The A&P Show

A few weeks back, one of the Rotarians, Allan Richardson, invited Eddy and me to come out to Wanaka to experience the Agricultural and Pastoral Show of Otago, which he claimed was probably the biggest A&P show in the country.  Last weekend, we were finally able to go.  On the drive to Wanaka, he told us about the geology of the region, the history of the gold rush, the intricacies of wine growing, and of course, the story of Shrek the Sheep.  Shrek evaded mustering and shearing for several years, and was incredibly woolly when they found him.  The local elementary school wrote stories about him, and now he has become an international sheep sensation.

We spent the night in a sleepout at Allan’s wife’s mother’s vacation home, then got up bright and early ready for a day at the A&P.  Unfortunately, since Dunedin is cold and rainy pretty much all the time now, I assumed it would be the same in Wanaka.  When I came into the main house, my hosts laughed at my jeans and sweatshirt and told me to go put on shorts and my togs.  After figuring out what exactly my togs were (my bathing suit), I then had to admit that I had brought neither.  Another oops.  Apparently I would not make a very good boyscout.

After I had changed into the most suitable clothes I could muster, we piled into the car and drove to the show.  After parking under a tree in a field, and leaving the back of the van open so their dog, a purebred Weimaraner, wouldn’t overheat.  No one seemed particularly worried about theft, and they told us to go our own way.  So we did.  And my own way was straight to the livestock section, pausing only momentarily to gaze longingly at the merino clothes, selling for $100+ for a small shirt.

Once in the livestock section, I was reminded vividly of 4-H, and my days at the Clark County Fair.  The horses stood in open paddocks, the cows smelled bad, and the sheep stood panting in the late morning sunshine.  And then, nestled between the tractor displays, I saw them.  The alpacas.  I dragged Eddy into the fiber tent, explaining to him the intricacies of crimp and luster and handle.  Then, we ran to the show ring, where juvenile fawn females were being shown.  As I explained to Eddy the importance of good conformation and the pitfalls of an animal down on their pasterns, one of the breeders overheard me.  Instead of berating me for criticizing her animals, however, she asked me if I had shown before.  I told her I used to train alpacas for 4-H, and she practically stuffed a leadrope into my hand.  Handlers, it seems, are a rare commodity at A&P shows, and owners who do well enough to have multiple animals entered in the championship rounds often need to show multiple animals at a time.  So, I met Alyssa the alpaca, and we entered the show ring with heads held high.  Standing in the show ring, my lead line held in a perfect J, toes towards the animal, I couldn’t help but grin at the judge.  I wasn’t wearing black and white, my parents weren’t watching from the sidelines, and Alyssa, not Fabio was at the end of the line.  But as the judge paced back and forth, examining fleeces and conformation, I realized that I was finally home.

After the show, Eddy and I wandered off to eat sausages and watch the Jack Russell Terrier race.  While watching the terriers yip themselves into a frenzy, then chase wildly after a rabbit roped to a horse, was fun, the best part was watching the owners try to catch the terriers after the race.  I never knew that anything with such little legs could run so fast. 

Once the terriers had been cleared from the center field, it was time for the the Grand Parade, a procession of the champion cows, sheep, horses and, of course, alpacas.  Once again, a leadrope was stuffed into my hand, and I led Alyssa, now bedecked with her championship ribbon, into the central ring.  Unfortunately, New Zealand alpacas don’t have the benefits of 4-H training, so halfway around the ring, Alyssa decided it was time to sit down.  It took 3 full grown men, plus me, to carry her, still cushed, back to her pen.  I guess I am my Daddy’s daughter after all.

The day after the fair was spent at the lake.  Allan’s family drove us around in their boat (complete with Weimarana), and attempted to teach me to water ski.  Alas, I am still a failure in this respect, but I blame it on the glacial waters and the very large holes in my wetsuit.  Boating, waterskiing, laying in the sun on a rocky beach that only the locals knew about…it was a pretty tough gig.  We had actually been to Wanaka once before, but only Eddy and I, but since we knew nothing of the area, spent most of our time driving trying to find the things that looked vaguely interesting on brochures.  Going with Allan and his family was incredible, because it let us experience Wanaka the way Kiwis experience it.  And the Kiwis have got it right.  I have said it before and I’ll say it again: if it’s not about what you know, but who you know, then Rotarians are certainly the right people to know!

