Sickness 2

I hope no one reading here ever has to experience what I've been going through for the past 7 days! Allow me to finish my coverage on the healthcare system in Malaysia.

I wanted to let everyone know that the stomach flu/food poisioning (which I would have loved to name the "never-ending-rollar-coaster-of-horrors") may have finally passed through its worst stage. (Yeah!) And I'd like to tell you as to how I survived the crazy tropical bugs - by being suspicious of, and asking a lot of questions to the doctors.

So, I did manage to feel better, after taking the medications prescribed to me by the state hospital that I mentioned in my last post. However, it certainly wasn't helping with the worst symptoms, namely the immense loss of fluids due to my body not being able to even hold down water. The "oral rehydration salts" was the nastiest solution that I had ever tasted. And I was beginning to suspect that my getting better had more to do with a placebo effect than anything else.

So here's the smartest thing that I've done on this trip - I asked to be taken to see a doctor again. Again soliciting Len's help, we went to a clinic in Chinatown, with a Chinese doctor that has seen a number of my friends in the last few days. And he was the one who pointed out that I was taking medications for a fever I didn't have then, and for stomach cramps that I have never had on this trip! By this point, I was so sick, that every few minutes I needed to lie down on the bed. Then I would be asked to sit up to drink some hot chocolate. Then lie down. Then sit up. And that continued... for a while.

Then it was on to the next hospital, a specialist hospital and a private one. Zaini, Len's boss, drove me by car there and I saw my third doctor in two days. By this time, I had been poked in my belly, had my heart beat taken and had my blood pressure taken three times. By this point, I knew what I wanted and desperately asked the doctor to be hooked up to an IV drip. Due to language difficulties, I thought that he wanted me to take an IV back to my hotel and do it myself! I was just about to break down before I got my wish... look below....

Happiness! An IV drip feels weird but when you are severely dehydration, it's a gift from the Heavens.

Thank you IV Gods!

My "roommate" during my stay. Notice the orange and pink curtains? I felt like I was at Baskin Robbins sometimes. :)

I woke up this morning feeling a lot better, though I have to take it very easy for the next few days. People, be glad that you have a functioning digestive system!

All my friends at the program literally just now gave me a sweet Get Well Soon Card! How sweet....

And I promise, my next post will be about something other than illness. I will leave you with a funny image for the road.

Sickness

So, travelling abroad is nothing as glamorous as you might initially think. I have no idea why, but I always fall deadly ill with some nasty illness or another when I'm abroad for an extended period (despite my precautions and being in perfect health back in the USA). Tropical bugs seem to be the deadliest and, considering that tropical environments also usually correspond with not the best of sanitation conditions, they seem particularly easy to catch. Today, I begged Len, our ETA mentor, to take me to the hospital today, which he was more than happy to do. While waiting at the front table, trying to explain my symptoms (try explaining diarrhea and fever in a foreign language that you've been learning for a week!), I got so incredibly dizzy, my vision blurred, and I was two steps away from collapsing when they brought a stretcher and wheeled me into the hospital ER. After asking a lot of in depth questions, the doctor diagnosed me with having a virus in my gastrointestinal (GI) track. (If you can believe it, this picture on the left was during the first few days of my illness.)

I'll save everybody here the trouble and not go in depth as what my symptoms have been for the past five days. But allow me to describe probably one of the scariest moment of the experience. Yesterday, I had a fever which was probably the hottest fever in my life, though I don't have a thermometer with me to give you a an exact measurement. However, the fever was so hot, I felt like my brain was being cooked alive! Thank God for TV, as it was at this point that I remembered that sick patients with fever often have wet towels on their heads. Indeed, it was only by doing that that the fever broke. (Who says you can't learn anything from TV?) I call it one of the scariest experiences in my life because all of my ETA friends were an hour away visiting a beach and a village and I was all alone.

I'm going to focus on the positives now. I got to see what a hospital room looks like in Malaysia. I can't really compare it with a hospital room in the US, because except for check-ups and the time I fractured my ankle, I haven't visited a hospital as a patient. But, it seems that US hospitals have private rooms for most of their patients, and a couple of a double room where the patients are separated by a curtain. However, in KT, the hospital room I went to contained about 10 beds all revolving around an island in the center which the doctors and nurses seemed to congregate around when they weren't helping their patients. Interesting huh? Individualism and communalism philosophies can even affect how a hospital room is designed. The separator curtains were all pink, which I found to be an unusual and a way too cheery color choice.

Another interesting thing was that all the doctors and nurses in the ER were women. Islam wins against the West in this regard. Cultures who practice Islam have always had women doctors, unlike the West. During the medieval era in the West, witch burnings of local medicine women occurred on a large scale, and universities that produced legalized and certified doctors banned women from their establishment. It seems that only very recently has the gender ratio in the doctor profession become somewhat balanced. Compare that with Islam. Even at the height of some of the most oppressive measures seen against women, after the 1979 Revolution in Iran, women were still doctors during this era. I think that having women as doctors may be written in the Qu'ran. Actually, it sort of makes sense in Malaysia, with its large focus on gender-separation.

