Taiwan Blog Feed

A few of us have opened a new discussion list for foreign teachers in Taiwan, in Google Groups. Myself and Scott Sommers are list admins. The owner is Kerim Friedman at Donghwa U.

To get on email me or Kerim

turton.michael AAT gmail.com
kerim.friedman AAT oxus.net

The Group's page
http://groups.google.com/group/foreign-professors-in-taiwan

This is not a very active group at all, yet, so it won't clutter your mailbox with unnecessary messages. If you know someone teaching at a university part or full time, please let them know. Disseminate as widely as possible.

[Taiwan]

Home service (or furlough) is a regular part of most missionaries’ lives.

For us, it comes about every 2-3 years and consists of us visiting various people and churches in the USA. Our next home service is scheduled for November 2008 to March 2008.

It seems like this experience used to be called furlough and that most mission organizations use a different term, like home service or home assignment. It is a welcome change because the word furlough indicates a “leave of absence or vacation” and for most missionaries, their time away from the field and in their home/sending country is anything but a vacation.

That isn’t to say that we don’t like home service or that there aren’t parts of it that are spent like a vacation… but I’d guess that most missionary families are like ours in that they actually try to take a vacation when they return to their country of service after home service.

In the August 2008 issue of Horizons, my friend (and missionary to Italy) Matt Crosser wrote an article about home service titled “An Old Country Perspective”.

Here’s a direct link to the August 2008 issue in PDF format (2.4MB)

Here’s part of Matt’s answer to the question, “How have your goals and expectations for the future changed
as you are now an experienced expatriate?”

Well, we have defnitely seen how important it is to keep taking regular days off.  Once we were introduced at a church as “Matt and Angie Crosser, who are on vacation here in the states and will tell us about the work they do in Italy.”  I think there is a major misnomer about furloughs for the average church goer. When we are in the states, we work at least as much as when we are on the field, it’s just now we get to be nearer to family, friends, and a comfortable culture.  We didn’t have family members who were missionaries or ministers before us, so our learning curve for insider language was vast.  It was on our second home assignment (furlough) that a close relative of ours finally realized himself that we weren’t on vacation while we were in the states.  He just didn’t know.  It was outside his personal experience.

Lots more in Matt’s article. Good job Matt!

From Monday's Taipei Times:

Now, I've seen a few possible explanations for the governments' poor performance:

I'd like to elaborate upon point #2 a little.  While it's true that the KMT lost control over the executive for the last 8 years, it DID have effective working control over the legislative branch over the same time frame.  So how did it spend its time?  Did the KMT spend the last 8 years KEEPING ITS GOVERNING SKILLS SHARP by actually passing into law legislative proposals that would benefit Taiwan? 

Or did it spend those 8 years engaging in pointless, petty obstructionism? *

I've seen the China Post sneer at former President Chen Shui-bian's record, asking what it was that Chen accomplished over the last 8 years.  I can think of a few things **, but let me turn the question around.  What did the KMT-dominated LEGISLATURE accomplish in the last 8 years?  They had a majority, after all.  Their votes were law -- Taiwanese presidents have no veto power.

So -- what legislative successes can KMT lawmakers boast about on THEIR resumes?  Hmm?  Anyone?  Anyone?  I'm waiting . . .

A former marathon winner comes out of a long retirement for a big race.  He thinks he's got a good chance to win again.  Does he?

Not if he's spent the last 8 years scarfing down doughnuts and grousing about how kids today have got it too easy.  If he hasn't spent enough time in training, maintaining his skills, his fans are in for a major disappointment.

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*  Speaking of pointless, petty obstructionism, here's a case in point:

Uh-uh -- you don't get off that easy, Mr. Wang.  Your boss, President Ma Ying-jeou, spent TWO YEARS boycotting those arms packages when he was in opposition.  As KMT chairman, Ma blocked 'em 60 times in the legislature.  Nyet, nyet, nyet, nyet . . .  Sixty times.  You can't pawn THAT off on the former president, buddy.