Climbing Mt. Cargill

 On Thursday morning, I woke up to the realization that I definitely had caught the "O-week cold."  Apparently, everyone parties so hard in Orientation Week (O-week), that a week or two later, the entire campus comes down with a case of this chills.  So what do I do, but decide it would be a good day to climb a mountain.  Mt. Cargill barely counts as a mountain, especially by NZ standards, but it is about a 2 minute drive from my flat.  The trailhead is actually closer to my flat than my classes.  According to NZ tramping guides, the trail is labeled a "walk," rather than a "tramp,"  and is designated easy.  Since Eddy was at work, my friend Elyse and I drove to the trailhead, and started walking. At first, the trail was wide and gently sloping.  The trees were tall and thin, with white bark and small, thin leaves.  The afternoon sun filtered through the canopy, dappling the light on the ground before us.  It was beautiful, and fun to walk and talk with a newfound friend.  Then, suddenly, the trail turned and everything changed.  The flora became dark and dense, and the afternoon sunlight could no longer penetrate the thick leaves.  The trail became rocky and steeper, although there were bridges over the many streams and ravines that we crossed.  Vines cascaded over the overhanging trees, cicadas chirped overhead, and suddenly it felt like we were in the jungle.  It was then I realized I had forgotten my water bottle.  However, a sign said we were 5 minutes from the picnic area and viewpoint, so we decided to forge onwards.

About 30 minutes later, a bend in the trail revealed yet another change in scenery.  Suddenly, the dense flora disappeared, replaced by short bushes and "cabbage trees," which look like palm trees, but aren't.  The muddy, trail was replaced by gravel, and large rocks to step over.  Each bend in the trail looked like it could be the promised picnic area, but turned out to be only another, steeper switchback.  The rocks turned into stairs, which led up and up, until suddenly, there were no more cabbage trees.  Instead, there was an incredible, 360 degree view.  On one side, was Dunedin, hills covered by little white houses, and the crystal blue harbor.  The ocean lay beyond, empty of land all the way to antarctica.  On the other side were hills, bright green hills that were too far down to see the sheep.  But we could hear them.

Something about the lay of the land amplified certain sounds. The howl of a dog, the chime of a flute, cows mooing; we could hear all this, but somehow, the sounds of the city were absent.  It was beautiful, and as we sat and ate lunch, baked by the UV rays made stronger by the hole in the ozone layer, I realized this was something that could only have happened here. 

And so it begins

My first day of class is also the day of my 1^st speech to my Rotary club.  Yikes!  I wake up at 6am for a 9am class, petrified that I have forgotten to do something, that I didn’t prepare fully enough, that I somehow missed an assignment emailed to my student account, which I have neglected to check.  By 6:30, I realize none of this is true.  I go back to sleep.  By 8, I am awake again, and realizing that it is an hour long walk to class, because it’s located past the university, in the hospital.  I throw on clothes, run to catch the bus, miss my stop and end up in the Octagon, a 10 minute walk from where I need to be.  I practically run to my class and arrive to find the doors still locked.  It is 8:35.  I really need to get a watch.            

My epidemiology class, usually filled with no more than 25 students, has 37 in attendance.  In the back, there is a man with a very large camera, recording the lecture for the students in Christchurch, whose classroom has been marked as “potentially unstable.”  My professor, a slim woman with an extremely quiet voice, is clearly unused to the camera, and keeps glancing at it and addressing the Christchurch students as if they were here with us.  And soon, many of them will join our class in person, choosing to leave their damaged homes in order to continue their studies.  We are going to need a bigger room.

The students in the class are the most diverse group I have ever seen.  I am one of the youngest people there, but certainly not the only American.  My RAS twin, Chase, an Ambassadorial Scholar from Kentucky also earning his DPH (and taking every class, all year, with me), sits beside me.  Across the room there are at least 2 other Americans, and several Canadians.  There are also students from Zambia, Samoa, China, the UK.  There some are recent graduates, with degrees ranging from anthropology to physical therapy to veterinary studies, but there are also doctors and nurses and mental health professionals.  Just hearing all of the credentials makes my head spin.  And my professor told me I would find the course less challenging than most of the other students.  Hah! 

The introduction to epidemiology, however, is a lot like an introduction to statistics.  Boring.  True, the case studies are much more interesting (studies that determined the causes/treatments of scurvy, cholera, plague, etc, are MUCH more up my alley than the examples I had to put up with in Stats 101), but the ideas are the same.  Randomization, observational vs. analytical, sample selection: important, but oh so obvious ideas.  Oh well.  At least the homework should be easy.

