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April-May: Floods, COVID19 and tempu bai-loron

Sorry if we've been out of touch. We felt rather thrown in at the deep end (sadly, pun absolutely not intended) when April (and our unofficial new-role assumption) opened with the floods I mentioned in my last post. The tensions and demands of the last couple of months (eating instant noodles with rice over the kitchen counter when one is too dead tired to cook anything else between crisis response meetings BD; thinking through COVID-19 safe measures for return to work, reassuring staff when colleagues get COVID-19, reminding people that COVID-19 is real, googling "mask-fitting in low resource settings?") have given me slightly more insight into the uncertainties of life out of our privileged bubble. I am getting better at not feeling as guilty, and channelling any guilt into work.

As the floods waned, COVID19 surged. I'm grateful to be connected to others, in other countries, who have seen first and second waves and much worse- their steadfastness and perspective gives me a horizon. I'm also grateful to my bosses back in various postings who modelled for me the sensemaking and courage that I now must find the Tetun for.

Tempu bai-loron, I think it's called these days- to habai is to hang clothes out to sun. And indeed the sun pours over everything these days, golden and mellow in the evenings, blistering and burnishing the rooftops in the daytime.

We saw a lunar eclipse a few nights ago.

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We have hired the Language Officer and are on the way to getting up a psychology glossary in Tetun. I'm pretty excited.

Our Medical Researcher has come on board- his youthful appearance belies the fact that he was a previous Director of Family Health- and he, with our friends Vivien and Linus popped in from Singapore for a stint, are driving research much further much faster than I could have envisioned. Thanks friends.

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In between all these events I'm preparing some talks for medical students on Global Health. Hope it will be useful for them.

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Lastly, one of Raj's previous students wrote a nice article about him global health (thank you Shiying!)

That's it for now.

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