Our continued solo-family financial support of the SOS clinic in Almaty

As previously described, our key concern about moving here was the lack of adequate medical facilities in town. It is not that Kazakhs are all dying on the streets for a lack of doctors (although I believe the life expectancy for Kazakh males is only about 56 – need to check that) but that without perfect Russian one is completely at the mercy of the doctors here unless you use the International clinic. Also, the method of studying medicine in this part of the world is completely different to the UK. Instead of learning all about medicine for about five years, then specializing, the doctors here train exclusively in their specialism from more or less the beginning (once they have done parts of the body I think they then move on to their chosen special subject) and so a fully qualified doctor who specializes in, say, bones will have almost zero understanding of the needs of, say, a 14 month old baby.

Basically, if you move to Kazakhstan you have to pray that you don’t have a serious accident or health problem, because you won’t be able to treat it here. If it is an emergency, they will patch you up and get you on the next plane out to Frankfurt, London or somewhere. If it is a long term serious thing, you have to basically go home.

The health care here is provided by SOS  and the name probably gives you a clue – you have to be in pretty desperate medical circumstances to want to use these guys. They are a health care and security services firm who operates in all the dodgy parts of the world where normal western standard medicine is not available. Places like Africa, Central Asia, the middle of China. One of our friends works for them, and was previously in Nigeria where one of his biggest headaches was getting the bodies out fast enough since the volume was so high.  Their clinic is full of ‘exciting’ pictures of private jets taking off in rural locations, I suppose to make people feel they are living on slightly wilder but safe side of life. For me, the thought of being so far from adequate health facilities that you need to charter a jet to get to any, and the imagined image of me (or anyone I know) being stretchered onto a plane to go to the doctors, is my idea of total hell. For some, it is what makes living in these places worthwhile – lots of gory stories, and extreme living.

The doctors work six weeks on six weeks home leave, and are on 24 hour call for that time. At the moment we have a nice South African doctor and when he goes home, we have a nice Australian doctor. Both seem competent but have different attitudes to certain treatments, so if you go with one issue one week and then go back with the same issue but continued problems the next, you may be diagnosed or prescribed with totally different conditions and solutions by the other doctor. But not to worry, there is always an element of critical analysis required of doctor’s opinions anyway I have found since starting to use private health care 10 years ago. (It was lucky we were advised to get a second opinion on the back doctor who wanted to have a go at My husband’s disk problem with a ground breaking laser technology in Brazil – the country’s No 2 back man who My husband got an appointment with thru friends’ contacts subsequently advised that the chances of irreparable damage to My husband’s spinal cord could have been up to 70% if he had gone thru with that procedure). And most of the time, people don’t have serious medical issues. So for day to day run of the mill things, the general doctors are absolutely fine.

The last few years, our family has spent thousands of pounds in private health cover and in total I think we have been to the doctors about 8 times for totally minor things like ear infections. When we came, we just thought that we would probably be fine since our track record for the last 5 years has been pretty good. But it has not been quite as planned. As you already know if you have read the rest of this blog, I have already had a general anaesthetic here. And unfortunately we moved into round two medical trauma a week after New Year when our baby Connie developed a high temperature of 40 degrees or so for days and days, didn’t respond to antibiotics, had green diarrhea so badly that her bottom turned inside out, and eventually had to be put on a drip for a night in the clinic.

We have been very lucky with our kids and not had serious problems, let alone hospitalization of any of them and it was quite shocking how quickly she went downhill and became a really sick baby. The doctor came to our house for a visit and she seemed to be rallying, but by the end of the day, she was flopping around, eyes sunken, drifting in and out of fitful sleep, occasionally crying as her tummy cramped and more of that awful green, mucousy poo came out. It was pretty awful.

In the end we called the doctor and told him that she hadn’t improved at all, and what did he think, so he told us to bring her in to go on a drip for one night, but that she might have to remain on it for 36 or even up to 48 hours.

Putting a drip in a tiny baby is a tricky thing since they have such small veins. Getting the needly thing to stay in is also tricky since they tend to wave their arms around and bend them, so everything comes out. We were lucky, the doctor is experienced and it only took about three attempts to get the line in. Then we splinted her arm and settled down for the night. At about 10.30 the doctor went home and handed over to the Local Night Doctor. The South African doctor told me that if there were any problems to call him and he would come down. But I thought, well, she is a doctor, (not knowing about the way Doctors become doctors here as previously described) and local, so her methodology might not be quite as expected but she is qualified so I expect that “Everything will Probably be Alright” – my motto for living in Kazakhstan.

