It's strange to actually begin to see the realities of international health work. How difficult it is to make positive changes. That any sort of positive change is stepwise, requires a lot of patience and the ability to giggle at the strange behaviours of the Deputy Director of Communicable Disease Control.
My approach to elucidating what I'm actually doing in this position of "Migration Health Associate" actually got brighter today. I served as a monitor for the IOM-funded meeting between the Ministries of Health of Cambodia and Vietnam on Crosss-Border Disease Control. We were talking avian flu here. It's not an emerging infection disease that we're holding student-run conferences to discuss the the exact genetic mutations and their sustainability that can cause this virus to go global. It's a reality here. There are cases, there are deaths. There is actully an underrepresentation of the actual number of cases out there. We can respond to it in 2 different ways. We can prepare for it. We can also understand that it is a part of human history; that plagues rise, like phoenixes, every half century..that they reach a plateau, and next think you know, 92.5% of your population are vaccinated against it to ensure that it doesn't emerge again. People do die but they're just necessary casualties to ensure global survival, no?
Today's meeting was definitely an exercise in that, cross cultural communication and the example of 2 very different forms of state. Vietnam and Cambodia do not speak the same language. If decisions are made, we follow scenario 1, or similarly nothing happens and we follow scenario 2. While the Ministers of Health, at the federal level, both had very good English to communicate with each other, this skill was not necessarily applicable to everyone else in the conference room. Some important members of the round table also had a very limited understanding about what was actually occuring. Vietnam and Cambodia also both underwent prolonged periods of conflict, and although they are NAFTA defined Most Favoured Nations, their development trajectories are on entirely different pathways. The nature of the recent conflict and its proximity to the present are important to note here. Vietnam was Agent Oranged, yet it came out of the 'Nam with the same number of doctors and a close relationship with Russia. Cambodia emerged from Pol Pot's violent genocide and civil conflict in 1999 with a definite paucity of doctors and learned individuals. Cambodia only possesed a trade relationship with Russia. Vietnam is a socialist republic. A communist centralized system with checks and balances; rules and regulations that are mostly adhered to. Cambodia seems to fear that centralization, most likely a result of the past. They have a highly corrupt government at all levels that seeks to mutate donor money into all creatures great and small. Today's meeting at the Cambodian Ministry of Health, room 202, definitely exemplified all of those things, as well as a CDC Deputy Director who defintely should have become a pop star instead of a doctor in charge of implementing policy.
He is a man who exemplifies the corruption of certain parts of Cambodian governance and the circularity of what defines politicking. You could see the Minister of Health of Vietnam cringe everytime Dr. Moneth never actually answered any of her questions but still had the hand gestures, finesse, articulation and blaming that would best characterize a politician. It transcends borders, you see.
Of course, I should not forget to mention that he did regail us with Khmer karaoke love songs later on in the evening, in addition to hitting on me. As did the head of Communicable Disease Prevention in Vietnam. He even had the snazziness to include a WOOOOOOOOOO at the end of his verses. They should seriously form a band called "Mao is dead and alive" or something of the sort.
Anyways, Bruno and I get to make a trip to Svay Rieng, which shares a border with Vietnam's Tay Ninh province, to check out border health controls. That's pretty awesometastic.
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