Monday 22nd January 2007
This is something new. It appears that I've offered to help some student doctors learn English! It's amazing what one will agree to after a few drinks!!
One of the other wives I've met through Tim's work is a GP and has contacts around Tokyo. She's persuaded a few of us who are at a loose end to help out in a brand new training session in some teaching hospital on the other side of Tokyo.
Today is the "train the trainers" induction. And even better, we'll get paid for it!
So, after a blissful school run on the bus we met up at a Metro station and headed off on quite a long journey to this hospital. Once at our destination Metro station, we proceeded, as is normal, to get completely lost. It seems most people get lost in Tokyo on a daily basis so everyone is incredibly helpful. However, if the person we've asked directions of doesn't know the way, they won't actually say they don't know – saving face? Or just wanting to help? I don't know; instead they confidently give directions to somewhere else, anywhere! I guess they hope we will find someone more clued up. An interesting yet frustrating characteristic.
Eventually after much walking and luck, we find the hospital; a huge, imposing and unprepossessing building with many pale and exhausted-looking young people in white coats bustling around. Just like hospitals in the UK, really. I think I was expecting something extremely modern, state-of-the-art and high-tech. This it most certainly wasn't.
There was a vending machine, of course, so I grabbed a tin of coffee and swigged it down. I quite like the vending machine coffee as it's hot and sweet. The taste isn't really coffee, but it will do the job.
We found out where to go and squeezed into a very small and rickety lift along with a few other gaijin who were all there for the same session. One of them carried rather a lot of extra weight... and the lift started complaining! The maximum weight it could carry was exceeded and it was not going to move until this was sorted. Unembarrassed, the large gentleman got out and the lift worked again.
Next, a trail of bemused gaijin wandered down a low-ceilinged corridor and found a huge room set up with a number of desks and a speaker's podium at the front.
There were about 70 gaijin of all ages, nationalities, skills and reasons for being there. Most were after the promised money, some were there for the experience and others were there as favours to friends. A couple of back-packing types barely had any English themselves, this didn't bode well for the poor students. Feeling a little nervous we got a bit giggly and silly, but soon behaved ourselves when the "teachers" came in.
Names were taken, paperwork handed out, instruction leaflets and scripts to read from. How to work with the students, some of whom had barely any English at all, apparently, and pep-talks from a number of high ranking doctors.
Then the bombshell – we WEREN'T going to get paid for this! Oh, the uproar that caused! Misinformation, change of mind, who knows; but there was a lot of unrest and complaining so a gopher was dispatched to find out what had happened.
Meanwhile, we broke for coffee.
On our return, the powers-that-be had come up with a compromise – we wouldn't get cash, but we would get a railcard to the same value – about £25 per day's attendance for the actual training to commence next week.
Not particularly happy about this, but as I do use the Metro it will be useful.