The local doctor looked a bit nervous at being left with a foreign woman and her baby. She also looked, I thought, a bit like the sort of doctor who might accidentally kill someone and then try to cover it up – but perhaps that was my being worried! I suspect that her specialism might have been geriatrics, she certainly didn’t know much about babies. Her first bit of advice to me was that reading with a reading light (which we had brought in so that the room was not lit with strip lights) was bad for my eyes, and that I ought to stop. “It’s OK, I am only reading for a little while, I think my eyes will survive,” I told her, smiling politely but holding my ground as she actually tried to switch the light off.

Later that night, the drip machine started to beep an alarm. She changed the bottle to the next bottle and it continued to work. But at 5am the alarm went again, and I noticed a large air bubble coming down the tube so I rang the bell to call her. She looked at it, and started fiddling around near the shelves, obviously not knowing where anything was. She farted around trying to suck the air out with a syringe (and almost injecting more air into the tube), then took the machine apart about five times getting all the tubes tangled up and spilling saline all over the floor. Still no solution. Then she fiddled about so much with Connie’s arm and dressing and splint that she managed to make the line fall out but would not admit that she had done that. Finally, at 7am she gave up and switched the machine off. She didn’t tell me that she was waiting for the doctor to come in, so after a while I asked her if she was going to switch the drip back on (after all, if I was just going to be lying on a bed with a sick baby I would much rather have been at home, and not in the SOS day room), to which she tetchily relied “No, I am waiting the doctor.” After being awake almost all night and enduring the last two hours of watching some technical incompetent trying to fix my baby daughter’s drip, I have to admit that I was feeling slightly frosty. So I asked her if it would be OK to switch off the light so that we could both go back to sleep. She was fiddling around counting medicines and recording them on a clipboard. She tutted, rolled her eyes, and stomped off to leave us to sleep for 20 minutes before Husband arrived with some breakfast. Not a great night.

However, no need for anything apart from this small bloggy moan, since the baby did recover eventually, and is now fine. The South African doctor patiently explained the way local doctors are trained when I told him quietly later in his surgery that the night doctor had been a bit ‘interesting’. And he said that the clinic is really working hard to try and get their local staff up to more recognizable standards of patient care (and bedside manner!) which is good I suppose.

We were glad to go home, and thought that would be the end of it, but we were back again last Saturday at the end of another interesting set of circumstances which probably deserves its own blog entry title.

sob, sob

Wow, a long break from my blog but things remain largely the same as my last entry. We are now a month in our new house, but there is no sign of the Internet being connected. The latest delay is that the telephone company will upgrade our telephone line and until that is done there will be no installation of the Internet at all. I have resorted to sneaking out in the early morning to the main Internet café here (Café Delia) and stealing the whole bandwidth to myself, otherwise the speed of connection is so slow I want to slit my wrists. I have spent three days in various internet wi fi hot spots (they should be called “tepid pools” in Kazakhstan) trying to download an upgrade to Itunes so that I can actually use my new ipod and sound dock that I was given for Christmas. In one of these places, the length of time estimated to download my 60mbs was so long that there was not space for the download box to fit it in, It just kept on going up: estimated time to download 4 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, 35 hours then blank!

Having left the house with everyone sleeping this morning, I have finally managed to do the download today. It sounds very superficial to whinge about my itunes upgrade, but it also means that to check my emails takes approx 5 minutes per message to open. Given that we are trying to organize a Burns Supper at the Intercontinental Hotel for 250 people in under 3 weeks time, not having working Internet is frankly a pain in the bum. 

Connectivity????

We have had no internet in our apartment for more than 10 days, during which time I have been able to go to an internet café three times, only one of which resulted in a successful download of my messages. Thwive I failed once because the connection speed was too slow to connect, once because of Apple’s insane insistence on making you download their browser to be able to access your webmail (boo hiss, I will soon move to gmail). Coming from super-connected Korea where the internet speed is second-to-none, this is very frustrating. But like any kind of deprivation, the first few days are the most acutely painful, and then you kind of get used to it.

So moving into our new house and learning that I will have to wait two weeks to be connected to the internet here (for that read up to a month, since New Year will happen during that period), is not too traumatic. I suppose this is a good thing (the not being traumatized bit, not the length of time I will remain off line). I opened my computer last night to see if, by chance, there was an open wireless network that I could log into from the new house, but there was nothing.

