HOSPITAL IS SHORT ON SANITATION
By Bob Van Leer

  (GUILIN, CHINA, Oct. 18, 1991) - Most of today was taken up by a four hour boat cruise down the Li River, Guilin's most popular tourist attraction.

  The day was overcast and misty and sailing down to the river with these strange, towering hils dropping vertically down to the river reminded us of the old TV program, "The Twilight Zone" where you are moving into another dimension.

  The whole effect is ghostly, like another world. The river itself has some similarity to the Rogue, it is clear and fairly swift but with riffles that barely show white water.
But the mountains along the bank are stranger, these funny looking limestone knobs dropping a thousand feet vertically to the river.

  And along the banks the activity is enormously different. Water buffalo were all along the 60 kilometer distance of the ride.

  These are not wild, many wear bridles. They were along the banks and in the river. In the river they feed on vegetation on the bottom.

  Sometimes the beasts, bigger than cows, would completely disappear and come up with a mouthful of something green.

  Periodically there would be docks with tethered cormorants lining them.

Cormorant Fishing

  They still fish with cormorants here. A bigger kind of cormorant than we have on the Rogue. We were told that fishing with the birds is at night.

  A light is held from the boat attracting the fish. The cormorant dives and catches a fish and comes back to the boat. But a ring was placed around his neck before the dive and he can't swallow the fish and the fisherman pulls it out for his own.

  Every few fish the ring is taken of so the cormorant can have a meal. We were told a well trained cormorant was worth several hundred dollars which is a lot of money around here.

  Quite often there were women down at the edge of the river washing clothes on the rocks.

Boating Business

  Tour boating is big business on this river. The boats are a standard size, perhaps 70 feet long with a main deck and an observation deck. Capacity would be about 75 passengers.

  I estimated we saw on the river or at docks at least 74 boats. Cruising speed is low, perhaps 15 miles per hour.

  From one point in the river I was able to count 17 boats underway.

  Lunch was served aboard, typical Chinese fare. All meals were washed down with beer.

  After the meal I noticed on ours and other boats dishes were taken to the back of the boat, buckets of water were dipped from the river and the dishes washed in this.

Hawking Goods

  All during the trip boats hawking various tourist goods would pull alongside the tour boats, floating bazaars.

  The boats selling the wares were of a standard type, the very minimum in boats. They were made of five bamboo poles about 6 inches in diameter, turned up at each end and lashed together. The decks were awash most of the time.

  The bamboo boats were powered by two men with poles. Our hosts said this kind of selling is quite recent. The sellers are farmers who supplement their income in the summer and fall this way.

  After the four-hour tour we were met by our bus, which came by road, and went back to town.

Nanxishan Hospital

  Our next stop was Nanxishan General hospital. The hospital was built in 1967 as a rear-area hospital for North Vietnamese casualties of the Viet Nam War.

  Closed after the war, it was reopened as a civilian hospital in 1976. It is a big hospital, 700 acute care beds and 210 recovery beds. Capabilities of the hospital from major chest surgeries on down to minor illnesses.

  Charges and wages and length of stay are greatly different from those in the U.S. In-patient charges are 40 yuan, about $8.00 per day. But that doesn't make much difference because the patient doesn't actually pay anything directly as far as we could ascertain.

  Communication is a continuing problem. We're not sure our questions are properly getting through the translation and the cultural systems are so different that comparisons are not necessarily valid.

  Nurses' pay ranges from 150 yuan ($30.00 per month) for beginning nurses to 300 yen ($60.00 per month) for the chief of the nurses.

  The spread between the pay of the nurses and physicians is not as great as in the U.S. The top physicians can make 500 yuan per month. Exact wages are difficult to come up with because there are so many fringes to go with the base wage.

  The hospital has a small department (11 workers) of traditional Chinese medicine. The rest is western-style medicine.

  The administrator said there was a whole hospital in town for traditional medicine.

1000 Employees

  The hospital has about 1000 employees. The hospital performs a wide variety of services, surgery, urology, dental, eye, ear, nose and throat, plastic surgery, x-ray, radiology and others. It has a nursing school as part of the hospital.

  Occupancy is high, over 90 percent. The average length of stay is 15 days. After a briefing by the director, Mr. Qiang, we were taken on a tour through several wards.

  Building maintenance was bad. Equipment in rooms would be about 1930s styles in the U.S. Sanitation was not good. But on the plus side, patients I visited seem well treated and had good attitudes.

  Many were ambulatory and wearing their own clothing. In the U.S. they would be discharged much earlier. The nursing staff was motivated and morale was good.

  We returned to the hotel and Betty and I decided to stroll through downtown that evening.     

  We met two girls, 18 and 19, who were from a nearby university and majoring in English and came to town to practice English. We had a pleasant time and took them to dinner.      They found us a second floor restaurant serving tasty noodles that we could have never found on our own.

  After the meal I noticed them whispering together and found that they were talking about whether they had enough money to pay for dinner for Betty and I.

  I explained that we had both been students and knew students were poor and I would not allow them to pay for the meal, they were our guests.

  Tomorrow we will do some sightseeing and then move on to our next stop, Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton.

No News

  A frustrating thing about being here is that we are mostly cut off from the news from the U.S. The vote on confirming Judge Thomas to the Supreme Court we knew was on Tuesday but we couldn't find out the results until today, Friday, when the China Daily carried a small story saying Thomas was confirmed.

  What else has happened since we have been out of contact we don't know.