Product placement and outrageous claims

A couple of things that stand out when you're shopping or driving around town here are the random product placements and outrageous advertising claims (even more outrageous than those we get at home, that is).

My favourite example so far is on the packaging of a toy car in our local grocer's shop, which says of the slightly bulbous Renault Scenic clone contained within: "It can make magical music and gives out wonderful light and imitates the sound of horses". Yes please.

And here's one from our dining table at the intezam (where we go for our lunches during the week):



















Those are some bold claims for a humble teabag, but it's the last two lines which seal its geniusness in my opinion. I'm tempted to request a reference, just to see which famous scientist/politician/celebrity writes back, and what they have to say to support these wonderful claims.

And one from our fridge:

I'm especially fond of the "get ready to embrace a life full of joy" bit, and the last sentence: "We collect milk daily from thousands of farmers across Pakistan to end your search for the complete all purpose milk with a promise of a life full of life."

A life full of life? I'll take some.

(There is something slightly too-good-to-be-true about this milk though - opened cartons have been known to last 10-11 days without even beginning to smell or taste off... It is UHT I suppose, but still, it's a bit spooky.)

It's also fairly normal practice for the badge on your vehicle not to match its make - Toyota being the high class manufacturer in these parts results in many Bedfords (and Bedfrods, interestingly), Daewoos and Suzukis being proudly emblazoned with the "ovally T" of Toyotaness. Oh, and we saw a suzuki minivan with beautiful BMW hubcaps the other day too.

And finally for today, it's strangely pleasing to note the number of taxis emblazoned with huge "Kenwood" stickers across their back windows. I mean, who doesn't love a nice food processor?

(Okay, I know they make stereos too, but it wasn't the first thing that sprang to mind...)

Lepidoptery 5

The next instalment... (see also parts 1, 2, 3 & 4)

These were all taken 3 weeks or so ago in the gardens near our house. It's now cold enough that there are few left, the bigger ones dying off or migrating sooner than the small ones. This little chap is a Common Punch:



















This is a Common Grass Yellow:



















Back to the more outlandish names - this one is called The Pioneer:



















And this rather beautiful (and slightly muddy) fellow is a Blue Pansy - pretty common to see them resting in the grass.

SWH prototype project part 1

Last week my solar water heater project really got moving. Here's a quick photo tour of what we've done so far.

Job no.1 - make the planks.



















Completed outer frame. That's the easy part over with then.



















Then lots of cutting up of bits of copper tube. The white board is used in conjunction with a steel rod and a great big sledgehammer to form fins out of sheet aluminium which will fit around the copper tubes.



















We took all our bits of tube out to a chap in the bazaar who has an oxy-acetylene torch to get it soldered together. As in everything here, health and safety is a bit take-it-or-leave-it: there's a pair of dark glasses the guys sometimes shove on while they're arc-welding, but that's about it. This is our first attempt at leak testing, which wasn't entirely a success (well, the test achieved it's aim fine, but you know what I mean!). Cue a return trip to soldering man.

























I don't know much about soldering copper, but I wouldn't like to hold up our pipework as an example of the greatest quality workmanship! It does look rather beautiful though...



















Here we are starting to lay out and fix the fins over our copper opposite-of-a-radiator arrangement. The fins, having been formed by much bashing, aren't too bad a fit to the tubes, but probably nothing like as close as any of the efforts on the DIY sites I've looked at. We run lines of silicone gel next to the tubes to try and fill up any air gaps (while not a stupendously wonderful heat conductor, it's a darn sight better than an air gap; also, it should be able to cope with high temperatures and differences in thermal expansion of the different metals).

























The aluminium sheet we were able to find in Pindi is 2 or 3 times as thick as what I would have liked - at around 1.2mm or 1/20th of an inch (getting used to everything in imperial is a bit of a challenge too!) - you can bend it in your hands with a bit of effort, but getting it into a shape that'll fit snugly around the tubes was not easy. This added thickness caused all sorts of problems, as compared to the reasonably effortless-looking examples I'd been reading up on:

1. Cutting all that sheet up with only a pair of tin snips is hard work. Really hard work.

2. Shaping the fins took 5 mins or so of bashing about per fin (DIY site example time: 15 seconds).

3. Other people's fins are splendid, shiny, perfectly-formed works of art. Ours look like they've been battered with sledgehammer. Oh, wait...

4. Other people lay out all the fins and gratuitously attack them with a staple gun. Us: staples won't go through, nails won't squeeze them together, split rivets won't reach through, the pop-riveter is broken. So it's out with the drill (of course, plugged into a dodgy extension lead of bits of wire twisted together and shoved in the socket), and lots and lots of nuts and bolts. This has the benefit of pulling the fins into close contact with the tubes, but has the decided disadvantage that we have to lift the whole board up to tighten the nuts up. With a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.