Here's one good thing that happened today because of my ill health. One of the hotel workers has gotten slightly frustrated with our room because we use the latch to prop open the door for each other (this hotel has given us only one key for a double room - how inconvenient is that?). Usually, he comes by 11pm to give me such a speech, though it is in such broken English that I think a 3 year old (actually, younger than that!) can best him. Today he came by much earlier, at 6pm, and was trying to get me to understand something in Bahasa Melayu. Needing to get away from the funny little man, I replied with a phrase that I've learned remarkably well over the past few days "Saya sakit" (I'm sick). These were the magic words because he looked sad and then left! I guess you have to be thankful for the little things.

My Orientation in KT

Hi everyone! I decided not to write during my first two weeks here in Malaysia because I wanted to gain a bit of perspective on Malaysian society instead of writing a rather superficial assessment. Granted two weeks in a country will still make me have superficial opinion. Oh well, you can't win them all...

So, after a few days in Kuala Lumpur, we headed over to Kuala Terengganu (KT), the capital of the state of Terengganu, which is in northeast penisular Malaysia. One of the few things that we have been constantly told is that Terengganu (along with its northern neighbor Kelantan) are the most underdeveloped parts of Malaysia. This includes the usage of the English language. In fact, this particular Fulbright program is the pet project of the Economic Minister of Terengganu to try and dramatically improve English language skills (learning English is coupled with development process here). Bearing these facts in mind, the big shock for me when wandering around Kuala Terengganu is that all the shopkeepers speak basic English! Indeed, I have not found anyone yet that didn't understand basic English! Granted, the basic English here can be sometimes rather... basic. My favorite example is when me and my roommate unplugged the TV and couldn't plug it back it (the plug wouldn't go into the outlet at all!). I called up the front desk of our hotel and asked during the conversation, "Is someone from maintance coming to my room or are you transfering me to maintance?" The response? "Yes." Perhaps I shouldn't equate shopkeeper-english with the english ability for the rest of this state...

This orientation involves having a lot of class. Our schedule starts at 8:30am and starts with 4 hours of language class... everyday. With a rotating group of language teachers, the lessons have a tendency to be, well I'll use the euphenism of "repetitive" (there was one teacher, Sauri, that happily broke the mold). After lunch, we have a rather fun 3 hour class on teaching english as a second language (ESL). Around 7-8pm we usually all meet up for some dinner and socializing. That gives us precious little time to do other activities, as class eats up so much of our time. And half the group have gotten badly sick with one thing or another (including me), which can be good in that you can miss some Bahasa Melayu class and some of the "repetitive" teachers. (In case you wanted to know, I had horrible allergies to mosquito bites when I first arrived and now, recently, I'm suffering from an iron definiceny, which makes you extremely fatigued and lethargic all the time - not fun.)

After a lot of nervousness in our whole group, yesterday we were finally told which schools we will be stationed at and where we will be placed (finally!). I'm being placed in Chukai, which is down south in Terengganu and is a large town/small city. Wikipedia is telling me that Chukai means "taxes" in Malay because taxes were imposed on the river traffic, especially during the British colonial period. You learn something new everyday! I'm actually pretty excited about my placement, and not just because of what I learned on Wikipedia. :)

Despite me living in an American bubble, as I'm around the other ETAs (English Teaching Assistants) the whole day, I'm definitely coming into contact with some interesting cultural and social practices of the people that live here (90% of the people here are native Malays). For instance, there is a strong separation between the sexes. We have been told by a number of people that, when meeting someone, you shouldn't place your hand out first to shake the person's hand. The reason? Several people are uncomfortable with shaking hands with people of the opposite sex. That's very different from the US, where it would be rude not to shake hands will all that you meet.

One thing that is very different here in Malaysia is the concept of time. Our morning class is supposed to start at 8:30am, but it has been delayed to 9am. Malaysian culture seems to be rather relationship-oriented, and therefore the social interation is more valued than the inconvience of waiting for a late party. It is not considered unusual to start up a conversation with a stranger in the street and then give them your phone number while you are departing. Indeed, that happened to me while I was waiting for my pizza at Pizza Hut...

Another interesting cultural aspect of KT is the way people stare at the "mat salleh", the white people. I'm in an interesting position in that I'm the only non-white person within the group and my brown skin color allows me to blend into the crowd. When I go out with the rest of the ETAs, man, do people stare! People will lean out of their cars in utter fascination, dumbfounded to say the least. I've been told that the people in Terengganu do not realize that 1/3 of the people in the US look like me and not like my white friends. That's one of the uphill battles that I alone here will have to face here, because I need people to accept my American identity and not label me as an Indian, a culture that I only have contact with through ancestry and my own hard-earned knowledge. So, you can bet that this blog will contain the unusual perspective of a non-white American travelling abroad in Malaysia! (I say "unusual" here because you see more white Americans abroad than you see non-white Americans, unfortunately... that's food for thought.)

Today our Bahasa Malayu language teacher told us (more like browbeated us) on not wearing mini skirts to formal functions. Since when does anyone around the world wear a mini skirt to a formal function? I have a strange feeling that I am going to have to break a lot of stereotypes about American here. Polite and decent behavior for a woman is more restrictive and conservative here. The last thing that you want is for village gossip to infamously label you a "loose woman".

I actually really like all the other ETAs in my group, so it will hard when I have to say goodbye to them in a week, and when we all get carted away to different parts of Terengganu. Thank God for the internet and cell phones! Check out some pictures below...

I love this shot!