A river ran through me

It’s said the Inuit have over 100 words for snow. Likewise we English have a whole collection of words for small body of running water with no obvious danger: stream, brook, spring, creek, course, rivulet, spate, pissflow. A river is something big, something to be feared and crossed on a bridge; to be looked at from a distance and admired.

A stream is where I got my running water kicks as a kid. I used to journey down brooks in my wellington boots. There was no need for waders; the water never rose above my toes, but still it felt like an epic journey each time I traversed the watery mile to the local tennis club.

(The "river" Chew in Greenfield. My home village.)

I poked things with sticks, imagined huge waterfalls ahead, pushed my action man in his raft, generally anything but come to terms with the fact that I needed a friend.

I had to do the work in my head; we simply don’t have that many big rivers in England to stimulate the imagination. I put it down to generosity of spirit; with our 200 days of rain each year, we make sure that every village has a trickle running through it. Anything else would just be greedy.

That’s probably why I’ve never white water rafted before. The only white water I’ve encountered has been from industrial waste in the Thames.

When I heard it was done in Korea I had to try it. Before we travelled East to Inje, friends insisted the water would be calm; an easy introduction to the sport. Sadly it wasn’t to be. The day before, it rained as if an ark was needed. The whole sky was like an endless bucket being poured on all below it. The river raged up 2metres in a week, up a grade in a day.

It wasn’t a case of spotting the white water as we drove alongside the course, rather spotting the water that wasn’t. I could see all manner of rafting paraphernalia in the swollen water: paddles, helmets, arms.

I asked the instructor if it would be dangerous. He nodded.
“It’s safe ...... verrrrry dangerous.”
“So, it’s dangerous then?”
“No, not dangerous, just a little not safe.”

This carried on back and forth. The instructor looked at another instructor and they told me various contradictory statements about the safety, or lack of it, of the rafting. The safety class was similar. We were told what to do if we plunged into a rapid. “Turn around, head up river, feet down river. Be verrrrry calm.”I looked at the waves rising up then crashing down into holes 3 metres deep. It didn’t seem conducive to calmness.

We got in the boat and practiced in the one calm spot for 10 minutes. This involved the guide shouting various instructions in Korean, the rafters shouting them back, and the boat spinning 360 degrees. He seemed pleased with this and so we set off into the first rapids.

Lindsay and I shared a boat with a group of high school exchange students from Singapore. They were confident, articulate and spoke in 2 languages, flicking back and forth between English and Malay, often mid sentence. The country has 4 official languages. Maybe their fluency can be put down to education; maybe that 42% of the country is of foreign heritage. Whatever it is if Korea really wants to be serious in its efforts to become a bilingual country then it need look no further than Singapore as a working model.

As we waited for the boat to drift to the first rapids and its doom I took time to look around. Cities in Korea are cramped, built upwards and generally devoid of any aesthetic pleasures. However, this does have a benefit. Much of the country is undeveloped, and in cities like Inje you can travel 10 minutes in a car and feel, as I did that day, like you are in true wilderness. Mountains rising up from rivers, entirely forested and seemingly full of adventures to be had.

(10 minutes from drive from the city of Inje brings you to this)

Then the rapids hit. We trashed our paddles around furiously, swayed from side to side, got soaking wet, but from the first swell I was hooked. There’s something extraordinary about being thrown about in a boat that is only comparable to when I’ve been mountain biking or fell running. You may not know entirely what you’re doing all the time, but that’s the draw card. You really don’t know what the result will be, because you don’t control every possibility. Nobody but nature does.

I started to get the hang of it, or at least I thought I did. We hit more rapids and guided through with no more damage than wet bodies. With 3 more rapids left we hit a big swell that rose the boat up and then dropped it mercilessly at what felt like a 90 degree angle. We all fell about, desperately clinging on. A girl was thrown overboard into the swirling abyss and the guide began to scream. Until that moment he’d be the epitome of calm. Perched precariously on the back of the boat and joking about. At one point I’m sure I saw him doing a handstand. Now though he seemed frantic. We were in the middle of a big rapid with a large slab of granite approaching. The problem with rocks is that they’re not in the habit of moving out of your way. Everybody grabbed what they could of the girl, whilst trying not to be thrown to the greedy river themselves. We finally hauled her on board and left her to lie at our feet.

