Elections and Walking

Since I've been back almost three weeks, the focus of the world's
attention has been on a couple of elections and transitions, whilst my
attention was more on a little baby.

Thankfully Obama was re-elected and we can hope that he'll maybe get a
little bit done this time. At least he won't have to start campaigning
again in two years (there will be a funny little Democratic primary
first so Obama can actually focus on running the country). I can't
imagine what his life was like in those last few months and I still
strongly believe that the fact so much time and money was spent on the
election was not a good thing. Yes, there should be debate and the
public should get to know the candidates, but a month or two is
plenty, like most democracies and there is no need to spend so much
money. Having said that, I imagine that without the campaigns the
media, journalists, public relations professionals, and a whole other
slew of industries could not survive without the extra income. I quite
like the British way with a cap on fundraising and a cap on the amount
of time allowed to campaign, as well as some sense of equality in
national advertising for the leading parties.

Then there was the Chinese transition, which was actually more
exciting than one would have expected, with the chaos of the Bo Xilai
scandal earlier in the year, the cutting of the equivalent of the
cabinet from 9 positions to 7, the insane amount of (apparent)
infighting in deciding who got those positions, and the genuine lack
of ability to predict those 7. In the end a few of them were
predictable but a couple of people did lose out. No women again, of
course. China continues to have abysmally low representation of women
in politics where it matters, at senior levels or at grass-roots
levels. We once looked up how many women were ministers, and it was
something like 3 out of 30. Yikes. And we'd better not ask how many
women are on Boards of Chinese companies, particularly the powerful
State-owned ones (where many of the positions are actually political
appointees).

It's clearly going to be tough for those in charge. On a macro-level
China is just getting worse (environmental degradation, inequality,
the need for clean energy, the lack of trust in anything, and on an
on). On a micro-level there are still plenty of amazing people and
organizations doing great things but struggling against a system that
is just not responding to the challenges at hand. A system that loves
status quo as much as the Western systems and a system where
entrenched business and political interests act strongly to keep the
status quo. Authoritarian regime or democracy, there is not that much
different in many ways, and America does have a lot in common with
China in this way as well as many other ways.

Beyond politics I returned to join some play-dates with babies and
some 1-year birthday parties. The parties are somewhat strange at this
age since 1-year olds still can't really play with others (they are
not able to socialize yet) and just play on their own next to others,
or else treat other humans like any other interesting object. Then
there are normally a bunch of older kids actually playing, and there
are the adults who don't really know anyone's names but are quite keen
to drink or eat or play with their own kids. In some cases the women
will all know each other and the men will be at the back, but it
depends. In other cases, the women don't know each other either, since
most of the time its the nannies taking the kids out to play!

And of course the insane consumption that defines our lives begins
with birthday parties. We buy the birthday kid a present; they give
party bags (a concept i had totally forgotten existed) or gifts to the
kids who came; lots of decorations and balloons go up for a few hours
(and then in the rubbish), and our kids who were so happy playing with
an empty plastic bottle or a ball begin to be inundated with things
that flash, beep, or move. Despite Hannah having a number of such
things her favorite activity is walking around and playing in the
playground and her favorite toys are a xylophone, a metal pot with a
spoon and a football. Although she does also enjoying watching her
parents' laptop screens!

Hannah had been pulling herself up and cruising around for a while,
and walking a lot whilst holding one of our hands, but a couple of
days after I came back we had some success withdrawing our hand and
Hannah continued walking on her own. This was especially effective if
she tried to walk towards one of us and we just kept moving backwards!
But for what seemed like a very long time but was only really 10 days,
Hannah was pretty steadfast about not wanting to willingly let go and
walk on her own. Until a few days ago and then she began to get the
hang of it and now, once she has pulled herself up (she still can't
stand up on her own) she'll immediately let go and walk off. Sometimes
she even tried to run, though normally ends up on her bum. In fact her
bum still gets a lot of action, but she's very solid on her feet now
(even if it does not look like it due to the litlte waddle in her
step) and has walked a hundred metres or more each time.

So it's getting more exciting and more dangerous. The little girl is
incredibly inquisitive and marches after anything of interest to her,
especially dogs, no matter if that dog is standing in a dry river bed
20 metres away or next to a bush 5 metres away. So we have to keep a
close eye on her and may soon give her a little present: a backpack
with a leash on the end so we can keep her somewhat close! In other
developments Hannah clearly recognizes her name now (at least when her
parents say it) and has developed her first form of intentional,
expressive and understandable communication: a wave of both hands to
say "no" commonly used when she does not want to eat or drink anymore
(though she is still a good eater). She's also mastered the wave
goodbye too. It's a start. And she's very different from the little
baby she once was. We met a friend last weekend with a 6-week old and
it seems so long ago that Hannah was anything like that. As Andrea
likes to joke, in just a few weeks Hannah will be sleeping with
College boys and smoking.... we have to hope not!

Only in China...

Throughout the whole Summer there was no news on the Marathon. Normally registration begins in June/July for the event in late October. Due to the political conference this year being even more important than the usual political conference at this time, it seemed as though the Marathon was off.