In the end, Ma relented on the special arms bill.  But by that time, America viewed him and the KMT as fundamentally untrustworthy.  And the U.S. put the weapons sale on hold.

And so it was that the KMT was reduced to begging -- BEGGING! -- for that which it had so casually boycotted and dismissed as unnecessary just a few months earlier:

Please, please, please, sell us these weapons.  'Cause if you don't, uh . . . you'll, you'll . . . look really bad.  If you don't, that is.  Really, REALLY bad . . . Yeah, that's the ticket!

As for the credibility of the Ma Ying-jeou administration, it'll escape unscathed.  Why, we're a lean, mean, governin' machine.

With the 24% approval rating to prove it.

**  At the top of my head, Chen's accomplishments as president include the de-politicization of Taiwan's military, increased democritization (via a new referendum law) and his partially-successful attempts to de-normalize Taiwanese worship of former dictators Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo.

Set against that record are troubling charges of corruption and money-laundering.  Which if proven true, make his presidency a very mixed bag.

When I get sick, I'd rather stick it out at home. The last thing I fancy is being propped up in an ER, waiting for a doctor to tell me something that I already know - that I'm really sick and that I need to rest at home - and then to prescribe a party bag of colorful med-candy that will do little more than get me woozy. I only hit the hospital circuit when my back goes out, when I have a biking accident or lose parts of limbs. Needless to say, when my daughter gets sick, all bets are off. This last weekend, I visited eight doctors at three different locations. My daughter was burning up with a fever peaking at 40+ degrees Celsius. And I was having a hard time finding help.

When she first hit 40+, I was just leaving my office last Friday night. My wife called me and asked that I meet them at the Taipei Women and Childrens' Hospital. Ahleena actually managed to get up to 40.2 C. Luckily for us, the doctor was competent. He gave Ahleena a suppository which brought her temperature down immediately. Then he took time to explain babies are capable of getting a little hotter than big beings, but that we should also come back if she reached 40 again. The next day, I was running errands when my wife called to tell me that Ahleena was again at 40. When I arrived at the Taipei Women and Childrens' Hospital, I found my wife and sick daughter impatiently waiting for me in ER. My daughter was burning up, and immediately demanded a "hug hug".

"What's going on?" I asked, picking her up.

"The doctor has just looked at her," my wife explained. He had simply prescribed a second bag of medicine, one day after our initial visit and bag, after looking at her for 30 seconds.

"What tests did he run?" I asked.

"Are you kidding me?" my wife responded. "He says we will have to check her in if we want tests run." My wife also explained that there were no more insurance rooms (meaning three babes to a room but covered). We'd have to rent a room for NT$2,000 a night to get the tests.

"Are you telling me that we have to rent a room to get medical service?"

"Yep," she answered.

When I complained to the ER nurses (who obviously thought this "doctor" was not holding up to his responsibility), they phoned him so that I could complain directly. "No, no, that's okay," I answered, feeling the usual fatigue.

"No, you must," they insisted. When the "doctor" showed up, they seemed to enjoy my asking him if he were a medicine salesman or a doctor? I also inquired about when the real doctor from Friday night would be back. I asked this "doctor" if he could speak English, but quickly decided to keep this conversation in Chinese for the enjoyment of all.

My brother-in-law then materialized and suggested we go to a "famous" baby clinic in Wanhua, my old stomping grounds. We were there for about two minutes when the "famous" doctor, after a stab/glance at her throat, prescribed yet another bag of medicine. When I asked him if his clinic had a real doctor, he said: "Go to the hospital." Now we had three bags to sift through, and were genuinely confused.

Knowing not what to do or which meds to choose from, we proceeded to Tai-da University Hospital. Here's where the good part kicks in: Tai-da provided us with four doctors. They spent about a half an hour on my daughter, with a battle-axe nurse riding shot-gun. In Taiwan, I advise you to do the following: find an intern or two. They are much less jaded; they don't realize the business of selling medicine yet. When the young doctors asked me about the previous doctor, I explained we had only seen medicine salesmen. They found my comments amusing and we were able to chuckle together.