The “Comparative Health Systems” class, however, fascinated me from the start.  After reading the first two assigned articles, I was beginning to wonder if the American health care system is the worst possible system in the world.  By the end of the 6^th article (this was before the 1^st class started), I was convinced.  15% of the population is not insured (and therefore, basically have no access to health care), and we spend upwards of $7300 per capita, per year, on medical care.  New Zealand spend $2454 pc/year.  Not only is our system overly expensive and inequitable, but the quality of care, reliability of services, efficiency and coordination of care, is abysmal.  We have one of the lowest life expectancies, and the highest infant mortality rates, of any industrial countries.  Many “developing” countries have higher quality care than we do.  Before this class, I knew some of these things (the high percent of unemployment, the high cost of health care), but I did not know its extent.  Furthermore, I did not know that so many other countries were so much more advanced than us.  I knew the Netherlands, the UK, Canada and France have excellent health services, but did not know that Singapore’s health care system is rated far above our own.  I did not know that the US is the only industrialized country to continue to use the market-driven model of health care.  Our health care system is on par with that of Ghana, Thailand and Nepal.  Reading these statistics, for myself, in scholarly, published journals, was shocking.

Another aspect of this class that shocked me was my own ignorance about other health systems.  To be fair, many of the students in the class had worked in the healthcare system for most of their lives, or had at least lived in New Zealand for more than 3 weeks.  But when the professor asked for examples of primary health in a secondary or tertiary setting, or for models of a health promotion scheme, my answers were met with an uncomfortable pause and a “well, maybe that is how it works in the US.”  Next class, I am going to sit on my hands. 

Shaken

New Zealand is in a state of shock right now.  65 casualties, and counting.  This is a small country, where everyone knows everyone else, so everyone has a friend, co-worker or relative living in Christchurch.  University of Otago has a campus there, which is closed.  The airport is closed (although reopening for local flights only today, to help get survivors out and medical help in).  Cell phone services, even here, were slow (and in Christchurch, they were virtually nonexistent).  All the headlines in the newspaper are about the quake, the victims, the heroic attempts to rescue survivors still caught in the wreckage.  It’s like 9/11 all over again, on a smaller scale (smaller country, smaller number of casualties), but this time there is no one to blame. 

I am lucky – my day yesterday was very uneventful.  I only found out about the quake when I answered a Skype call from my Dad frantically asking if I was OK.  I had been out running (or maybe in the shower) at the time the quake hit, and didn’t even feel it.  Many people here in Dunedin did, though.  Eddy said he noticed because he got dizzy and then saw the liquid in the beakers shaking (typical chemist).  My Rotary counselor, Margie, said she actually had to brace herself in the doorway because her building shook so hard.  Dunedin is 360 kilometers (about 200 miles) south of Christchurch, so the people who felt in most were on the higher stories of buildings.  I am thankful my flat seems to be located on a very sound piece of rock.

Although I don’t know anyone in Christchurch, my heart goes out to its residents.  The city has been plagued with aftershocks (this earthquake is even considered an aftershock) since the 7.1 magnitude quake last September.  While New Zealand is used to earthquakes, several residents told me that last September was the first time Christchurch had experienced a major one, and that geologists only recently discovered it is built just a few miles from a fault line.  Now, they have been plagued with them, and their fear is tangible, even down here.  For lack of a better word, everyone here is shaken.  Hopefully I will be able to make myself useful and volunteer to help with some sort of disaster relief, but being so new around here, I don’t really know where to start.  At the very least, it will certainly be interesting to begin studying public health in the wake of this public health disaster.          

Adjusting to the Long White Cloud

There must have been a drive from the airport to Russell’s house, but I have absolutely no recollection of it.  After more than 48 hours on airplanes and in airports, I may have been walking and talking, but I was not awake.  Those first few days in Dunedin were spent in a haze of errand running and getting lost. I don’t remember much about those days – I know I set up a bank account, checked into my flat, walked around, bought groceries – but what I did and when blurs together like it was years ago, rather than a week.  What I do remember is that I wrote a list.  It was a list of things I learned, things that surprised me, that I wish I had known or done.  And here it is: 

-          Believe the weather report. I looked at the weather report for Dunedin before I left for India.  50^oF and raining, it said.  I figured that it was getting the same rains as Australia, that it would all blow over by the time I got there.  Besides, Google Earth had a picture of my flat, and in that picture it is sunny and there is a palm tree.  Plus, February is dead smack in the middle of summer here in the southern hemisphere.  So I packed for India, and figured I could buy some warmer clothes once winter set in.  Nope.  The first thing I bought in New Zealand was a sweater from Kmart.  New Zealand wasn't named "The Land of the Long, White Cloud" for nothing. 

-          Metric System Being a scientist, I know how the metric system works.  However, taking my bench/classroom knowledge and applying it in the store is a completely different story.  I have no idea how many bananas 1 kg of bananas is.  Or how fast 100km/hour really is.   My first trip to the grocery store nearly stopped my heart, until I realized that the prices were per Kg.   

