Most of a letter to a friend

This really long response to a letter from a friend in France is basically everything I would have wanted to post as my next post, so here it is in (most of its) entirety:

I don't think we're EMTs because I asked my cousin and she said that when she was a Richmond, VA EMT she could give patients aspirin, epipens, insulin, etc. So I think EMT is חובש, medic, and that we're Certified First Responders and nothing higher. We took a sixty hour training course before starting to work. Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for the collective health of the citizens of Haifa) I have yet to use the CPR training we spent so long doing. I have used the trauma protocol though, but not in a car accident or anything.

Most of our patients are pensioners who’ve collapsed or fallen in their houses, and so we just take blood pressure and carry them out of their houses. Once, though, a woman showed all the textbook symptoms of brain injury (unequal pupil response, uneven limb strength, hematomae around the eyes and ears...) so Beth, my partner, and I strapped her to a backboard and carried her out to the stretcher. Her son does freelance journalism and asked if he could take our picture, but, following protocol, Tal, my driver, said no. Two weeks later he came into the volunteers' den and asked if I remembered the photographer's mother. I did, of course, because it was a backboard and because her granddaughter, just about our age, was so incredibly devoted in the ambulance and at Rambam. (When Beth went into the shock room to get hospital stickers, I told her not to let her face betray what she'd seen inside--this grandmother with all her clothes cut off and losing consciousness--so that the granddaughter wouldn't break into those horribly devastating silent tears.) Anyway, so the son had written a little thing in an advertising newspaper. I've posted the lines on facebook, but here's the acknowledgement of our silent work: "...when they ring the patient to the hospital and disappear to another patient, we forget them immediately..." The full translation is in the post below.

Other interesting calls have included an unconscious junkie, a 3rd-tier soccer game, a 7 year old who fainted after a shot and cried because she couldn't go back to class, and, of course, our trip to Tirah, Israel's biggest psychiatric enter. Amputees are always very sad to deal with. And one day I set o bunch of records: a one-month old was the patient and also we took another one all the way to Tel Aviv, 228 km by the end.

Though certainly a majority of drivers are Jewish, there is a very respectable proportion of Arabs. I realize that the two categories are not parallel, but in Israel that's always the distinction: never "Jews and Muslims" or "Europeans and Arabs". But here it's not the comparison I really want anyway.

Being with all these Arabs has certainly brought me closer to the sort of "they're not all _____" idea. But on the other hand, nearly all (maybe even properly all) of them are Christian Arabs. So it's not quite the same; these guys are not from Jenin and Tulkarm. At the beginning of Intifada 2.0, Arabs from Haifa who live in the neighborhood Wadi Nisnas were beating up the "those" Arabs, who had come to rile things up with the Jews. I think Haifa is unique in this respect, that because there is so much mixing (I'm not sure really about "integration" so I'll stick to "mixing" as "interaction") there haven't really been those tensions here. Since I live in the valley--Lower Haifa--it's easy to always find my way home even if I don't know exact streets (just follow the route water would take). I've felt plenty comfortable walking through the narrow street/alleys of the Wadi at night, listening to a language I can't understand and reading signs I can with difficulty read half of—and smelling the best cooking in the world. I don't quite yet have the guts/gall/insanity/chutzpah to invite myself over, and I probably won't, but damn that would be an extremely interesting evening. I suppose that these conversations, should they ever occur, would fit into the "mixed-up, fractious, estranged family that is Israeli society," or something along those lines.

I've discovered a show called "Az Herzl Amar", on a few afternoons a week while we're at the station. The two hosts, we'll call them, take up an issue and go up to seemingly random Israelis about the issue. I've already seen one about internal and external religion: a guy who follows all 613 but doesn't wear a kippah because he doesn't identify with the dati crowd; a guy who claims "absolutely no religion" in his life, yet when pressed says that yes, in fact, he is totally shomer kashrut and shabbat, only he doesn't light candles or welcome shabbat in a symbolic way. That question has arisen a few times, as in, "Gideon, why the kippah if you don't _____?" One driver, Shlomi, put a kippah on his short, gelled hair, brought tefillin out of the ambulance, sat outside, finished his cigarette, davened for a little while in front of an unloading truck, returned the tefillin, took off the kippah, came in, and asked, "Little fucker, you want to lose in shesh-besh?" So what am I supposed to make of him? And what's he supposed to make of me, with kippah, without tefillin?