Actually, Taiwan's universal medical insurance is wonderful by anyone's standards - any person in any country. I say only this: find a doctor you can stand, like the very kind and able Dr. Lee who delivered my child, and stick to him (or her). Don't be duped by all the businessmen masquerading as doctors. If you bump into one, demand that your medical insurance card is un-swiped, and that the charges aren't made. Or, do as my wife says, and take their name down. "They don't do any action but try to check you into the hospital!" she says.

 

Creative juices are flowing this month.  I’m snapping photos like crazy and have spent the last two weekends wandering through textile markets and bead stores.  I’m revisiting my old design days in anticipation of having some truly knock-out jewelery for the wedding. I’m tackling my own veil as well, which should prove to have some interesting results, since I’ve never made one before.

I guess I’ve got my finger in every pot.  I’m dibbling and dabbling with anything and everything.

My most recent fun has been with Picnik, which accounts for the polaroid frame. This photo was taken from the back of the train as it pulled out of Banciao Train Station.

McCain.
Palin.
Obama.
Biden.

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Of course… talk of whether McCain or Obama have greater support for Taiwan seems somewhat surreal to my mind - given another 4 more years of the present Republican party, America may not even exist anyway :-)

Elsewhere … Korea finds out the long-term costs of fueling an economy with high levels of debt.

“The won, which is already the world’s worst-performing major currency this year with a loss of 26 per cent, will weaken to 1,400 to the dollar as Korea struggles to refinance its short- term debt, CFC’s chief investment strategist Dariusz Kowalczyk wrote in a report Monday. The last time the currency breached that level was amid the Asian financial crisis, in 1998, when the won lost half of its value.”

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It's a good thing mom has a helmet, so she can take care of the kids in case of an accident....

The Taipei Times had a wonderful little ditty from Charles Snyder, who's leaving his post as the paper's excellent Washington reporter (heartfelt thanks for all the wonderful reporting over the years, Mr. Snyder). This piece covered the recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) report that shows the US is suddenly experiencing the first exciting chills of that OMG what have we done? feeling...

“While US policy favors improvements in Taiwan-PRC [People’s Republic of China] relations, it has been silent on what should be the speed, depth, and degree of cross-strait conciliation,” the report said.

“Some observers worry that the KMT [Chinese Nationalist Party] government, driven by economic imperatives and pressures from the Taiwan business community, quickly could reach an accommodation with Beijing that may complicate US regional interests,” it said.

You know the situation sucks when your chief joy upon seeing it is being able to say I told you so when what you really wanted to say was I'm so glad you came round to my point of view before all this happened. China may not have liked the DPP but at least it had a pragmatic and hardnosed foreign policy whose lines were fairly clearly drawn. By contrast, no one knows where the limits are for Ma, who, after all, remains formally committed to the eradication of an independent Taiwan. Yet the US attacked Chen and the DPP, and supported Ma. The uncertainty for the US will only grow worse, because Ma's forward progress is exactly the kind of forward motion that keeps accelerating right up until the edge of the abyss.... mmbbeeep-bbbeeeep.

My favorite part of the summary is here:

The report also called for a strengthened Democratic Progressive Party as an effective opposition to KMT rule.

“Many feel that US interests in having Taiwan remain a full-fledged democracy may be compromised should the opposition remain too feeble effectively to monitor and hold accountable the majority party,” the report said.

Yes, after roundly abusing the DPP in two elections, and bragging about how it helped lever Ma Ying-jeou into power, suddenly the US is worried the DPP might be too weak to effectively monitor the KMT.

Let's see that game plan again.... on this side we pushed Ma forward because his KMT is going to "make peace" with China, while on this side we helped impair one of the most effective checks on the KMT's power: a viable opposition party. And then suddenly we worry that maybe Ma and the KMT might go too far....

Sure.......

[Taiwan]