A week ago I a cold/flu or some Taiwanese sickness and it had gotten to the point were it was very difficult for me to speak loud enough for the students to hear me. So I finally decided that it was time to visit the doctor.
Now visiting a doctor here in Taiwan is a unique experience that one does not always enjoy. There are two different kinds of doctors to choose; the Chinese doctor or the western style doctor. The Chinese doctor, bless his little heart, will give you lots of herbal medicines that smell horrible to smear on the wound or to take. He will also perform “Chinese Kung fu” on the area that needs healing, which hurts immensely. So since I am very wise I decided to go to the western style doctor and skip all the weirdness.
The doctor I choose to go to is a friend of ours and thankfully treat us for free and speaks “Hong Kong English.” But even a western style doctor can be strange sometimes and today was his day. First thing he did was to look in my ear, as may of you may remember it is not totally that painful of a thing to experience, but the doctors over here love to inflict pain and he did. A little side note, the doctors over here will honestly laugh with joy as they cause you to wither in pain.
Well, after all the so call examination was over we had a conversation about what he would do to help me get better. He said he would give me drugs to help me get better , but quickly changed it so he said he would give me medicine, remembering an earlier conversation about drugs we had had. So we had a nice little English lesson on when he could say drugs and it would still be okay. We waited about ten minutes and then he brought out a big hill of little packages of pills (drugs) for me. He went over all the pills, there was one for this and one for that and another one for this and so forth until I knew what each pill was for. Another side note, if the doctor does not give the patient medicine the Taiwanese don’t think the doctor is doing his job.
Before leaving we had a conversation with his wife in “Chinglish” (Chinese and English) as we call it and they were very disappointed that we would be leaving soon for America and Canada. Over the passed couple months we have spent a lot of time over at their place spending time with their daughter who is in Grade 12 and have gotten to know the family well. They are Christians and the doctor has choose his line of work and where he works so that he might be able to minister to the Truku Tribal people.
I pray that this has given you just a little glimpse of what life is like over here. Please continue to up lift my team and the people we work with in pray, for our health, our strength emotional and spiritually and for daily protection.
A Child of the King
Josephine Papp
Hualien Taiwan
