Support Carl Bart
…and so we find ourselves in this awful predicament. Our darling son is hurt in a road accident, we have no knowledge of how it happened, just that he has serious brain injury, we have to get him home, but the cost is immense. How on earth we find the money, God only knows. There is no help from the Government, not even in the short term, and the state hospitals don’t have the facilities for his condition, so every day he stays in the private hospital costs £1,200. He won’t be well enough to leave for some time, and then there’s the air ambulance home. If he is well enough to come by stretcher on a scheduled flight we are looking at £35,000 to £45,000, so with the hospital fees of at least £30,000, that’s a lot of money to find. If he isn’t well enough for a stretcher flight and we end up arranging an air ambulance that will be £100,000.
We have managed to raise £60,000 by re-mortgaging our house, but we will be unlikely to ever pay that off, being now 59 and 60 years old, so we will have to sell at some point. We have pooled all our credit cards to raise another £25,000, so if all stays as planned we sort of have enough. The problems start though when we have to start repaying, so absolutely anything that can be done to raise funds to help will be great and truly appreciated.
Jealous of those coffee shop kids
Reading online reviews I find myself becoming irritable at people I don’t even know who seem able to spend literally hours every day in coffee shops.
It’s a more watered down version of my incredulity at those who always seem to be on the move. People with not just the time but the money to be mobile.
It’s just jealousy of course. But take coffee bar time out of Hanoi and that’s a large chunk of the city’s allure gone.
No time is more delicious than weekday time. A coffee in an empty cafe on a Thursday morning is so much sweeter than when you’re wedged between noisy tables on a weekend.
Similarly there are few activities more decadent than watching a movie in an otherwise empty cinema on a Wednesday afternoon.
For expats it’s always about the location. We focus on where we live. Everything, good, bad or indifferent we attribute to our location.
But when the location is just out there, beyond office walls, doesn’t that change everything?
Making sustainability unsustainable
When I worked at KOTO the boss used to like quoting that rather over-used fishing analogy:
Buy a man a fish and he will be able to eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he will be able to eat every day.
The aim obviously is to demonstrate that it’s better to educate than just to give. Those two lines were repeated so often by NGO workers they became the textbook example of sustainability.
Walking past Westlake today there was a guy fishing with maybe thirty lines. Each one was unspooled and wedged under a rock as he went up and down the lines reeling in fish.
As ever Vietnam adds its own twist to common wisdom:
Buy a man a fish and he will be able to eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he will be able to eat everyday.
If he catches more than one fish he can sell it and buy another line.
Then another line and another line.
Till all the fish are gone.
Paying for health care is about more than money
I got the inevitable cold when flying back to the UK and since then I’ve added new layers of blocked noses and sore throats. Then I spent a week dashing to the toilet with an upset stomach. It all culminated in a night of sickness, diarrhoea and assorted sweats and shivering.
So I went to the docs.
To set the context we have health care insurance via work albeit at a level that doesn’t begin to cover the costs of an “international” clinic. If I was a little less squeamish and had better Vietnamese I might consider attending a more local level clinic.
What it has taken me a while to realise is just how, compared to the UK’s free National Health Service, paying for health care radically alters the dynamic of the treatment.
Looking back nine times out of ten, examinations in the UK meant someone looking down your throat, in your ears and listening to your chest. They’d ask you “does this hurt?” and then “how about now?”
You’d then get a prescription and you’d walk to the pharmacy across the road and pick up your medicine and head home.
Originally that used to cost you zero pence – later you paid only the set prescription charge.
I don’t recall ever having tests during a visit. I suppose if the above diagnosis had failed to make a difference that’s when they’d do them. Back home “tests” have a sense of foreboding about them like they’re the last throw of the dice.
Yesterday there were three tests, and a fourth one which was unrelated to the illness but they wanted to check on it. The tests were processed there and then and I was diagnosed and dispatched with the aforementioned bag of drugs.
All very thorough and, in this context, nothing to complain about.
But back home the Doctor controls the costs. We trust them to do what is right. They prescribe as a result of what the symptoms tell them – rather than what any costly tests might have confirmed. Here each test is a choice.
To compare it to a car, when buying tyres at Kwik-Fit and being told I also need new break pads, I never know what to believe but suspect up-selling and decide to leave it a couple more months. When it’s your health, you can hardly say no to anything. You can’t cross your fingers and hope to stay healthy.
Back home the “do I really need to?” decision is taken by the doctor themselves. Mostly we wouldn’t even know there was a decision to be made. That must add its own pressures.
Perhaps this is why I’ve noticed among British people a respect for doctors that I don’t always see in other nationalities.
Here it’s not as if the doctors can ever ask your budget before prescribing the best method of health care.
They can’t say: “What, you’ve only got $20? Right, well take a box of these and take two a day for a week. That should kill most things but if it gets any worse then come back.”
We tend to think of paid-for medicine versus free medicine simply along the lines of cost and we debate the ethics accordingly. What we don’t take into account is how that simple difference drastically changes everything in terms of our treatment.
I should say that the international clinic response to my not-to-serious sickness is as extensive and impressive a level of health care as I am sure I will ever receive. However, I’d still be happier with the NHS approach where cutting corners to save costs is part of the system.
Because, in the end, if there was tests or treatment I really needed, I’d absolutely trust them to provide them.
Vietnam: The Next Generation
With Friday a national holiday we made the frankly ridiculous decision to visit Vincom Towers. We arrived, realised our mistake and got out.
