I always enjoyed the train trip in Java. Taking train for eight hours from Jakarta to Yogyakarta will show you the life of the majority of Indonesians living in Java. We can see the slum and high building complex side-by-side in Jakarta downtown; the paperboard houses along the rail; the dirty and slow rivers cutting…
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Try to recall your life events during your first three years, you will get either none or tiny fragments. Our memory records everything we see, hear, and feel in our life time, but it only allows us to recalls the event after 5-year old—not all of them with the same clarity; in fact, many are…
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“We would like to give you a sponsorship,” Doctor Pascal, the company owner, sped-up my heartbeat. I believed, Doctor Lowry had talked to him about my study plan. “But, you have to work another year first.” My heart beat slower. The offer was reasonable because I had just worked for the AEA for three months….
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“You should take specialization in internal medicine,” Doctor Lowry said while stitching his patient. I smiled. He was very observant and noticed that I was good at clinical medicine. However, I had never liked it. My conscience forced me to learn it hard: a stupid physician is a danger to his patients. “I am applying…
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The KPC mine region might be similar to the places we will go after we die, according to Bible. Tanjung Bara is the heaven; Sangata Lama (Old Sangata) the hell; and Sangata Baru (New Sangata) the temporary shelter, where souls are waiting for God to make decision on their fate because their sins are about…
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“He has pneumonia.” The man was still about 15 meter from us. “How could you know, Pater?” I said. “Check him!” When he arrived, I grabbed a stethoscope and listened to his respiratory sound. Father Ton van der Wouw, my boss, had been right. The man’s lungs were noisy with abnormal sounds. After a few…
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The vehicle accidents in KPC were mostly caused by either sleepiness from long working hours—mining operation was 24 hours—or alcoholic drinks. The victims from the latter cause were almost all ‘bule’ (Indonesian name for white people), the expatriates; and it was the case of the rolling car tonight. The car was badly damaged but amazingly…
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“Doctor, could you please see my nephew?” The request came from Farida, the manager of AEA Hospital in Sangatta Baru, East Borneo. “What is wrong with him?” I asked. “He has been sick for about two weeks.” “Where is he now?” “In the ward. Doctor’s Rusdi patient.” She did not tell me which one. I…
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“Do you have any question?” Doctor Golding asked me. I was not ready for that question. I had prepared the answers to the questions ‘How do you handle a patient with cardiorespiratory arrest?’, ‘ . . . head trauma?’, ‘. . . open fracture?’, etc. The position I was applying is an on-site doctor of…
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“Are you happy with it?” Captain asked me. I was not happy with one word on his reference letter. I had brooded over asking for a reference from him for weeks. I absolutely needed it because all the schools I applied to required the referrers to send the reference letters directly to them. Ronald Anthony,…
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My medical school tuition and cost of living in Yogyakarta were paid by my mother when she was alive; when she passed away, she still paid the same expenses of mine in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. A few months before she died—she had had hunch about her incoming death because she had been sick…
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“I quit” and bang! The little bang of the phone handset hitting its cradle: the expression of my disappointment. The BIG BANG followed it in Jakarta, 3800 kilometer away: the slam of the door behind my boss, the Commanding Officer of the US NAMRU-2, leaving his office. His personal assistant told me a month later…
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The pain on one of my toes woke me up. I grabbed my flashlight by the camp bunk; everybody in the house was still asleep. I touched the hurt toe blindly—the wonder of our nerve system—it was wet: bleeding. I had only one suspect of the attacker. They had been around day and, especially, night:…
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“Woman case, isn’t it?” I said. My landlord nodded to confirm my guess but said, “But this time is different.” “How?” “Two women.” He then continued filling me in with more info on the ‘different case’ and managed to push me back to the community center I just had passed. There were more people than…
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I saw my dog Goi sitting in front of the Supreme Judge of Afterlife. Goi was rewarded for his good karma (guarding my house well and greeting me always when I was coming home): reincarnation as a top predator of the food pyramid in his next life. He could choose between a transmigrant (a human…
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“Where is he from?” I asked the doctor of the Abepura Hospital. She looked at the nurses. “We don’t know,” one of them answered. “Who brought him here?” “His friends, might be. But they are gone.” There was no way to get the answer now because the patient was unconscious. In America, he would have…
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For nine months, I was on-call in four hospitals. But the beeper system was only installed in the Dock 2 hospital; the other hospitals reached me by phone. They called me quite often but only 7 patients were enrolled at the end of the study. The false calls were costly in term of effort and…
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“Bip, bip, bip,” my beeper was beeping. 2:20. They had no mercy on me. I had just come back from the hospital an hour ago; a false call again, but I had to take care of the patient anyway because the on-call doctor did not respond to the intercom call from the nurse. Half-awake, I…
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“You are on-call. The nurse, by phone, has reported a patient with the following information: . . . What will you tell her?” the professor asked us. Everyone answered with our best medical knowledge but none of us was correct. The correct answer is “I am coming.” I have never forgotten that answer, and that…
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Interesting (environment and people), meaningful (for others and myself), kind boss, and adequate compensation –in that order—are the criteria of the job I want. The first job in Asmat fulfilled the first two criteria, but periodic malaria infection was too much for me. The second job seemed fulfill all four criteria. Although exhausted from flying…
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