Hello from the Derby Mob.
Seeing as everyone else was showing of their newspaper articles we thought we would join in and show you our FRONTPAGE Article. Thats right FRONTPAGE. Now before you say Derby must suck because they put us on the FRONTPAGE, it doesn't we are just super cool. And when your super cool in a town thats so hot you are a FRONTPAGE news item.

Derby Lads Signing Off.

Medical Students To Spend a Year in Derby

Three medical students from the University of Western Australia have arrived in Derby to begin working at the Regional Hospital and Derby Aboriginal Health Services (DAHS). Fifth-year medical students Owen Milne, Michael Patton, and James Stacey will spend 2007 building their clinical skills as part of the University’s Rural Clinical School (RCS).

Dr. Charles Zelnick, their Site Coordinator is also newly arrived in Derby. He will work half-time as a consulting doctor at DAHS in addition to supervising the new students. Dr. Zelnick arrived in Derby two weeks before the students. One of those weeks was spent in Kalgoorlie where he and the 62 students in the RCS underwent Orientation, including a mock disaster exercise which involved retrieving car crash and plane crash “victims”.

The Rural Clinical School is funded as part of the Governments $830 million Rural Health Strategy. The aim of the School is to get students out of the city for a large portion of their training, in hopes they learn the attractions of country practice, and reduce the shortage of rural doctors. Derby students will spend time on the hospital wards in Paediatrics, Maternity and Women’s Health, as well as General Practice. They will see patients with local doctors both in the hospital and at DAHS. A strong focus of their training will be to work with Aboriginal Health Workers and get out into the community to learn about resources they may use to help local people. The Derby students will participate in teleconferences from Perth, and will have some joint workshops with their 8 fellow RCS students who are based in Broome.

The three young men all grew up in the Perth area, but have been keen to come to the Kimberly to broaden their experience. Their supervisor, Dr. Zelnick, is from the United States, where he worked as a country doctor for ten years in rural Washington State. “It was a small town of 3000 people, mostly farmers.” he said. “But the surrounding hills were covered with sagebrush, and we often heard coyotes howling at night.” Zelnick spent the last 14 years teaching postgraduate doctors and medical students in Cedar Rapids in the state of Iowa. After working a 6 month sabbatical in Winton, New Zealand in 2004, he was recruited to work in Derby by the Head of the RCS, Professor Murdoch, who had also worked in Winton. He is accompanied by his wife, Vicki.

“Everyone in Derby has been so welcoming and friendly”, Zelnick said. “We are sure the students will have a great experience here, and hope some will eventually return to settle in the Kimberly.”

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough. –Charles Dudley Warner

We’ve been in Australia for 6 weeks now, and although we are “settling in”, it remains an adjustment.

Things have been quite busy for me at work. My 3 students have arrived and begun their training. Their basic didactic teaching is familiar, but I don’t know the local doctors, the hospital routines, or community resources, not to mention Australian medicine and customs. So it’s been a steep learning curve for all of us, but we have been making steady progress.

Also, two weeks ago Vicki and I moved into a different house. DAHS gave us the opportunity to move to another house a block away. This home features a huge tropical garden. Besides the wonderful smell of frangipani trees, there are two water ponds, bamboo, and coconut, papaya, and banana trees. The house has a wonderful long veranda in the back, and a very shady yard. Vicki and I have spent quite a bit of time painting two rooms, cleaning and tidying up and moving into our new quarters. These quarters are certainly some of the best in town, certainly a lot better than what the majority of my patients live in, and we feel very lucky. I have been doing a lot of home repairs because of the labor shortage in the area- e.g. there is only one licensed plumber for the entire Kimberly.