Added to this, the last few days my phone has been playing up. I have been trying to call husband and being told that my calls are barred. I looked into the phone security and it seemed that the kids had been playing with it and locked me out of my own phone security with a password (chances of recreating the password input by five-year-old fingers who know not what they are doing must be about the same as picking the winning lottery ticket). While I like them being able to listen to music (their favourite song at the moment is Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day which, even though it contains the F-word is such a great song that I cannot resist letting them listen to it) I don’t like having my phone settings changed.

Eventually, I restored the phone to its factory settings (deleting Green Day and the rest) in order to be able to make a call. But all to no avail. And then husband called from the office to say that the finance department had forgotten to pay the bill for October so I had been cut off, and once it was paid I would be reconnected.

The mobile phone company helpfully sends you anglicised English messages (Russian but written with non-Cyrillic letters) which means that you can read the sounds out loud, but still have no idea what they mean. So perhaps they had warned me of my impending cut before it happened. I don’t know.

It is difficult to organise life with driver, nanny, three kids and husband all in different places without a mobile phone. I know it sounds so pathetic to complain about having to organise a small army of staff, but there is no point having them if you can't organise things like what time to collect me, or the kids, or husband from a certain place. And with no mobile as well as no landline or internet, I have been feeling quite isolated - and from time to time, dare I say it, a bit lonely!  As with all things in Almaty, a hefty cash sum was dispatched to the office and the problem was quickly solved.

All I need to do now is get a landline in the house.

Moving house

This may or may not be the correct date. 

We have had numerous conversations 

about the right

 date but 

I have not checked yet what it is. Frankly

 speaking, the last few days have been a bit of a whirl. This has been partly from my own making – more of that later – and partly because when you have not had internet connection for more than 10 days and your cable TV is disconnected and your phone gets cut off because the company didn’t send the bill for October and your husband’s company didn’t pay the bill, then you start to stop tracking things like dates! So it must be around the 8^th or 9^th, but yesterday was a bank holiday, so even if the date is wrong the week is shorter than we need to do what we want to achieve!

And so I am writing this in my lovely new house, but I have no internet connection to upload so I am saving it to word and then at some point in the near future I hope, I will transmit it to my blog site, by which time any regular viewer will have assumed that I have stopped posting to this blog at all, and stopped visiting.

So let’s back track to the move. When we packed in Korea, it took nine men four full working days to pack us up. Admittedly, unpacking is quicker, but the moving company here was confident that it would take them just two days to unpack us here. I was dubious, and especially so when they told me that half of one of those days would be to unload the container from the train and put it onto three trucks to be moved to the house here from about an hour’s drive outside Almaty.

So let’s just put it down to differences in definition, such an important part of life. Yes, they did take everything out of the boxes in two days. Did our previously fairly well organized Korean home re-appear unpacked in Almaty? No, it did not. A scene akin to the effects of a force 15 hurricane attacking the house, or an angry giant picking every room up, shaking it around a lot then moving off to destroy something else, did.

But then the definition of packing here is different from other places. An aside to the big move, the one that involved 384 boxes, is the smaller move from temporary apartment to home.

We had arranged for our basement to be divided in two, to provide a dedicated guest room for the people we hope will come and stay. And then we had decided to use our previous guest bed in our eldest daughters room and put the bunks in the second oldest daughters room, so that both of them could have friends to stay without a having to get involved with the usual inflatable mattress scenario. Which left us a guest bed short. So we arranged with our landlord of our temporary apartment who was selling that flat, to buy one of the bedrooms-worth of furniture off him as we left.

And he arranged (since our movers here were planning to over charge us about 2000 percent on any extra work we gave them) for some guys to come and move it for us. And we then arranged that since the guys were coming, would they also, for an extra fee, move our stuff (suitcases, boxes of files etc) since we both have sore backs at the moment. Sorry to bother you with the tedious background details of this situation (scroll down if you are falling asleep).

So they came to the apartment and wrapped up the furniture, we had already packed up our clothes and files etc into boxes and suitcases (which was fun after an impromptu 1.15am laser pen disco with Debs and Matt who had popped in on the way home from the pub for a last drink together, as we had all been living in the same apartment block).

Then they drove them the five minutes to our new house, and we were telling them where to put the boxes, and all was going pretty quickly. In fact, I was even beginning to think that the local movers are not too bad, maybe people could use them if they were moving in Almaty and not have to use the top dollar English-speaking ones, when suddenly the rough-looking foreman said in Russian to his men, “Right lads, get in the trucks”.