Another episode was about different Arabs and what adjectives they used to describe themselves (one, an "Israeli Palestinian Arab") nationalitywise, and which of those they wanted or were proud to be. The principal of Jerusalem's Beit Safafa school (the now-absorbed suburb was cut in half 1948-67; today half of the Arabs a re Jerusalem Arabs and the other half are PA Arabs...); the female DJ of a cutting-edge Nazareth radio station who much much prefers living with two Jewish roommates in Nazareth Illit, the Jewish suburb. That one I didn't get to see the end of, because of a all, and I haven't seen the program in the intervening three days, but it's a great insight into the type of journalism I wish I were able to do. One ingredient in the social stew that's totally invisible (Ethiopians are finally coming through--see "Idan Raichel"--though there aren't so many in Haifa) is the "Thailandim", young women born either there or here to Thai parents and who almost exclusively work as state-provided personal assistants to our most common type of patient. I must see two or three of these aides every day and as a general rule there's no general rule about their linguistic ability. Some are fluent in Hebrew, some only in English, some in neither. Which makes it very hard, sometimes, to get necessary information like address and phone, etc. But also, I feel like I can't interact with them at all like I usually do with patients who seem to be in the mood for a short conversation. Just two hours ago, for example, upon finding out that an electrician was 59 years old, I asked, "Before or after Israel's birth?" Turns out he was born in Cyprus before May and his parents were survivors (dad escaped a camp and as a partisan fought with the Red Army against Germany) who were one the boat Af-Al-Pi-Chen, which was turned around by the Brits off the Haifa coast. Today, that boat is one of the first things you see when you enter Haifa along the southern coast... So a very interesting story (the man IS Israeli history; think: like Israel, he was also 19 at the Six Day War...). But I cwant to ask all these Thai women about their stories and I can't, because the focus of the ambulance trip is their ward, not them, and also I'm worried about sounding condescending in asking them. Like: how often would you ask your friend's Polish cleaning lady about her story?

Switching topics entirely, except for the "Israel" and "story" segues: most of my reading has not been Koenigsburg for childhood-completion, but instead Uris and Begin, etc. for Israeli politics/society completion. I read Exodus after Legacy. I just finished Begin's The Revolt, in which I found myself, much to my dismay, replacing his "us" with "Palestinians" and his "them" (variously to mean "Brits" and "Haganah") with "post-'67 Israel". The language he uses regarding freedom fighting and justifications, etc. is very similar to the language the literate Palestinians use in justifying their current actions. But then I start to feel bad because I've almost fallen for the trap that so much of the world has: yes, maybe this is a terrorist and this is a terrorist. But this terrorist warms and attacks military targets, blowing up supply trains or stealing weapons, whereas this terrorist walks into Israel two days ago and explodes himself in a bakery in Israel's resort/tourist city. Otherwise, though...the Irgun saw any British soldier anywhere as an Occupier and didn't recognize British jurisdiction at all and the Arabs say the same about Israelis (not just soldiers; hence the justification for the Regev/Goldwasser kidnappings in July). Now I'm a dozen pages into O Jerusalem, the epigraph of which consists of three quotes: one Jewish, one Christian, one Muslim, each of which includes the English "O Jerusalem". I think it's supposed to present all the sides, not like THE Haganah book like Exodus or THE Irgun book like The Revolt. I like reading these after being in the places, so now that I've left Jerusalem and know it as well as I will, I'm reading this 550-page monster even though we were supposed to have read it before Year Course. I also picked up Inheriting the Holy Land from a box my Chevy Chase hosts were getting rid of.