Yesterday was also the seventh anniversary of me arriving in Vietnam. Back then it felt like there was teenagers everywhere. The sheer youthfulness of the country gave it so much of its optimism and vitality.
Now, looking around the shopping centre, it felt like those teenagers had become parents and it was their toddlers which had become the dominant age group. An altogether different dynamic.
Vietnam’s population has doubled since the end of the war. Their parents were the first in generations not to suffer war. You’d hope the majority of these kids won’t suffer poverty.
So what of the next generation?
It’s hard to guess whether the good news continues or whether they’re the ones who’ll start to pay for the growth of, well, pretty much everything.
Westlake swimmers
The One Night Stand
I promised all-round good guy Daragh Halpin that I’d post this on the blog. Daragh, apparently will be making his stand-up debut.
Rather him than me.
Hanoi – did it change too much or not enough?
During the two and a half years I spent in Vietnam during my VSO/KOTO era I can recall only ever meeting one person who claimed not to like Hanoi.
The fact that it was just the once makes it stand out. I was in a bar chatting to a backpacker and they asked if I lived here. I said I did and they were astounded.
“How could anyone live here,” they said. “It’s horrible”.
I won’t tell you the miserable hellhole they came from. Each to their own.
But lately it seems no one admits to liking Hanoi.
There’s no doubting Hanoi has changed. Nothing stays the same in Vietnam but did it really change that much?
I came here first as a wide-eyed backpacker and was overwhelmed by many of the things that people still seem to be complaining about today. I was scared to cross the street. I was ripped off repeatedly. I got sick from the food. I had cockroaches in my room.
And yet people still seemed to like Hanoi – we liked it in spite of these things.
We loved it because it wasn’t like Singapore – now people seem to wish it was.
There’s no doubting that my circle of friends has changed and shrunk. Back in my volunteer days I’d be a regular around Hanoi’s bars and now I’m more likely to go out for a quiet meal with the missus. Are those pubbing and clubbing still loving it? Is it just the olds who are less positive?
Perhaps young and old expats want almost the opposite of each other. Cheap beer, illegal drinking dens, motorbike madness and the complete absence of a nanny state – all good for young volunteers and backpackers. Meanwhile the marrieds worry about healthcare and education, air quality and having somewhere for the kids to run around.
But I’m tired of meeting people who talk only of escaping.
I wonder how much social media plays its part. In giving us platforms to criticise we forget the positives. Didn’t we we used to love Vietnam’s once-charming crapness? We’d giggle and order another beer and our Vietnamese hosts would giggle with us.
Do we expect more from the country now? Should Vietnam have grown up?
Did it change or did we change? Did it change too much or not enough?
For the record, I still love it. That’s not to say I wouldn’t one day welcome the chance to work somewhere else. I guess Hanoi now fits the role that Newcastle used to for me. It’s the place I’ll always come back to. And I know however much Hanoi grinds me down – I’d miss it if I left. Frankly I miss Hanoi during a weekend in Hoi An.
I sometimes think that expats are scared to love Hanoi. Loving Hanoi is for tourists. Being positive is seen as naive. You need to be brave to be positive.
I hear negativity from Vietnamese colleagues too. I hate that most. Is this something the more international, English speaking crowd have picked up from hanging out with tays? Did we do this to them?
So what did Hanoi lose? What stopped it being lovable? Is it just us? Do we ask too much?
A talk on blogging: @ourman at Bookworm
A talk on all things “Our Man in Hanoi” and blogging from my point of view
Time/Date: June 29th 7.30pm
Where: Bookworm, 44 Chau Long
Profits to Blue Dragon.
Cost: 50,000 VND. Bookings, apparently, adviseable.
Click the banner for the rest of the “Festival of Words” programme. I hope to see you there.
Today has not been a fun day.
Purely as a result of mine ( and obviously other people’s) social media activities I spent a significant amount of time today dealing with people who think they know me and as a result have it in for me.
A third party told me that someone I have never met is spreading rumours about me. This is so ****ing sixth form. Pleeease. Just what is going on here?
My last post, freakishly, prompted a response from someone promoting Moonbear rescue suggesting that I was somehow in favour of their culling – or at the very least against their rescue. Like I said, freakish, but it was two hours of my Sunday trying to explain why this premise was just so ludicrous. And they still didn’t get it.
Turns out, however, that this argument was prompted by something I posted two years ago on an entirely unrelated topic.
Back in the real world lawyers are fighting on behalf of a Premiership player who wants to take on Twitter. Daft. Except that now we all have these platforms it’s time to be a little bit more responsible in terms of how we use them. Time to start being “excellent to one another”.
Strangely, in Hanoi, a lot of people still introduce themselves to me saying they recognise me from the blog. There was a time when I enjoyed this z-list expat celebrity. It was very useful when I was a charity fundraiser. Not now. Either me or the world changed but I am out.
It’s taken me the last couple of hours miserably staring out at Westlake to make this decision but nothing is worth this crap.
If this is some kind of karma payback for anything I have said before then I apologise but I’ll happily continue to debate with the reasoned. It’s the deluded and the vindictive I am less happy to deal with.
Blogging in Vietnam? Well in the end it wasn’t the Government that shut me down.
Hopefully this isn’t the end but it’s certainly the end for sometime to come. Social media has been a large part of my life in recent years. It’s been a companion in a miserable posting in Cameroon, it’s been a business, it’s been an area of expertise that has got me a job and allowed me to stay in this city I love. But I’m married and employed now, I’d rather concentrate on that.
I’ll leave the comments on but I’m moderating. I’m not taking a kicking for anyone’s pleasure.
