Complex

So there hasn't been a great deal happening here the last few days. The past weekend I had the opportunity to watch an island style wedding and attend the reception. It was a pretty colourful affair I guess and similar to a standard Western wedding in a lot of ways, just with a heap of flower shirts and island dancing tacked onto the end for good measure.

Church here is a pretty big deal. Such a big deal that the arrival of the first missionaries to the Torres Strait Islands is marked by a local public holiday known as "the coming of the light". Despite this overarching love of all things Jesus, the people don't seem to agree too much on exactly how to love Jesus. Consequently there's a heap of different denominations throughout the islands, at least 4 here as far as I know which for a population of about 800, seems like a bit of overkill.
 
Anyway, the wedding reception was all about the food. I had previously thought I might be interested in trying some dugong or turtle meat but after seeing 4 of the sea turtles being butchered on the beach a day earlier, I suddenly felt a bit sad about the whole thing. Of course it's hypocritical cos I happily ate the beef lasagne on offer but you know... turtles are cool! Right?

One turtle was left tied to a tree overnight to be killed the next day. A nurse who had previously worked here a few years back apparently liberated a turtle in similar circumstances and unsurprisingly, was on the next plane home.

I left the reception around 11 o clock after watching a bit of the dancing. This dancing apparently went on unitl 8 the next morning. Funnily enough, the following Monday we saw three patients who, being in there 70s-80s, were feeling pretty shitty after such a late night. One lady was deep in the clutches of sepsis and had to be airlifted out to Thursday Island for Intensive Care.

What was really sad about this whole incident though was that her family didn't seem to really give a shit. She had apparently been lying in bed for 20 hours or so before we were called to collect her. As soon as we arrived to the scene, her son then took the opportunity to piss off somewhere else; apparently not too concerned that his mother was close to dying. Having already seen a few other situations like this on the island, I wasn't so much shocked as I was disgusted that someone could seemingly not care so little. Ironically, an elderly lady at the clinic had for no particular reason given me a lecture that very day about how selfish mainlanders are and how good islanders are at looking after their family.

The moral of that story is that things here can sometimes be, well... complex and generalisations don't always apply to any group. For every messed up family we see there's a bunch of good families who fortunately, do look after one another and do get concerned when their grannies are on their deathbed.

Welllll, less than a week to go now and this time next week I'll be on Thursday Island checking out the hospital there which I'm looking forward to. More soon