But no, today registration opened for the Marathon that will take place 2 weeks on Sunday. That's 17 days from today. Insane. I'm not sure who will even know about it to register! Meanwhile I have to desperately get in shape. Desperately!

Only in China....

After the storm

Eventually I get kicked out of the Hyatt, but after managing to remain there most of the day. I head over to my friend's girlfriends. She lives up on 55^th street which was not affected by the power cuts. We hand-make pizza for dinner that night (and for the following night) and I end up staying there 2 nights and a whole day. I'm very grateful! On Thursday morning I cab it downtown to get my stuff from the other apartment and then head to the bus station to get back to Newark airport for the flight back to Beijing. Airports mostly opened up again on Wednesday so a Thursday flight is good timing.

Although the subway began to come back to life again, it's still out all of downtown where there parts of it are still flooded and there is no electricity. The BSR office remains closed and without electricity, so my 3 days of work were not as productive as intended to be, and some meetings had to be cancelled, but we made do using skype. Without electricity downtown is strange. The traffic lights are all out of course, and there are no lights on in any shops or restaurants. Most of which are closed but a few shops remain open, taking cash, and selling non-perishable goods. I'm not sure how many people are still living downtown, as most probably did as I did and tried to stay elsewhere. So it's certainly a ghost town down there. And down near the tip, the stock exchange has re-opened, with a power generator to keep it going. I'm not sure who managed to get down there or work there, but it's symbolic at least. Power may return at the end of the week or weekend and then Manhattan will be back to normal (depending on how long it takes to clean the water out of the subways).

In reality the storm did not hit Manhattan that badly—a few trees down, lots of leaves around and so on. Some other areas in New Jersey, or in the New York suburbs were worse hit with some trees collapsing and plenty of flooding from the ocean and rivers (mostly, rather than rain).  At least 70 people died across the US and several million are suffering without power (and for those in high-rises, no water either) which surely has an economic impact. The major problems in Manhattan tended to be at the hospitals where my roommates were all working, so I was somewhat exposed to them, or at least I heard first-hand accounts.

On the Monday when the storm hit, Rachel was working at Tisch hospital , one of two major hospitals right on the east coast of Manhattan and highly vulnerable to flooding. And flood it did. The hospital was also affected by the power cuts, being below 39^th where the power was cut by the power company. The hospital had to use its backup diesel generator to keep priority things running, but that began to fail after a few hours and they had to evacuate the building around 3am. Rachel's story was not pleasant and she said it was worse than in New Orleans, where she was when Katrina hit. At Tisch they had to carry patients down 15 flights of stairs in the dark; sometimes having to balance IV drips. Machines that were in some cases necessary to keep patients alive (for example 20 babies who were born premature) had to switch to battery power but that did not last long and doctors were desperately sitting there, in the dark, calling any hospital they knew and trying to find room for the babies and other patients.  It was pretty chaotic and not pleasant. Even some of the ambulance drivers got lost trying to drive the patients to other hospitals because many additional emergency personnel were from out-of-state and drafted in to help. She got back about 5.30am and collapsed into bed.

Bellevue hospital, next to Tisch, but bigger, with over 700 patients including some which are criminals (and thus on a special floor with protection) had also been running in its backup generator. But the generator was on the top floor and the fuel was downstairs, so apparently up to 200 people, mostly, thankfully, National Guard had to form a chain in the stairwell and spend all day moving diesel upstairs. Meanwhile they began to evacuate the most serious patients. By Wednesday they began to experience problems with their generator too and so a full mass evacuation began. This time in the daytime and better organized compared to that at Tisch (which was happening during the storm) and hundreds of ambulances were on standby. Still, Lucy reported it would take a good two days to complete the evacuation and the hospital was not much fun whilst it was happening, since the toilets weren't flushing and all sorts. The hospital had better learn some lessons about preparing for these kinds of events. To have unreliable generators and no backup plans is embarrassing.

All three of my friends were thus pretty heavily involved, and playing their bit. They were more severely affected than most, but then I also hear the hospital is pretty crazy on a normal day too! Of course the media went crazy over the storm, and it clearly affected many people. On the broad scale of things though, there was good preparation and the storm was not too serious. I imagine that more lives might have been lost on a normal day from car accidents or crime—during the storm there was much less driving and crime taking place! It is still a tragedy of course, but on reflection it's clear that developed countries that are well prepared and with decent infrastructure do pretty well compared to developing countries. The Caribbean was much worse hit by the storm.

And amongst it all politics continued, though adapted. Hopefully it will have helped Obama. And Halloween was cancelled. Well the big street party Wednesday night was, and will be moved to next week, which is a shame. At the girlfriend's apartment, we did get to meet several groups of kids trick-and-treating; some usual costumes like cats and some more unusual like aliens, and some more imaginative like Sherlock Holmes. We had prepared a lot of chocolate, but did not give out much! I imagine there might be more Halloween parties at the weekend, once electricity returns. And maybe people will be dressed up like Sandy.