A couple of days hard graft, a couple of hundred holes, and a couple of hundred two-man tightening-up-of-nuts-and-bolts later:

























The last batch of little fins drying in the sun (a little coat of paint on the contact surfaces should help prevent galvanic corrosion) - these ones will fit over the thicker manifold pipes at the end. Then, hopefully, it should be all ready for some black spray-paint.

Conference 2

Here's a few pics from our 2nd conference. It was in this lovely hexagonal compound (which made finding your way around it a little taxing until you learned to always keep an eye on which number of side you were on):

(click to see larger image)










There was lots of interesting wildlife that we don't get up by us, some wild, like this pointy fellow:



















But lots kept in the compounds fairly extensive menagerie. These guys' tufts remind my of one of my university professors...



















Poor monkey:

























On the last night we took part in the 'Fun Night' (a title like that is asking for trouble, but it was actually genius!). Lots of people sang songs (including me), danced, read poems, acted out the story of Samson complete with Bollywood dances, and so on...

Here's a couple of the highlights:

Jenny and the other girls put in several hours of practice for this Sindhi Stick Dance:



And this is a Qawali - often written about leaders or holy men, but in this case an irreverent appreciation of our company's leadership team:



We've seen few really good sunsets so far - the sun usually sort of fades out through the haze like this:



















But occasionally it does do something a little bit interesting:

























You may have noticed that this post about a conference - a meeting of people - doesn't contain many people. That's on purpose. But please be assured that we did in fact meet lots of lovely people doing all sorts of interesting work in all kinds of places and situations. We had some interesting teaching, and some fascinating local perspectives on culture and politics. We enjoyed some good times of worship (with an actual music group! And some awesome harmonies, mostly courtesy of one musical family...) and times of sharing things for prayer.

It's nice not to be doing that long bus journey again for a while though...

Lepidoptery 4

Time for a few more flutterbies. These are from a few weeks ago now. The cold weather beginning to kick in is causing the different species to disappear one by one.

This fine beastie is an Indian Fritillary, enjoying the flowers just outside our front door:



















As is this one (may even be the same one - there were a few fluttering about):

























And this is a Common Wall (bizarre name! My favourite name is the one called THE LEOPARD - sounds a bit ferocious for a mild-mannered insect - and one of the few that I didn't manage to photograph before it disappeared - maybe next spring...) - apparently a female one:



















And last but not least of today's selection, this is an Indian Tortoiseshell, seen on our walk up Mukshpuri the other week (as was Mrs Wall above).

First day in clinic

Disclaimer - This is about my first day in clinic and being a “lady daktar” the problems of the patients I saw reflect this. You have been warned....

Yesterday was my first day of full time work, and it went something like this...

6.20am: Alarm went off, wake up feeling slightly nauseous with nerves about the day ahead, feel better after breakfast.

7am: Ward round, reasonably straightforward as I accompany our resident paediatrician. It was very sad to see one baby who had been brought to clinic a bit yellow and needing some phototherapy, but whose family either couldn’t or wouldn’t allow him to be admitted. He subsequently came back 2 days later, even more yellow and having seizures and now seems to have some brain damage.

8am: Clinic starts. Unfortunately the very capable nurse-in-charge has “chuhtti” (leave) today so somehow no-one was really expecting me. After a bit of a guddle finding a room and a clinic helper my first patient arrives. I’d hoped for a nice straightforward case to start with but instead it it was a woman with an 8 years of infertility, polycystic ovaries and possible type 2 diabetes and I rapidly discover as my Urdu runs out that my clinic helper doesn’t actually speak English!

9am: Things improve when I get a new clinic helper who does speak some English and is very good at correcting my Urdu so that the patients can understand me. My next patient is also concerned that she is not getting pregnant but actually only got married 5 months ago, (you have to be trying to conceive for at least a year and possibly 2 before you meet the definition of infertility). There seems to be quite a lot of pressure here for women to have babies in the first year after they marry, even if their husband is working in another country and only home every couple of months or they’re living with their in-laws!

9:30am: Rufie (my clinic helper) and I are both stumped when the next patient launches into discussion in Pashto which neither of us speak. Fortunately she also speaks a little Hindko (which Rufie understands) and has a straightforward problem so we muddle our way through.

10am: A much needed chai break. I wondered why it didn’t taste sweet even after I added 2 teaspoons of sugar but discovered why when I got to the bottom of the cup and discovered the sludge there. The sugar granules are huge and it takes a lot of stirring to dissolve them.

10:30am: My next patient tells me her problem is abdominal pain and it’s only when I go to examine her and find she has a large mass in her abdomen that I realise that she is 5 months pregnant and she’s actually here for antenatal care - oops. (I don’t think she’d mentioned it before.)

