Adjusting : )

My relationship with China is an interesting one.  Being that I spent 5.5 years of my childhood here, it feels like my long lost home.  However, being that I haven't lived here for 20 years, I have times when I feel like I'm in another galaxy. 

 
I have had some ups and downs these past couple of weeks.  I looked up the definition of culture shock and Wikipedia says, "Culture shock is the personal disorientation a person may feel when experiencing an unfamiliar way of life due to immigration or a visit to a new country, a move between social environments, or simply travel to another type of life."  PERSONAL DISORIENTATION is definitely what I feel here.  Sometimes, I see something and just think...is this real life?  I have experienced the most culture shock over the everyday tasks...riding my bike to work, trying to order food and shopping (even WALMART which I thought would be my little America, disorients me!). 


Riding my bike (and walking sometimes) is one of the hardest tasks right now... traffic is so nuts!  I literally feel like I am going to die the whole time.  I have been evaluating the traffic patterns here and have done some math... when you are walking across a 6 lane (3 lanes each direction) road and you cross when the light says "don't walk", you will get crushed by six lanes of on-coming traffic.  When you cross when the light says "walk" you will still get crushed by three lanes of traffic...you NEVER have better than a 50% chance of survival!  I feel like I am playing Frogger all of the time...you go a little into traffic...stop...step to the left...go a little more...step to the right... go a little more and hopefully you make it to the other side : ).   Oh and another safely hazard when walking...I was told not to step on those manhole covers, they may collapse and you will fall to the center of the earth : ).  It’s sort of like when you were a little kid and you played “don’t step on the crack” except this won’t brake your momma’s back, it will brake yours.  While walking has its own dangers,  biking presents with far greater risks.   There is normally a bike lane, however, it is shared with motorcycles, parked cars, occasional cars going the wrong way down the road and sometimes a bus.  The bus is the scariest.  I have had a couple of close calls. 

 
The language barrier is killing me.  I want to talk to people and I really can't...I had a small victory yesterday when I told the cashier at Walmart that one of the other short termers needed a bag and the cashier understood me before I did my gestures and interpretive dance moves that I normally need to break into.  Sometimes you just want an easy task to be as easy as it would be at home and it's not because of the language barrier.  For example, I wanted bananas yesterday and I didn't have the energy to try to bargain with a fruit seller, so I did what I thought would be easy... I went to Walmart.   I was at the checkout with my banana's and a couple other things and the cashier picked up the banana's, said something that I didn't understand and put my bananas under the cash register and rang up the rest of my order.  I had no idea what happened.  Ken and Lisa later explained that you have to weigh them in the fruit section.   Moments like these are hard.  You think to yourself, "I am 30 years old, have a masters degree and I can't even buy a banana." 

 
My reactions to my new home have varied depending on the day and my sleep level...most times I love the newness and the adventure of it all.  The chaos can be thrilling!  Other times I'm not as amused.  I am surprised at how draining simple activities can be and also that these little life inconveniences can make me feel kind of angry.   

 
But luckily there is a silver lining here...one is that I am blessed by the patience of so many people here.  When I got off of one of my 15 hour bus trips, a women taxi driver asked me if I wanted a taxi (at least that's what I think she said).  My intended answer was "No thank you, my friends are picking me up but thank you for the offer".  My actual answer, with a combination of my best Chinese and interpretative dancing was "No want...friend (pointed to ground), thank you."  She smiled, understood my meaning and then left.  A couple of minutes later, I was on the phone with Ken and Lisa trying to figure out where they were and where I was.  This sweet women saw them and figured out that they were looking for me (there really are not a lot of Caucasian people here) ...she told them "your friend is over there, she's waiting for you."  Lisa said that the women seemed concerned for me which is really sweet.  I've experienced a lot of grace from the people here... I am a mess and still they put up with me and for the most part, help me get by and for that I am grateful. 

 
The even more amazing silver lining is that G0d is bigger than our "personal disorientation."  He alone is able to take our silly despair over no banana's, our fear of being squished like a bug by an oncoming bus, and our distaste for people blowing boogers onto the sidewalk and allow us to see the bigger picture.  I have definitely felt at wits end here at times and wondered why I am not at home, but I know that I’m here for a reason and that by the grace of G0d I’ll not only get through this in one piece, but I will learn more about G0d’s love for the people that He has created, grow in my own faith, be blessed by the people here and hopefully be a blessing to the children and adults with communication disorders.  BUT in the meantime, I am going to learn the how to buy banana’s speaking Chinese…one small step at a time : )

A Whirlwind Start!

Wow, my first two and a half weeks in China have far exceeded my expectations for adventure!   I arrived in Kunming after a 37 hour travel extravaganza on Oct 28th.   I am staying with a family that our family knew many moons ago and I have since reconnected with over the past year and a half and it was nice to see a familiar face as I trudged off of the plane!   The next day I went to the rehab center in Kunming where I'll be working to set up a schedule and meet everyone.  I was also told that day that I had the opportunity to go on a trip out to the villages in the rural north of Yunnan.   The only thing was that this trip was leaving from Shangri La and in order to get there in time, I would need to leave Kunming the following day and take a 14 hour night bus.  Let the adventures begin!!!   So I ran around gathering up warm clothes as Shangri La is in the mountains and gets really cold, and sunscreen and sunglasses because it is so high that the sun is brutal.  Luckily the family that I am with had some warm socks etc. that I could take.   The one thing that I needed to buy was thermal pants for under my jeans.... This is where my fat American complex began.... We went to Walmart and after trying on a couple of pairs of pants, it was determined that I am a mans 2x.   How terrifying!   Then the next evening I set off...

