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update to 15 February from Indonesia Added to site: Feb 15
My time in New Zealand flew by as usual, from meeting Tessa at Wellington airport and then driving the 550 kilometres to Gisborne to work at Te Karaka Special Area Community Health Centre for 6 days, to maintain my NZ medical registration. All went without without a hitch.
As luck would have it my visit coincided with a previously organized family reunion. Unfortunately bad weather in the Bay of Plenty played its part and not all the family were there.
Soon enough it was back to Wellington to talk to the Indonesian Ambassador regarding the pending court case and to express my regret at causing trouble with the Indonesian Authorities. They recommended I contact the Australian Embassy, and they in turn advised me to talk to Canberra, which I did xplaining the situation and the possible six year jail term in Indonesia, so ... the Canberra officials said they would look into it and talk to their seniors.
I also took advantage of my time in Wellington to have a conversation with Dr Nigel Raymond, Infectious Diseases Consultant in Wellington about an interesting case in Indonesia with a lady with possible Herpes Zoster encephalitis.
There was time for a brief talk with Bronwyn from Plimmerton and soon enough it was on the plane to Indonesia for my police report in Padang. My lawyer had stretched the reporting times sufficiently to allow for my NZ Registration clinical time.
As it happened the CIB equivalent of the Indonesian police were unconcerned that almost 4 weeks had elapsed since my last check-in! I recontacted the NZ Consul to Indonesia Graeme McGuire and started heading back to Medan to remeet up with Margaret Reid from Tauranga New Zealand and Melioni.
We checked out scheduled flights to Tello but these are still suspended while the government renegotiates a new subsidy contract to this isolated group of islands. This negotiation process can take up to 2 months. We finally managed to obtain bookoings but then the plane we were booked on, Merpati, had a breakdown at Gunung Sitoli so flights were cancelled for 2 weeks and we enquired about flight across with Riau Airline.
At 10;30 pm at night a Riau representative phoned there were seats available for the morrow.. Yay !!!
The next day we duly flew to Nias, reconnected with the ambulance. I was then contacted by the Crisis Relief Society Singapore. The medical teams they have in Haiti , are stressed, seeing up to 400 patients per day, suffering with trauma, infections, malnutrition and exposure. They wanted doctor volunteers so naturally I agreed to assist even after such a long time since the devastating earthquake.
The next CRS team flys from Singapore on 17th February, so unfortunately, there was no time to reconnect with Pulau Tello, other than by phone. Margaret Reid has offered to look after Melioni while I assist in Haiti.
If the police agree I should be gone for at least two weeks.
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