This would have been fine, except that they had not finished. And the two remaining items waiting to be moved were massive, heavy bits of the huge wardrobe that we have purchased. One huge block had been put in the middle of our living room, the other large wooden base was blocking the access to the downstairs loo and almost unmoveable it was so heavy.

“No, no,” said my husband, “You haven’t finished.”

“Fssyo (finish)’” said the foreman,

“No, you have to move these two big things into the basement,” said My husband.

“Fssyo,” he repeated.

His men were looking at each other, and at us, and hovering around.

“Get in the trucks,” he told them again, and off they went.

My husband, increasingly desperate not to have to move these things himself, was hopping around, trying to persuade the grumpy man to allow his burly strong men to move the things downstairs in an effort that would have taken them less than 5 minutes, but the foreman was having none of it. Emphatically, he went and sat in the truck himself, his men around him while My husband phoned our go-between contact urging him to intervene.

The foreman then tried to explain, “Ahh, sorreee, my director, he say no, he say finish. My director, my director he say no move.”

“Well, tell your director he is not getting paid if you don’t move these things downstairs. It will take you five minutes. Please,” begged My husband.

A few more minutes of heated phone calls ensured, during which time the offending items could have been moved downstairs several times, and then with a flourish of the foreman’s arm with the words “Go, Go, Go,” and in a cloud of road dust, the two trucks and all the muscle disappeared, leaving us with the gigantic pieces of furniture in the middle of our living space.

“Maybe we can move it ourselves,” said My husband, and tentatively tried to push the wardrobe across the floor to a less prominent position. It didn’t shift!

We managed to resolved the problem later that afternoon, when some guys came to remove the rubbish from the previous days unpack and My husband got our controller at the moving company to tell them to shift it for us. And then some guys turned up to reassemble the bed and wardrobe. Apparently, moving something does not include keeping it in the same form as when it is picked up, the movers were quite happy to move it, but then leave it totally dismantled.

The start of my connection issues, the crunch begins to bite

No internet now for 7 days. I hate being off line. I can’t phone anyone. I can’t email, I can’t check my mails. I haven’t been able to do my last minute Xmas shopping and get my mum to post it out for us. I am on strict instructions not to spend the 2 days we get in Bangkok shopping (and frankly I would rather spend the time as a family having a holiday than haring around trying to arrange stocking fillers etc), but since the airport there is pretty majorly infested with Anti government protestors, the chances of us actually making it to Bangkok in the next two weeks are slim.

My friend in Bangkok, the Mighty L, reports that protestors have even ripped apart images of the Queen of Thailand in the Northern provinces (in response to her attending the funeral of a pro-government rally victim) which is quite out of character for Thailand and quite worrying for the future of the monarchy there. The monarchy in Thailand being not quite as kosher as one might like, but definitely better than the utter crack pots who would otherwise be in charge of the political spectrum. The fact that the airport has been occupied for more than a week and, umm, the army have not been ordered in by the government to empty it says quite a lot about who is in charge there. Or about the power stalemate. Why is the government not just sending the army in? Why do the BBC reporters keep referring to the “military” levels of organization of the protestors etc?! Perhaps because the government is no longer in charge of the army, and the army are helping the anti-government rallies. I am glad we don’t live there any more.

Having said that, the continuing gloom in the global recession is not at all good either. God. I am not sure if you want to be miserable in places like London and kind of grieve along with all the others as people lose their jobs, and all the fun in life is removed with financial constraints. Or whether one is better off living somewhere utterly bonkers anyway, where things will likely remain fairly bonkers and the possible solutions to a down turn will be interesting to see. I don’t know. We still have skiing 20 minutes away, but not if the lift operator goes out of business. But surely the super-rich Kazakhs would not want to be embarrassed in front of their Asian neighbours and admit poverty to the extent that the 2001 Asian winter games would have to be cancelled for a lack of lift facilities.

The worlds largest outdoor ice rink (until Mexico city unveiled a very wet-looking one on the news today which is apparently bigger) at Medeu, which is just outside town, was open all summer with no ice on it.  Now that it is cold enough for everyone to want to go skating on it, they have shut it to prepare for the 2011 Asian games and it is surrounded by 20-foot metal fences like everywhere else in town (to cover up non-working credit-crunch-quiet building sites.

