Missing something... something missing?

Today, just briefly, I find myself missing my middle class naïveté. The way I used to be able to so easily tell the difference between wrong and right and see clearly the line that divides the two.

It started with landmines, interestingly enough. I remember sitting in a classroom in university studying the various makes, models and deployment; taking notes of their effects and knowing definitively that the use of such items is plainly wrong. It’s not a moral certainty anymore.

This week, I found myself listening to a story on my balcony, sharing a meal with friends, sharing stories and talking about our work and the people we know. We were talking about children, and those who are unable to have their own, and adoption.

There are all kinds of conversation topics, but especially those one has at social dinners, which are entirely predictable. There are a range of acceptable responses and one selects from them and voices some variation of the words and everyone nods and we all go away satisfied, or at least reasonably sure that we’ve done our social duties as best we can.

Instead of the range of responses I was familiar with on the subject of adoption, somehow, I was hearing about this woman who got pregnant for the sixth time. Within a month of giving birth she was back on the streets again, where she pushes a metal cart, picking through trash in garbage cans. She can’t afford another baby and you don’t know what a tough life is until you have glimpsed where the street people live.

So she sold her sixth baby, because she didn’t have enough money to feed the other five, even working as hard as she did every day.

I had to ask.

“How much was she paid?”

Three thousand baht. About one hundred Canadian dollars.

When I heard the price, my heart dropped.

If the baby was bought by a Thai person, a woman could take it to the hospital within seven days of its birth and have it registered as her own child, provided that the doctor at the hospital isn’t someone who knows her personally and hasn’t witnessed her un-pregnant at some point in the past few months. With a Thai citizenship and a family ready to bring it up as its own, the baby is at leas guaranteed food to eat, a safe shelter to live in and access to a health and educational system.

It was strange because after I stopped thinking about the price and the economics of child birth, I started to see how the situation might just turn out happily for everyone. This idea I have in my head, this romantic notion of motherhood, is what makes strong and loving families in some cases, but not in all cases. In other situations I can suddenly see how it is just that, romantic. If five children get fed, and another gets a well off family to feed and love it, instead of six children crying while their bellies bloat, while they experience illnesses born of malnutrition and while some watch others starve, how can that be wrong?

Of course, children get sold every day into terrible situations and believe me, it’s something I fight against firmly. But no one buys a baby to raise it into a whorehouse, it’s just not economical.

I like this ideal I have where children get raised by their families, where families love all their children and where all the children get fed and I’m clinging to it but I cant help but wonder, if it isn’t just an ideal, and if in the real world where only practical people can survive, alternative arrangements should not be judged so harshly?

Canada in June

It’s Friday afternoon and the air is cool and filled with the energy of a pending thunderstorm. Outside my window, the banana leaves bend in the breeze but memories of Canada are still very fresh in my mind.

I returned to Canada for three weeks in June just in time to enjoy a Canadian summer and celebrate my brother’s birthday and graduation. I also went home in order to learn more about and acquire a new insulin pump, which is a machine which helps me regulate my diabetes.

I haven’t had much luck with insulin pumps in the past. Perhaps it is the life I live, which admittedly, is not the average lifestyle. Who knows if the pumps were designed for tropical living, trekking through monsoons and slogs through the jungle? I started pumping with a company called Diesetronic. When I had problems with that pump I was told by one of the company executives that “mechanical machines can and will fail.” To illustrate the point, I was told about this time the man’s Mercedes had broken down, stranding him beside the road.

For non-pumpers out there, when an insulin pump fails, things can go wrong with your health very quickly, like within hours, quickly. It’s not like driving a Mercedes at all, except that when the car crashes you could die and that’s true with pumps, in a way, too.

Diestronic never admitted my pump had a problem but they later issued a general recall of the model I wore, which is frightening really.