-          DON’T BUY ANYTHING without talking to my hosts Signing a lease to a flat before seeing it was stupid – the landlord convinced me that it would be impossible to find a flat once I arrived.  Lies!  There are plenty of flats left even now, many of them better and cheaper.  Had I asked my host sponsor (to give myself some credit, I didn’t know who it was until I was already in India), he would have given me the real story.  Plus, Rotarians like the give me free stuff.  I have so far accumulated a tent (not a backpacking one, Mom, sorry, you still need to send mine), a stove, camping dishes/utensils, dish towels, several guidebooks, roadmaps, a wok, dishware, silverware, apricots (those are gone already), a keyboard AND a violin.       

-          Look ALL ways when crossing the street Just looking left and right isn’t good enough.  I would probably be roadkill by now if Eddy hadn’t figured out quite quickly how oblivious I am.  When cars drive on the left, they suddenly become able to appear out of absolutely nowhere. 

-          Don’t worry so much My first few days were actually quite slow.  Not knowing anyone else, I ended up sitting in my flat quite a lot, worrying about how I wasn’t experiencing things or meeting people.  Eddy helped me to get out of this funk.  Journaling, reading the local newspaper, walking around, going to meetings (Rotary meetings especially), helped me to slowly realize that this is where I am, this is how it is, get used to it.

-          Even if it looks just like home at first glance, look again. There is always something new and incredible to find

India (Part I) - Eating

I’ve never read Eat, Pray, Love, nor have I seen the movie, but I sincerely believe that it has been mis-titled. It is my impression (one I’ve only gotten from commercials, so forgive me if I’m wrong), that the “Eat” portion occurs in Italy, “Pray” in India, and “Love” in Bali.  My experience of India, however, was “EAT!”

Bincy and her fiancé Snehal picked us up from the Ahmedabad airport at 3:30 in the morning.  After a seemingly short drive to Gandhinagar, we arrived at Bincy’s house.  Once at Bincy's house, Eddy and I were greeted by Bincy's mom, Suma, and tiny cups of piping hot chai. Indian Chai is different (and certainly more delicious) than any tea I have ever tasted.  The spices are crushed pretty much directly from the plants then added to buffalo milk, which is creamy and rich.  A tiny, espresso sized cup has more flavor than a Starbucks Grande Frappacino (or whatever crap it is Francine drinks), and certainly is healthier.  This was my introduction to India: welcome to your new home, drink up!

And eat and drink we did!  Bincy had to spend 2 whole days at the salon, getting manicured and pedicured, hair treatments and skin treatments and who knows what else, so Eddy and I were left to our own devices. Our first days were quite simple: sleep, eat breakfast, sit around, eat lunch, nap, tour around for an hour or so, eat dinner, sleep.  Suma decided that she was going to cook all of the traditional Gujarati dishes for us, but she only had 3 days to do it, so each and every meal was a feast.  There was rice, and pancakes, and roti, and parrotha and puri, for the breads, served with every kind of curry, fish and meat (chicken and a dark meat, maybe buffalo?) and vegetable, all with different arrays of spices.  Everything was cooked from scratch.  The chili peppers were fresh from the vendor, every spice was hand crushed from the plant/seed by Suma herself.  And the breads were made by soaking the rice and/or lentils (depending on what type of bread it was) overnight with yeast powder, then frying each slice individually over a fire.  As far as I could tell, each dish was distinctly different, united only by the fact that every one was spicy as hell. 

I will admit that I am a sissy when it comes to spice.  However, I pride myself in being willing to try almost anything, and after hearing how much work went into each dish, resolved to finish everything on my plate. The first night, they served the fish curry, meat curry, dal, rice, and some fluffy white potato pancake that I still have no idea what it’s called.  Each serving seemed to be the size of a small mountain, and before I could get halfway through the first few dishes, Suma would be there to spoon more onto my plate.  Did I mention I was eating with my hands?  The potato pancakes were easy – just scoop a tiny bit of curry on, then stuff a huge into my mouth.  The rice I had more trouble with.  The trick is adding enough of the curry to get the rice to stick together, then balling it up and shoveling it into your mouth without dropping it everywhere.  Sounds easy enough right?  Now, here was my dilemma; the curry was spicy.  Really, really spicy.  A single bit set my mouth on fire, and yes, spice seems to understand the powers of summation.  The more curry I used, the easier it was to get the food into my mouth, but the more my mouth would burn, and the less I would be able to eat without diving for my water glass.  However, if I used less curry, I ate more slowly and thus gave Suma more time to pile second, third and fourth helpings onto my plate.