The rest of the morning was more straightforward; urine infections, lower back pain, nothing too complicated. I’m informed that there are only 2 patients to see after lunch so go home for lunch quite happy.

1pm: Clinic restarts. I see a woman who’s is probably having a miscarriage but when I do an abdominal ultrasound I can’t see the baby. This means I can’t rule out an ectopic pregnancy (where the baby grows outside the womb, rare here, but a potentially life threatening condition that you don’t want to miss). She needs an internal scan (which I can’t do yet) and when I call our obs and gynae specialist, she’s been called away to the operating theatre to do an emergency c-section. I panic slightly but am reassured when she says she’ll come when she’s finished. Then all the cards for the patients she was going to see arrive on my desk, so I spend the rest of the afternoon struggling through various gynaecology problems, so much for only 2 more patients.

4pm: My day at the hospital finally ends after a short teaching session on internal scanning for the 2 bleeding ladies I saw during the afternoon and checking up on my babies in the nursery. I only managed to see 10 patients in my day in clinic and it felt like a lot more but I survived. Back tomorrow for round 2.

Bring on the Snow Leopards! (& Common Leopards!)

As mentioned previously, we stopped in at a wildlife park on the way down from Makshpuri, and in the process realised the ambition put to you in my inaugural blog post.



















Relaxed snow leopard. We also encountered a noisy school group of teenage boys, which meant we were just as much an exhibit as the leopards - a little uncomfortable, especially for the ladies. However, they decided they'd had enough after Mr Snow Leopard here did a fantastic charge/leap/claw-onto-the-chickenwire right behind one of their number. Then it sat there looking pleased with itself.



















While it's always something of a shame to see grand beasts shut in tiny cages, I wasn't unhappy about having 3 layers of chickenwire between him and me.

They also had a couple of common leopards, which were good entertainment value. Almost as grand, though without the mighty balancing tail of the snow leopard. I could have sat watching them for much longer.

Wagah Border Ceremony

I'm getting slightly out of chronological order here, but this is worth going back to. At the end of the orientation conference, we and a few friends went to the famous Wagah Border Ceremony. This involves lots of shouting, stomping around and generally facing off against your Indian counterparts.



















That's India through there.

























No idea who this chap was or what he was doing there. He wandered about a lot with his picture. People cheered.

























"You're looking awful cheery for a guard..."



Here's a taster of some shouting. And stomping. At times the whole thing felt like 3 shows happening simultaneously, with minimal co-ordination between the various parties. There were cheerleader chaps with big flags who shouted a lot and gee-ed up the crowd. There was a guard with incredible lung capacity who stood on top of the gatehouse and shouted - people cheered. There were rousing pop songs along the lines of "Go Pakistan!" - people cheered. People in the crowd started up their own chants in competition with the cheerleaders ones - and people cheered some more.



















They have been known to kick their own hats off on occasion.

























The flags descending. In order to keep international relations suitably happy, it's obviously imperative that the flags come down in unison, with one never being below the other.



















And finally, the flag being hot-footed back to safe-keeping. A job well done. Now for some Lemsip for the shouted throats, and a nice warm bath for the stomped legs.

Photo post: Mukshpuri

Last weekend we took a trip out into the Murree Hills and did a lovely walk up a 9000ft hill called Mukshpuri, passing through a wildlife park on the way down (separate post on that coming shortly).



















As you can see, the road up is fairly impressive on the way up there; from above it looks something like this.



















On the drive there we met a sizeable troupe of these fellows.

























Looking down from the side of the valley.



















Some of the local ladies collecting fuel. Etiquette reduces my National Geographic-wannabe shots to covert behind-a-tree-once-they-aren't-looking operations.

























There are a startling number of lightning-struck trees, but that's understandable given the standard of lightning storms in this part of the world...














(click on pics for larger versions...)

At the top we emerge from the trees onto this plateau or alpine meadow - it almost doesn't feel like the top of a mountain somehow. This is the quietest place we have been, night or day, since we arrived - no bustling bazaars, no truck horns, no shouty loudspeakers... aah.



















Some big mountains are just about visible to the north-west. We're told that on a clear day you can see all the way to Nanga Parbat - maybe that's it, who knows?



















We stop at an open air barbecue restaurant on the way home, where we have possibly the best curry so far (a ginger chicken dish with soft fresh naan - spicy without being too hot to taste the ingredients!). Here is one of the views from our table. It's amazing where people manage to build their houses. And it gives us some understanding of why so many of pregnant patients at the hospital don't make it to their antenatal appointments!



















Some alternative transport - I'm not sure I like the look of that commute, even though it would probably cut an hour off the journey from one side of the valley to the other.