The weather remains very hot, and the townspeople say it’s the “driest Wet” season they remember. We’ve had some amazing thunderstorms, but little water. Daily temperatures have been above or close to 100 F. with a lot of humidity. So we’ve been walking early in the morning, getting out at 6 AM and watching the sunrise. We have several favorite routes; out to the Wharf and back, around the racetrack at the golf course, and a route along the edge of the mudflats where we routinely see wallabies and parrots, which we’ve enjoyed a lot.

On Valentines Day Vicki made us a lamb dinner, and I made her a plumeria lei like she used to have in her Hawaiian childhood.

But behind all this is our adjustment to rural Australian and Aboriginal life here in the far north. When unpacking, Vicki found the quote above, which speaks volumes. Besides downsizing and leaving possessions behind, I am making a conscious effort to leave the baggage of my preconceived notions behind. I am not really ready to write about culture and community here in Derby- it may be a long time before I can do that well and fairly. We just haven’t been here long enough. I don’t know the hidden rules and expectations. So while I can’t help but have a lot of impressions, I try to let them go. It is what it is. I can only say that I am glad for the support I get from my co-workers at DAHS and the RCS as the patients have a lot of medical problems and are very challenging.

Tomorrow morning I go out on my first “remote clinic”, driving into the outback to a community called Jarmadangah. My students and Vicki and I join the RCS students from Broome next weekend for an Aboriginal Culture workshop in this same community, so I am looking forward to this trip.

If you’d like a taste of Aboriginal culture, I highly recommend the movie “Ten Canoes” which is out on DVD here in Australia. We watched this wonderful film this weekend. The people are from Arnhem Land, 1000 km from here, but the red dirt, the hunting for bush tucker, and the people’s approach to life seem similar to this area in many ways.

For most recent photos, go here:

We've been in Derby for a little over 3 weeks now, minus the week we spent in Orientation in Kalgoorlie. Although it’s only been a short time, so much has happened that it feels a lot longer. My students arrived a week ago Monday, and we welcomed them with a steak barbeque, with salad, and chips from the local Takeaway. We finished with American-style banana splits, as novel to them as the daily cricket matches on the telly are to us. They have settled in well to their studies at the hospital and DAHS (Derby Aboriginal Health Service). We have been staying in a nice house provided by DAHS, but have been given the opportunity to upgrade to another place with a wonderful garden and beautiful veranda, just around the corner. Vicki and I spent this last weekend painting the kitchen and master bedroom: white of course...

But despite all this, I know we are still in the first impressions stage. And my first impression of Derby and the Kimberly, is that everything is INTENSE. When we first stepped off the plane from the South (twice in two weeks!) the heat hit us like a sauna. The sunlight is piercingly bright- we have to wear our “sunnies” everywhere. We walk early in the morning to avoid the baking 38-40 C. heat. From complete darkness, in minutes the sun slams over the horizon. At that moment, the quiet is suddenly broken by a cacophony of birdsong and the flutter of rainbow wings in the trees. The earth itself is extreme, this ancient landscape thrusting upwards in rust brick termite mounds. Boab trees have immensely thick trunks and dark green leaves. Ghost gums, white barked, provide contrast. Bugs are huge, a grasshopper, larger than my hand, dive-bombing me out of a frangipani; giant beetles appear and walk across the floor of my Consulting Room. The tides fluctuate 10 meters, boiling up the sound in standing waves of caramel-colored water. A ship riding in to the wharf on the tide grows from a small dot on the horizon to running up on the beach in 15 minutes. The sky is huge. Cloud bases float at high altitude and build into the stratosphere by late afternoon. Wind blows off the King Sound strongly enough to push land-sailors to high speeds on a mud flat Sunday afternoon. Some days thunder rumbles like an earthquake, shaking the building before unleashing a twenty minute torrential downpour. Immediately after soaking the soil, the sun returns to steam the town, and vapors rise from the puddles. At the end of the day, 4 layers of clouds take it in turns to glow golden crimson in an 180 degree sunset. As if that was not enough, the full moon bangs over the horizon, huge, orange and upside down. INTENSE.

You can see it here: