RAMALLAH REDUX

Aaaannddd... we're back! I've just settled in to my hotel room for round two of the rumble in Ramallah, and I'm only the tiniest bit dizzy from not having slept for two days - dreams! Who needs them! I've got just enough energy to write and spell check through a few unconnected observations.

Just to refresh your memory, your faithful correspondent is in the Holy Land as a US Agency for International Development technical consultant in emergency medicine, and not just for the fantastic kebab, shawerma, shish tawouk, falafel, hummus, shashlik, clay pot dish... but of course, for dinner tonight instead of those delicious local dishes I somehow managed to order myself a chicken sandwich. With french fries. And extra ketchup.

As mentioned, the flight was super-long and painful, but I think I might be getting used to sitting in the plane for those long stretches - perhaps I'm developing butt calluses...

Traveling alone unfortunately gives you the temptation to do all sorts of awful, tawdry, shameful things, things you wouldn't normally do in the presence of your peers... on that long flight over I cheapened myself by watching "City of Ember", "Max Payne", and "Love Happens". Okay, I didn't watch "Love Happens", but I'm still having trouble looking at myself in the mirror...

Well, actually, I didn't travel alone (but the joke was so much more effective that way), but rather with a really terrific human being, Orrine, who's a nurse. We've known each other for a while now but recently I realized that the first formed memory I have of her speaks volumes about her nature. Now, if you're squeamish you may want to skip this story - working in health care, particularly emergency care, means that all sense of propriety has left your soul and you no longer intuit what's appropriate to share with a mixed audience - but if you're like the 99.9% of the world that relishes a gruesome story: a nurse rushes up to the doc's desk and asks, a bit flustered, "hey, are you all busy? Can somebody come and see this guy?" As the new kid trying to ingratiate myself, sure, I volunteer myself and walk over. So, the background story is something you have to know: the patient, a man, said that he had tried to vault a barbed wire fence a week ago but had somehow gotten his (you can cringeingly see where this is going) "delicate bits" caught on the pointy barbs, and had let the wound(s) fester for a week before finally deciding that, hey, an abscessed, bleeding penis is probably a health problem.

Now, having had some of the new rubbed off me since then I now realize that what I had naively assumed was the truth was probably, well, let's say part of a broader narrative that I may not have entirely uncovered, but the points to remember are 1)blood, 2)pus, and 3) this man's "junks". I walked in to the room to see Orrine, who was the triage nurse that day, finally figure in to my meandering retelling, because she had done exactly what you do with uncontrolled bleeding, applying direct pressure to the area, and in this case, the area was one typically covered by one's bathing suit, and there she was, death grip on this gentleman's exsanguinating willy, but doing so with total composure, calm, even aplomb, and still somehow also compassionate, all while trying to prevent death, or at least loss of gender identity, and I thought to myself, wow, what a cool customer, this Orrine, someone who epitomizes what ER nurses do every single day. I mean the calm, compassionate, critical care stuff, and not the handling-of-a-guy's-you-know-what-that'd-been-injured-while-leaping-over-barbed-wire part. Anyway, she's well-equipped for this USAID project.

We were met at the airport in Tel Aviv by Waleed, one of the project's drivers. We shake hands warmly and I ask, "what's new?" and he says with half a grin, "nothing, nothing's new!"

Which, I suppose around here, is actually sometimes a pretty good thing...