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Habesha Driving

Driving in Ethiopia deserves its own short discourse. It’s a rodeo. Now to be fair, I’ve seen worse: Small-city China in 2005, Bangladesh, bumper cars at the state fair. But Ethiopia is remarkable for its danger, its unspoken rules, the shoddiness of the equipment, and the sheer novelty. At the time of my first trip in 2007, there were a handful of stoplights in Addis, a city of 8-10 million. They were cursory suggestions, merely slowing traffic but never stopping it. Today, there are tens, if not hundreds, of stoplights in the city. People come to complete stops at red lights, yield on turn signals, and generally follow the universal rules of the road. But heaven help you if you try to make a left turn without a light. That’s a process of slowly edging your nose out far enough into traffic until you nearly get rammed, and then magically, the next car swoops behind you, and then you’re home free. To be fair, you see fewer overturned trucks, shattered automobiles, or
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Fishing in the Bale Mountains

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It’s cold in Dinsho. More than 10,000 ft in the southern Ethiopian highlands, I’m nestled in below 5 thick felt blankets, at least one which I think was formerly a curtain based on the metal rings sown into it that are lying heavily across my feet. My shoulders and ever-growing bald patch are cool to the touch. Every 20 minutes or so, a rumbling CNCO truck rumbles into the compound shaking the building, the driver walks up and down the row of 10 rooms knocking on each door and shouting “hello” until the attendant wearily opens the door to the “reception” office.   So how did I come to be lying in a Pension Motel on the main/only road in Dinsho, 250km south of Addis? I came looking for trout.   During my last trip to Ethiopia, I had seen one sentence in the Lonely Planet guide book that mentioned, “a fishing guide can set you up with a rod and reel.” That was enough to get my mind racing. A quick google search revealed that at some point there were trout in Ethiopian mou
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Location: Dinsho, Ethiopia
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At it Again in Addis Ababa

Tenastellegn! Time to commence Ethiopian Adventure #5! Like the Fast and the Furious franchise, this one gets better each time around (even if we're now straight-to-DVD). For a guy who loves to travel and explore new places, I just can't seem to get enough of this place (either that or I'm a sucker for 1970 Russian Lada taxis, copious dust, and endless coffee). This month, I'm tagging along as the +1 on my awesome wife's adventure here. Liz is an Oral & Maxillofacial surgery resident at Emory and this year she's participating in Emory's Global Health Service Partnership with Addis Ababa University. That's a fancy way of saying that she's spending the month in Addis working alongside the oral surgery residents at Addis Ababa University, learning from them, providing extra hands for retracting, and hopefully giving a few lectures. This is her first international surgery trip and I can't wait to see what type of shenanigans/surgery she gets up
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Dispatch # 6 - Dhaka Airport

A few people have asked where they can make a donation to help the refugees.  The organization I am volunteering with is called  MedGlobal.  They are doing great work in the camp by providing top-notch medical care in an underserved area of the camp. They are also supporting the work of their local NGO partner, Prantic Unnayan, and the health initiatives of OBAT Helpers. They also run missions to Greece, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, and Venezuela.  If you want to donate to broader refugee relief efforts that address issues beyond healthcare, check out the  International Rescue Committee  (disclosure - my sister works for the IRC, great organization) or the  UNHCR .  =============================================== Thirteen days, eleven shifts, and at least 300 patients. Thirteen breakfasts of rice and vegetable curry. At least 40 hours driving through the countryside to-from camp. A few tom-tom rides and three morning beach runs. A few highlights - The sounds of the camp. Very few car
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Dispatch #5 - The Refugee Industrial Complex

It's weird to write about a problem when you feel like you're part of the problem. For example, this refugee crisis. I didn't personally displaced anyone, certainly didn't commit any violent acts, threaten, or attack anyone. But in trying to be part of the solution, I feel like part of the problem. For one, any refugee crisis screws up the local economy. Before the Rohingya arrived, Cox's Bazar was a small but rowdy beach resort town for Bengali tourists. A few nice hotels, a few average hotels, 75 miles of beach, parasailing, air force base, some other government offices. When the population of the Kutupalong-Ukhia camp exploded in 2017-2018, the district of Cox's Bazar did as well. In one year, the population of the district went from 400,000 to 3.2 million. As NGOs pour into town, demand for nearly all goods rises, housing/food/raw materials supply is slow to catch up, and the cost of nearly all items rise. Basic inflation. Long-term rentals in hotels that
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Dispatch #4 - The Future of the Rohingya Refugees

A few people have asked where they can make a donation to help the refugees.  The organization I am volunteering with is called  MedGlobal.  They are doing great work in the camp by providing top-notch medical care in an underserved area of the camp. They are also supporting the work of their local NGO partner, Prantic Unnayan, and the health initiatives of OBAT Helpers. They also run missions to Greece, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, and Venezuela.  If you want to donate to broader refugee relief efforts that address issues beyond healthcare, check out the  International Rescue Committee  (disclosure - my sister works for the IRC, great organization) or the  UNHCR .  =============================================== In this post, I want to share a few musings on what the future may hold for the Rohingya refugees. A disclaimer: First, I am NOT an expert on this topic. I have spent all of nine days in Bangladesh working in the world's largest refugee camp but there are thousands of pe
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Dispatch #3 - OBAT Clinic

Hard to believe I've been working here for six days already. Unlike an ED shift where volumes ebb and flow throughout the day, patients line up in the morning before we arrive and are then shuffled around the clinic until we see our last patients around 3:45PM. Similar to the ER, there's always someone else to see. For starters, it was not easy to find an organization to volunteer with in a refugee camp. Naively, I thought it would be easy to find volunteer opportunities with organizations doing this type of work. I found a handful, emailed them, and none got back to me. So I sent another email, and then a third email. Finally I made a phone call and only after that did I hear back. And these were the organizations that returned my calls at all. I ended up signing on with MedGlobal after hearing many good reviews from fellow emergency docs. In Bangladesh, MedGlobal is working with OBAT Helpers and a local partner, Prantic Unnayan Society , to staff an outpatient clinic in
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