I wore a Medtronic pump for several years. The pump I bought was waterproof, only the company later sent out letters informing customers that it wasn’t in fact, accounting for several pump failures I had experienced. For some reason, the company, in producing a $6500 machine responsible for medical functions, failed to safeguard the pump against the static electricity generated by the average human body. So basically, my DVD player is better equipped to deal with static electricity than the machine I wore on my body daily. Weird, huh?

When the Medtronic pump’s screen went blank and no alarm went off, I was seriously alarmed and even more so that customer service was calm about the whole affair. I decided it was time to give pumping a break and go back to needles.

At first, I kind of enjoyed the physical freedom of going without my pump. An insulin pump is the size of a pager and connects, through a tube, to a needle which delivers insulin continuously into a person’s body.

Unfortunately, needles are all but free. Not only does one have to eat meals at regular intervals, but the meals should consist of certain types of food. Routines are really good for people on needle therapy and I have always been anything but routine.

So after six months, I decided to investigate and try a new company, so back to Canada I went to invest in a new insulin pump. The Deltec representative was incredibly friendly and accommodating, fitting easily into the busy home schedule of meeting people, seeing old friends and spending as much time as possible with family.

Only a few days after hooking up to my new pump and going through all its buttons and programs, I was in the mountains of British Colombia with my parents happily hiking away.

My parents had just bought a new canoe while on a road trip in the States and they were dying to get out in it. I hadn’t been fishing in years, so I was eager to get on the lake as well.

For years, my family has gone fishing at Blackwater Lake. We never get very big trout, but we always get some of an edible size and we always have fun. One memorable trip included my brother and a friend on an inflatable raft that we discovered all too late wasn’t so inflatable. My friend jumped overboard and swam across the lake in her lifejacket while my brother and I paddled like crazy to get across, arriving almost in the lake ourselves.

I took the front of the boat, Dad the back and Mum crouched in the middle. It was an amazing three hours of fishing, with the afternoon sunlight staying forever in the sky and fish jumping, even skipping across the water. We saw a muskrat in the rushes by the shore and wallowed in the tranquility of floating on water surrounded by nothing but forests and mountains.

I caught the first fish but Mum soon caught up with me. Dad didn’t have much time to fish since he was baiting Mum’s hook and taking her fish off for her. But the three of us were having a good time. Every time Mum got a fish on her line, Dad had a tendency to get very excited and Mum would get nervous, feeling like she didn’t know what to do.

“Bring it in! Bring it in!” Dad would should, and Mum would do her best to bring it in, whatever that means.

I was slowly reeling in my line when I felt the tug of a bite. I heard Mum say excitedly behind me, “I’ve got one!”

And Dad: “Bring it in! Bring it in!”

The next thing I know, the boat was rocking wildly.

What happened was this: There was Mum bringing it in, when suddenly the fish was out of the water and flying towards her face. Startled, she fell backwards, losing her balance.

Mum and Dad hit the water first but I wasn’t long after them. One moment I was there enjoying the mountains spread out majestically before me, the next thing, I’m hitting the glacial water with a splash.

It takes a moment to adjust to the new environment. The water is so cold, it squeezes your lungs, making it hard to breathe and you panic a bit, until you remember that you have a life jacket on.

When we’ve all calmed down, Dad says: “Where are the fishing rods?” I have no recollection of what happened to mine. The last thing I knew there was a fish on the end of it somewhere. How Dad put his in the boat before tipping out, I have no idea, but Mum and I had totally lost ours.

Then Mum looks at me with wide eyes: “Where’s your pump?”

My hand darts down to my stomach to feel if the needle is still there. In the shock of tipping, the tube could have caught on something, the pump could have fallen out of my pocket, it could be drifting, as we spoke, down to the muddy depths of that cold cold lake.

But no, there it was, still firmly attached to my body. Waterproof, and happily pumping away no worse for wear.

We, on the other hand, couldn’t say the same. My tropical body was shivering madly and we weren’t able to get sorted out and back in the boat for almost half an hour. We were a rather bedraggled crew when we struggled up onto the shore but we still somehow still had our catch of fish, a sunburn and an amazing story to tell.