This was where Eddy came in.  Eddy quickly mastered the art of eating with his right hand, and was sopping up the curries with remarkable ease.  True, his face turned fire engine red, but he could shovel that food like a true Indian.  So, being the gentleman he is, we devised a system in which I (not so covertly), would pass him the spiciest bits under the table.  This was a source of much hilarity for our hosts, and Bincy soon began introducing him as “Eddy-who-can-eat-like-an-Indian” to her family.  I then became the “Angel of the House” because I was so sweetly giving my food to my “husband”. Hah.  If only they knew.

The system worked quite well for a while.  After a few days, a caterer from Kerala (the southern state where most of Bincy’s family is from) took over, so that Suma could concentrate on Bincy and the seemingly hundreds of friends and family members who had arrived.  Kerala cuisine is very different from Gujarati – it is less spicy (or so it seemed at first), uses more rice and less bread, and seems to use coconut in everything.  This would have been all fine and dandy, except that now the food was served by the men, so the portions became even larger.  Every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner, was a 3-course feast, and guests had to eat in shifts because there were so many of us.  Bincy and her “honored guests” ate first – we were included in this group – then the friends, and finally, the multitudes of relatives.  Because no one else could eat until we finished, I vowed to speed up my eating (imagine how slowly I eat with utensils, then incorporate the elements of spicy food and eating with my fingers, and you’ve got yourself a 2 hour lunch, easy).  Speed proved to be my downfall.

On the day of the wedding, neither Eddy nor I were feeling very well, so I decided to get a lunch plate that we would share.  A few bites later, it became apparent that Eddy would not be able to eat any of it.  Sitting with a mountain in front of me, my knight in shining armor battling his own inner dragons, I realized that it was up to me to eat the entire plate.  I began slowly, and things were going well.  The yellow curry was quite sweet, the dahl was delicious, and there was plenty of rice and water.  As I ate, I gained courage and speed, mixing the curries together quickly in hopes that if I finished quickly, I could fold my plate over before the men came back to deliver seconds.  And then, I found it.  A huge, fresh, green chili, the kind whose seeds I had been scrupulously avoiding.  I put my tongue inside of it.  My eyes welled up, my nose sprung a leak, and my mouth caught fire.  I spit it out, shoveled the remainder of my rice into my mouth, and downed 2 glasses of water.  The Indians all saw me, and laughed.  By my second helping of rice, I knew it was a lost cause.  I folded my plate, ran into the house, and threw up.

Unfortunately, that was my last experience with what I now consider to be the real Indian cuisine.  True, there was a lot of food at Bincy’s reception, but I was still too shaken to try anything that Eddy didn’t pre-screen for me.  After the wedding, Bincy’s family started letting me serve myself (although they still made fun of my Natalie-sized portions), and sweet breads and lentils became a more common occurrence.  Then, it was off on a train to Delhi, which in 9 hours served a snack, tea, dinner, dessert, another tea, and breakfast, with tea.  Once in Delhi, we ate the complimentary breakfast of tea, toast and boiled eggs at our hotel, and ate “dunch” (dinner/lunch, since we couldn’t possibly stomach both) wherever our guidebook or guide recommended.  Food in Delhi was still delicious, but it tasted like the food you can find in Indian restaurants in Seattle.  We tasted our first naan in Delhi. 

In many ways, my time in India, especially my time with Bincy’s family, was defined by food.  Obviously, much more happened (don’t worry, I will post about the wedding, as well as all of the incredible sights along the way), but the food represented what was probably the most important aspect of India to me; family.  There are incredible sights to see pretty much anywhere you go in the world, and while India may have more than its fair share, I honestly don’t think I know enough about the history of culture of the subcontinent to truly appreciate everything there is to see.  For me, what was most special about India was getting to live with a family, Bincy’s family, see their world and share in Bincy’s very special day.  And while the food itself may have been a trial for me, the moments surrounding the food were incredibly special.    

Arrival in New Zealand

Well, I've arrived.  My Rotary host, Russell, picked Eddy and I up from the airport late on Sunday night.  It may be summer here, but when we arrived, it was cold and pouring rain.  And we landed pretty much in a cow pasture.  I couldn't decide if it feels more like Seattle or Wisconsin here, but it certainly feels like home.

I know I have a lot more to post, especially about India, but this is mostly just a test run.  If this works (and once I have gotten more settled here in Dunedin), I will post more. 

~Natalie

Ps.  My Rotary host already calls me "Nat"  =(