One of the big plant storage areas next to the biggest development site in town caught on fire a week or so ago at the weekend and we passed it as we were heading off to a shop somewhere while the fire engines were there. And the first thing that came to my mind was, “Oh, XXX Development company’s  plant and materials depot is on fire. I wonder if that was an arson attack/insurance claim then.”

Off to watch the news to check the status of the Thai airport again then bed.

Tomorrow we begin to move into our new house. I should be sounding much more chipper.

An early weekend in Almaty

Friday night was a leaving drinks for a guy who actually already left but who had come back to celebrate his new life in Luxembourg with a small cocktail at the Kazakhstan hotel (times are tough and no more fancy schmancy events are to be held at the most expensive hotels in town, according to Moscow head office).

 

Mainly the party was full of HR personnel, the usual expat crowd who go to everything, and his other colleagues.

 

The food was pretty ghastly (although in Almaty, even the worst looking food usually tastes better than you expect because of the delicious nature of the fresh produce here), so noone ate much, and by the time we all went next door to the pub at about 9.30, everyone was pretty well oiled.

 

The pub in question is the dubiously-named Guns and Roses pub: hotel bar with a rock theme and on Friday nights a live band. Actually, the G&R is not at all bad. A previous visit surprised with a really excellent cheese bacon burger. It is massive with lots of leather booths and a dance floor and loads of staff who mainly speak English, and as a result it is pretty much a favourite hang out for the expats in town.

 

Last Friday though, there were heaps of people we knew in there: a large girls night out, our office party and then the usual guys who are always in the pub no matter which pub you go to and on which night of the week. It must be a lonely life if you are here as a singly, and so no surprises that they head out for a beer and some company most evenings. The telly is crap!

 

Saturday

 

Friday night was late and beery, and so we woke up on Saturday feeling under par (but not so bad as to want to give up on the day). We had a quick fry up and then got ourselves into gear to pack up for a day at the ski slopes. Hungover this, of course, took about four times as long as we would have liked and so we didn’t leave until about 10.30.

 

Spent the day at Chimbalak taking it in turns to look after the baby and go skiing and it was a pretty good day. Apart from the fact that by the time we had suited and booted everyone and carried all our kit and the baby in her pushchair up from the lower car park (it deffo pays to arrive early) to the café I felt like we had done a days skiing.

 

We were supposed to be going to another party that night, but I had failed to find a babysitter and it was probably a good thing. We were totally finished after six hours at the slopes looking after the kids, and went to bed at 20.11!!

Way back when, a November hike

Another Monday and another fabulous hike. I nearly didn’t go this week, as Sasha had been complaining of a sore tummy all weekend and then had a very slight temperature on Monday morning. I was looking forlornly at the snow-topped mountains out of the window while she happily coloured in some Balamory print offs at 9am when Allia the nanny arrived.

 

“Aren’t you going hiking today?” she asked

“Well, you know, Sasha is ill and I sort of thought I ought to stay at home with her’”

“It’s a lovely day today. Klassnaya pagoda (classy weather),” said Allia

“Yes, I know, fantastic weather for a walk,” I said.

“Oh, go on. I am an old woman and I can’t go, you go up there and have a blast. We’ll be fine.”

 

I didn’t need much encouragement and 10 minutes later I was fully kitted up and running out the door to meet the hiking group at the Gorny Gigant rendez vous point.

 

And what followed was my favourite hike so far. We drove past the ski centre at Chimbalak and further up the track, about 5 kilometers on snow and ice. Stopping by some unfinished chalets (surprise, surprise, nothing in Kazakhstan seems to be finished) with one guy mixing cement at snail’s pace, or should I say credit crunch pace we parked the cars and headed up a track. The beauty of this walk as that it was not too steep but looking all the time along a fabulous wide valley, the sun rising through the sky all the way. At one point we took a short cut through the snow walking up a steep incline on our way towards a massive rock face. We passed an RIP sign to some guy who had probably met his maker there, or perhaps who had also loved this spot so much he had chosen to be laid to rest there.

 

Then we walked up to a dam built apparently to stop avalanches from crashing down into town, and water from racing down the valley. A very quick lunch as it was v cold, then a brisk walk back down to the cars.

 

On the way down, friend L and I chatted about various things including currency fluctuations and the credit crunch (even the house wives are at it now). We commented, as we floundered about how many Tenge there were to the Euro and what the Pound was at, and therefore what was best to buy where, at how glad we were that we were having this discussion on our own, walking down a mountain and without our supposedly financially-astute husbands listening to the gobbledegook and utter nonsense theories that we have both developed!