The bus ride actually went well.  I was so tired from not sleeping for days that I slept well with the rocking of the bus.   It had little beds so that was fun.  I had one scary moment when I woke up in the night to see that it was really dark, the narrow road was winding up the mountains, there was so much fog you could barely see anything AND the bus was flying!   A little while later the bus ended up rear ending someone in a truck and that was interesting to watch.   Both drivers flew out of their vehicles screaming at one another, then other people from vehicles stuck behind also joined the lively discussion, as did so e of the passengers on the bus.   After about forty minutes of group yelling everyone got back into their vehicles and we were on our way.

I was met in Shangri La by one of the members of the team up here and taken to their rehab center.  I spent the rest of the day with the team up here and then we headed off early the next morning.

The road trip was AMAZING!   We were gone for about eight days and went to really remote places in the mountains.   Let me set the scene for you.... Our little team consisted of myself (speech therapist), the group leader who is a German man wearing an Indiana Jones hat, one of the local staff members, a local physical therapist and a women from England who was wearing a cowboy hat.... All five of us came charging into these remote villages in a jeep.   It must have been quite a scene!  It was sort of like a Wild West experience... We would come bouncing into these, dusky, single road towns (these roads were so rocky that I hit my head off of the ceiling of the jeep a couple of times) and people would gather.  Generally speaking we would get there and the person or couple of people that the gvt had sent for would be there.  All of the commotion of us being in these towns that don't get any foreigners would result in the members of the small town gathering to watch, everything here is a group activity : ).  As people got an understanding of why we were there, they talked amongst themselves and generally came up with more people that may benefit from speaking with us.  It was great to see the community members thinking and advocating for each other!

This trip came about because the gvt was given a grant from a private donor to help families with people with Down Syndrome.   They asked the organization that I am partnering with to come with them to help identify these individuals.   This trip was a blessing because it allowed us to meet the gvt employees from the remote counties and it allowed us to meet these people with various special needs and medical conditions and give advise where we could and also tell them about our clinic and invite them to come for medical treatment and therapy.  Also, this came at a great time because there is a team of specialist coming into Kunming this week to do surgeries for little cost.   We were able to identify dome people who would benefit from this and they actually made it to Kunming in time and are receiving medical treatment as I type.   HE is good!!!  One of these patients is a little five year old girl that we met on our last day on the road.... She was burned on the back of her leg two years ago, the burn is behind her knee and is not healing causing her a lot of pain.  One of the specialities of the team coming in is burn victims.   This is an issue in rural areas because it is really cold and some of their houses are heated by open fires.  Also there are a number of gas fires because gas stations are so
far away so people who have motorbikes keep gas cans in the house....open fires and gas cans are a
fatal mix.   The people that we met, live up in the mountains and are farmers and herders...having an injury is devastating because manual labor us really the only option vocationally.

It's out of the scope of this post to go into all that we encountered but basically I would say that we spoke to about 120 people, some of them living in villages that were hours by car from the neighboring villages.  We identified four or five individuals with Down Syndrome, a couple with Autism, many with developmental delays with unknown causes, some stroke patients, four people with mental health issues and about five people who are Deaf or hard of hearing.   It was heart breaking to see mothers who brought their children down the mountain to meet us along the side of the road in hopes that we could give them a magic potion to heal their child's physical or cognitive disability.  One mom carried a twelve year old girl on her back for two hours to meet us.  I wish we could give more than is evenly humanly possible.  It was also sad to hear that some of these kids stayed at home in a bed, by themselves while their family farmed....there are no schools that allow children with physical or cognitive disabilities to attend in this area.   Many of the parents that we met had also been scammed
and taken for what little money that they had by people who told them that expensive surgeries or medicine could cure their child.  These children had disabilities that are not curable but could become better managed with therapy.  This trip certainly reminded me why I am here and although the homesickness has begun to set in a little, I know that I'm exactly where I should be.


P.S. On a less serious note, this trip required the eating of many things that I have never had before.... Intestine (I thought it was mushroom), internal organs of something, lung, a chicken head, yak butter tea and what put me over the edge..... Cow head soup.   The soup had so much oil from the cows head that it would harden if you left it in your bowl.   I kept trying to eat the various parts of the cows brain or whatever and pretend it was something else, unfortunately this dish is a delicacy so the people we were eating with reminded me what I was eating multiple times.   It was rough!

PPS.  On an even lighter note... I had a fat American/ Goldilocks experience.  We were eating in the remotest place that we stayed.   We were eating in this one room area by the light of a single light bulb and myself and a skinny Chinese man were sharing a bench.   Out of nowhere the bench smashed!   I have never seen anything like it!   It wasn't like the leg broke or it cracked, it smashed into tiny pieces and it happened so fast that this man and I were both lying on the ground in shock....it was embarrassing but hysterical too!!!