And now moving totally away: I've lauded Haifa a little already but I'll continue a bit now. First of all, unlike our Jerusalem quarters, which are off the southwest corner of maps from before about 1995 and were accessible via three bus lines, the Absorption Center here has about twelve lines that stop right in front and probably another twelve that jump over our stop but stop a block away in either direction. We are certainly located on an arterial road here, which is a great change. And we get free (well, I guess it's from tuition money) monthly bus passes, so the only transportation drawback is that most buses end at 11 instead of midnight. Well that and the fact that Haifa is Mt. Carmel, so any streets shown parallel on the map are probably several hundred vertical feet apart. Most stairway-shortcuts aren't shown on maps, which means that in looking for them you often walk up 50-100 stairs only to find yourself in a backyard and having to retrace your ascent to its well-lit beginning. Jerusalem is built on mountain tops; Haifa is built up the side of a mountain. Though of course there can be only one יפה נוף ("nice view") street, nearly all the hospitals are located on streets with amazing views. I know we can see Akko and Nahariyya, and I wouldn't be surprised if Lebanon were visible on a clear day. There is an absurd number of museums here, art and otherwise. Only problem with that is that we only work morning shifts, 7 AM - 3 PM, so museums lose soon after then. There's the Bahá'í Gardens, which we finally got to as a group yesterday. I had no idea that what I thought was a (redundantly?) staple landmark of the city was put into planning phase after I was born and was only opened in 2001. The Shrine has been there since the Bab was martyred in Persia in the 1850s (?) and was buried here in the Carmel, but on the 19-terraced Garden rising up the face of the mountain and looking down on the German Colony is almost still under warranty! Haifa, like Paris, has a lot of students because of Haifa University and the Technion, but since I'm not doing academic stuff and I've had only four patients under 25 (only one of whom was old enough to vote) I've only met a handful of them: a handful here at the Absorption Center and a handful and the Haifa Ultimate game I finally got to a fortnight ago. Secondly (OK, just putting that in there because I had a "first of all"), I guess I just really like it up here. Maybe I'll come back when it's warm enough to get in the Mediterranean past my knee, but for now it's a beautiful backdrop to read against.

Missing home is minimal for a few reasons. Most importantly, when I'm online one of the girls or maybe Grandma is almost always invariably also. (This may change now that I've managed to short out the screen of my laptop so the contents are only visible under the proper lighting conditions.) Also there's the beautiful invention of podcasts, allowing me 59 minutes of Ira Glass, 47 of Peter Sagal, 7 of Will Shortz, and 6 of Michael Feldman per week, in addition to up to 24 5-minute segments of NPR news per day. I just can't wait for Click and Clack and Garrison Keillor to finally get their dinosaur asses into the 21st century. Then it will be like a complete weekend of radio spread into as many I'm-bored/dish-washing segments as I need--at my convenience. On which note I'm glad to read that you didn't make the same iPod mistake with your year abroad as you did with your summer.

I almost forgot to add my current obsession: Israeli license plates. They take the form XX-YYY-ZZ. I've figured out, therefore, that there are 3390 possible plates in which (XX) * (ZZ) = (YYY). Out of 10 million plates, this means one "success" in about every 2950 cars seen. Figure you can get access to about 25 cars per minute while driving in an ambulance and you should "win" about once in two hours, so about one a day for the time we spend driving. But this is a game because though I've been aware of this game for approaching-four months now, I've gotten nothing. Recently I had my first three addition wins (for example: 79-099-20 and 27-029-02) and today I got 40-020-02 for a division win. A friend saw a subtraction finally, and then a few days later I saw one: 95-088-07.

But the multiplication just isn't there and it's really frustrating how close the plates sometimes are.

Now that I've finished this megillah I've got to go learn 1 and 10 of Esther to read in front of some Hadassah ladies net month. Great thing about Israel: 48 straight hours of Purim if you do it right! So come on down and join me...

In the News

Found in the Kolbo-Haifa, which seems from the first thirty pages being advertising that it's not really a newsy newspaper, some time in January (date to be provided later):

To the medics of MADA-Haifa with love:

When we need them and they arrive with the birdsong of their siren, we pray that they will faithfully perform their duty, and when they bring the patient to the hospital and disappear to the next patient, we forget them immediately. To the people of Magen David Adom that work with the the soul in the hardest moments of the swing between life and death, thank you. And also thank you on a personal level to the medic Tal Rosen and his helpers Gideon and Beth, volunteers from the US who came to help our country and worked faithfully on January 9, 2007 in their evacuation of the patient S.T. And thank you to the anonymous citizen that took it upon himself to call and request to write this acknowledgement in the newspaper.