course pressure and my own conspiracy theory about israeli moss. checking my mail :P i've stayed pretty apolitical
i mean ok i have my thoughts about what took place
and what has gone on
but i can honestly say that as far as possible for me
i came here with a clean slate and open mind
and well

the reality is so much more vivid and disturbing
than i thought.
i ask open questions
when discussing politics
deliberately
to let people answer in their own words without being led
to talk about their experiences with occupation
or just hwat it was like
living
here

past ten years

and yeah its been really eye opening
I can go into specifics later, but lets just say i feel much more comfortable talking about the reality on the ground here
having kind of in some small way
gained an appreciation
of what its like to live here....
and ramallah is doing ok

much better
than other places
and the west bank
is much better than it was 4 years ago
but at least people here don't have to go through daily checkpoints

and detours as they used to 5 years back............



Work at hospital is great. Not as much hands on as i would have liked and obviously language is a major barrier (arabic is bloody hard to learn!)...but at the same time the docs here challenge me daily with management plans and differential diagnoses, to an extent that puts London to shame. At the same time there is none of this bullshit minimum competence crap that dominates king's mentality.
You are expected to know details that I would have earlier dismissed, and in doing so I honestly have realised just how much more further I can go the distance in terms of getting to grips with the reality of practicing medicine daily.
But hands on experience is lacking and so I will transfer from Red crescent to Ramallah general govt hospital next week as it sees so much more trauma/acute ER stuff, as well as a much higher burden of cases in every other department.