JOE

Many of you may be thinking, I am going to talk about Joe, Joe Harper, dad. It’s another Joe, the one who has recently been in Tbilisi, Georgia, the Joe that responds to Mr. Vice President.

As you may recall, our Mission office is in Tbilisi, Georgia. It is where the Head of Mission and the team that “call the shots” live and work. The MSF Tbilisi office is in a shabby building two blocks off “the main street”. Rastavelli, the main street has shops and hotels and the Parliament building. As is often the case in many cities, the main street is fancy, and two blocks away the living is distasteful or downright disgusting. So it is with Tbilisi.

Joe was visiting not long ago and he happened to stay at the Marriott on Rastavelli,one block away from our office.
So there was security, meaning blocked streets and extraordinary traffic. No surprises with a visit from a dignitary.
Everyone anticipated some hub-bub, but I understand it was quite an event. Let’s defern the politics until another time.

While Joe and President Sakashvilli are discussing arms and peace with Russia (Ha!) and other such important things, humanitarian aid was in motion.
Weekly on Thursdays we have transfers from Tbilisi to Sukhumi and Sukhumi to Tbilisi. On those transfers we transfer expats, expat’s stuff (if they are coming to the mission or leaving the mission or just going on holiday). We also transfer mail from Tbilisi, because there is no postal service in Abkhazia, and we transfer items from Tbilisi that cannot be purchased in Sukhum. However, most importantly we transfer sputum and pus. Those disgusting body fluids that must be analyzed in order to determine whether and which type of Tuberculosis is alive and well in these particular specimens, as we know it to be alive in well in many, many human species in the Caucasus, some of whom are our patients.

Because we expats and national staff and drivers really don’t want to be infected with Tb while transporting the samples, (and that can happen), we have a rigorous process to protect the sputum and pus( and those that are involved in the transport). We have boxes, “cold boxes”. These are insulated, metallic-lined boxes in which we have placed those blue frozen thingies you put in the freezer then put in your cooler to keep the potato salad and beer cool on the 4th of July….. instead of potato salad and beer, we put sputum and pus in the cold boxes, which are really only cool, not cold.

Anyway, Joe and his entourage were causing quite a ruckus on Rastavelli and the area surrounding the Parliament building, and the humanitarian aid workers just wanted to get the cold box out of the car and into the next box along the “cold chain”. So, what’s a cold chain? It’s a process of moving items that must be kept cold from one place to the next. There are often a series of cold storage devices to make that happen such as freezers and metallic boxes with blue thingies. In our case the S&P had to get from the Tb hospital in Sukhumi to the MSF office and then to the Tbilisi laboratory where further analysis would be conducted to determine whether the sputum has regular Tb or multidrug resistant Tb (it had already been established that Tb was present).

Typically the transfer is quick, efficient, minimizing any mishap which would involve dropping the box and the S&P. As you can imagine there were multiple blocks with traffic and hoy-paloy interfering with an efficient transfer. So, on this otherwise uneventful day, the driver of the transfer vehicle and his passengers were obliged to carry all the transfer items, including the S&P, from the car, now parked many blocks away.

For entertainment value I would like to tell you that there was a grand mishap, that S&P were spilled all over the streets of Tbilisi, that Joe and his entourage are now undergoing testing in the US to determine if they have been exposed to Tb and that there is a wild, embarrassing Tb scandal, but the truth is everything happened as it should have, given the interruption of the traffic and the extra on-foot transport of S&P.

There is no big splash, or emotion, or “awakening” to share with you today. Just a simple recognition that while all of you were listening to news of the day, and perhaps heard that Joe, the VP, was traveling somewhere far away, and a few of you may have even thought, “I have heard of Georgia, it’s the place that’s close to Russia, that’s where Genie is, isn’t it?” The truth is I am not in Georgia, I am in Abkhazia, but the MSF mission headquarters is in Georgia.
But anyway, on Wednesday this week, as on every day there is “THE NEWS” the scandal, the big scoop, and then there is what is happening with the rest of us that never makes the news. Primarily because it isn’t news-worthy.

Sitting at the beach today, it was fun to think about potential events, the unlikely but possible events that turn into screenplays and blockbusters….like Caucasian terrorists who have staged a heist of a humanitarian aid’s transport vehicle, during the chaos of a dignitaries’ arrival, only to find deadly sputum and pus …..!!
Not to worry, I will not be writing it.

it’s bedtime…nighty night….