I may appear youthful (and handsome), but in fact I was raised in a very conservative fashion. I was brought up to understand that religion and politics weren't topics of polite conversation.

So I work at a Christian institution which sent me to a predominantly Muslim area that's at odds with the Jews in order to work with a US federal agency that's partnering with a politically appointed Ministry of Health while health care reform is being considered in our own country.

I'm not sure how I'm going to get out of this one... maybe I can pretend I'm Canadian... or learn how to talk about the weather in Arabic...

At the hotel's breakfast buffet this morning they were playing Bob Marley. I love reggae, I love Marley, and his message of peace, love and understanding, but does that mean that the Palestinians embrace Zionism as so long it's practiced by nice Carribean guys with dreds and urine drug screen positive for cannabinoids?

I've been surprised to discover that Palestine is the first developing country I've visited where almost universally the people in cars wear their seatbelts, even the drivers.

I visited the Sheik Zayed Emergency Hospital in the Palestinian Medical Complex today. It was actually very well run and organized, and the doc on site was happy to show us around. There's no specialty of emergency medicine here, so what the docs do is go to 6 years of medical school which gets them an MBBS, then a year of internship, then licensure. When I asked what they thought I could do for them, the response back was "continuing education lectures".

Now, I enjoy lecturing, and my major (likely only) contribution to global healthcare has been the introduction and dissemination of "medical jeopardy' to the third world. But I didn't want to stop there - lectures benefit the individual docs with a certificate of training or whatever, and they help the public with the skills they learn in class, but these lecture do nothing for the system of healthcare as a whole, there isn't a systems-wide improvement or change, nothing brave or innovative about it, nothing that would affect the system as a whole, like coordinating EMS care between three different cities that are separated by checkpoints and the security wall.

Which reminds me: speaking of brave, one of the things the medical director brought us was a photo album, but rather than having pictures of his smiling children or of the interns under his tutelage, page after page held photographs of injuries sustained during the intifada; each page of the album documented the horrific injury patterns that the "non-lethal" weapons that had been used against the Palestinians had inflicted on these people. The rubber bullets penetrated and broke bones and caused hemo-pneumothoraces, the "super sock" shot gun rounds made awful limb hematomas that caused necrosis - the doctor was assembling a record evidencing the abuses the Palestinians had suffered.

Perhaps what they really need is a continuing education lecture in medical forensics...