Mondays Missives

• I often when carrying the baby hold a coffee cup in my left hand but, never hold it by the carrying handle.
• Carrying handle? That can't be right.
• I know at least one person who has burned Christmas card money in the fireplace.
• When I worked in refugee health I made a goal to do a basic interview in Spanish and Vietnamese and be at least polite in Serbo Croatian. By the time I left I could muddle my way through any interaction in Spanish- even a lot of phone contact. Vietnamese? Whatever- incredibly difficult language, I tried at least learning the eye test chart. It was so bad it wasn't even funny bad, just bad. Serbo- Croatian? Eastern European languages are among the hardest on Earth to learn. I don't even know how native speakers do it.
• I was providing services to a lot of people from Bosnia at the tail end of the Balkan wars. What fun people- great sense of humor but, almost always kind of fatalistic. Educate them about an aspect of their health and they seemed very likely to shrug their shoulders and say,"Oh well if I die, I die my father died of the same thing."
• As a rule the Serbo Croatians hated and distrusted any government official but, when they found out you were genuinely interested in their well being and there to help they loved you equally passionately and would even be incredibly protective over you.
• I was always interested in the guys who had been soldiers before. They knew better than to try and totally hide their military service but, they also suspected if you were with the government you were probably looking for war criminals so when you'd ask about military service none were ever infantrymen or other combat roles- they were all either radio operators or mechanics. A large percentage of guys from there with military backgrounds had battle related wounds- loss of eyes due to grenade shrapnel, loss of a thumb and index finger due to bayonet attack, the list goes on but, all of them were either radio operators or mechanics, if that war was that dangerous for them I would have hated to have been in a combat role there.