after being away for a week or so, with the first day of my pediatrics rotation looming ahead tomorrow starting at 8.30am and my grades still in a limbo, i feel the way that fuzzy pink blob looks.
that fuzzy pink blob btw, had itself a photoshoot, courtesy of the 2mpx camera embedded in the sony ericsson k750i on macro mode. not too bad a photo quality, i must confess. i was expecting worse. i've got more pix but comp's not happy with them at the moment so they'll all be uploaded later on, prolly straight onto flickr rather than individually introduced here.
as far as how the past week has gone... well there's so much to say! i don't really know where to start. everything's in a muddle, swirling around in my head. things have mostly been on the happy side for a change and that roller coaster my emotions have been hitching a ride on lately seems to have rolled to a quiet chugga-chugga instead.
in a nutshell, the developing world conference was aweinspirantastic! met plenty of new people and did that networking thing, found plenty of keepers in terms of friends, stuffed ourselves with yummy food throughout the conference, heard from very inspirational speakers ~ some were fellow med students, others were doctors working with médicins sans frontières. at the end of it all, i not only took away some invaluable snippets and anecdotes that may be useful in the future, but as a group, we've decided to set up a national body to network all the individual international health groups of each university. think of it as an amsa focused on international health. at universities such as ours without such a group, we're hopefully gonna set one up. would be a waste of time and conference resources ~ would be a shame really, not to.
and then there were the issues! so many injustices, so much to do, so little time, such a great feeling of powerlessness. besides feeling inspired, i was rather frustrated at the end of the conference. felt helpless, felt useless, made me want that bloody piece of paper signed by the dean saying that i've graduated even more than before. all these random, disturbing facts, pictures, faces and stories...every 22 minutes, another child uncovers a landmine and gets hurt. there are communities who rely on food drops every day to survive ~ what happens when the airport is shut down for the day because of a visiting dignitary? what about those people whose village has not only been hit by the dec '04 tsunami, but have to also muster the strength to rebuild after an earthquake, and then a volcanic eruption a few months later? out of the 13 women in labor in the obs ward, 5 were in the middle of delivering their babies when the tsunami hit the hospital. pictures of a random hand on the hospital grounds, a bloated body hanging off the jagged 2nd floor landing wrapped with muddy palm leaves, flattened land up to 8km inland, dead cows, muddy water lines more than a foot high marking the walls of the remaining buildings.. i didn't mean to remember these particular images. they were some of the ones that just stuck as we listened to speaker after speaker, seminar after seminar throughout the conference. makes for some good food for thought.
ok, so that wasn't such a tiny nutshell. i was never good at paraphrasing...
as far as my grades go... the situation isn't as bleak as it seemed last week. i think that besides trying to settle into pediatrics mode, i will be taking up as many religions as i can this week and pray/bow/kowtow to as many gods as i can that things continue to look sunshiny-hopeful.
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