She looked terrified. We managed to traverse the rest of the white water with no further incident, and it was then that I could consider the facts that make rafting so exciting. It really can hurt you. The water doesn’t help you out. It’s unrelenting, and so needs unrelenting respect and attention. That just deepened my addiction.

One of the best parts of outdoor sports compared to competitive sports is the removal of the competition. With that gone, your success doesn’t correlate to somebody else’s failure. It creates an atmosphere where people help each other out, and do their best to make sure you enjoy the experience. I looked up the river from our end point and the smiles were just the same as mine from boat to boat. If there’s ever a sport that sums up the spirit of Korean people, then it’s rafting.

"A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." Gandhi

The average person in the UK will spend 42 days in hospital over a lifetime. I’ve spent 12 in just the last 4 years before coming to Korea, so it wasn’t entirely surprising that I would receive some treatment during my time here.

It’s not that I’m especially sickly; most of my problems have been injuries. Damaging nerves in my hand after spearing myself with an electric toothbrush is a particular highlight.

My first trip to the hospital here was to deal with the dreaded swine flu, or piggus sickus to give it its Latin name. I arrived at the treatment room 5km away from the main building, on an island, over a moat reinforced with barbed wire, just in time to see the sign being changed from ‘keep out, leper colony.’

My next trip was to have an x-ray on my foot following a collision with a seemingly suicidal goalkeeper at football. This time I went to a different, smaller hospital; the choice is endless here in Chuncheon. I entered the building and was immediately given an appointment for an hour’s time. Coming from England I was expecting to be told to come a month next Tuesday, but only if it isn’t sunny, otherwise the old women will fancy a day trip.

From the time of appointment I was seen to, given an x-ray, assessment of the x-ray and prescription, all within 25 minutes. I’m still not sure what was wrong with my foot. He just kept pointing at my toes saying “abnormality, abnormality, abnormality,” whilst dancing about with some sort of staff, before sending me on my way to physical therapy. This involved a walk of 100m and no waiting.

They must have known I was English, because physical therapy involved the kind of treatment James Bond could expect to receive should he ever fail to escape the clutches of the enemy.

First a red hot bandage was wrapped around my foot. It was left on for 10 minutes, plenty of time to leave my foot medium to well done. I was told to lie down whilst they cooked my body parts, something the old woman in the cubicle next to me was evidently doing, as my bed shook violently with her snores. After the time was finished a nurse removed the pad and took it back to its rightful place removing wallpaper.

The middle part wasn’t as bad as a nurse rubbed gel onto my foot and moved a lump of metal over it. I had no time to ask what it did as straight away it was removed and replaced by two electropads. These proceeded to send electric currents through my foot. I did ask what these were. Her English was sketchy, but she managed to mention something about ‘stunning cows.’

As it turned on she pointed at a button and said ‘pain, press here.’ I nodded, lay back and relaxed knowing there was nothing a couple of pads could do to hurt me. Then it started. Waves of currents were sent through my bones. The first set forced my body upright, the second, gave me a twitch I’m still trying to get rid of. The next few went entirely through my foot, and gave it a similar to sensation to being crushed in a vice. After two of these I pressed the buzzer frantically. The nurse walked over, nodded and turned the power up. I screamed in agony and pressed the buzzer again, only to see her manically grinning as she turned it up still further. We played this game for 5 minutes before the power shorted out, the hospital lights started to dim and my foot began to smoke. Then I was allowed on my way.

Ignoring the devastating pain, and thinking of the time taken, for me the whole experience was fantastic. But therein lies the catch: for me. I can afford it. Millions can’t.

Certainly the old man I see near my apartment, bent double with arthritis, using a plank of wood as a crutch because he can’t afford treatment or crutches, can’t afford it. It’s an $8,000 a year minimum to be insured here, and that covers roughly 55% of your bills, only if you have work.

Nor can the woman who uses a pram filled with bricks to act as a makeshift walking frame. If you have no work, then you’re liable for 100% of your bills. Insurance just buys you the right to be treated.

In the other major country with no free healthcare, the land of the free, the USA, it’s a similarly shitty deal. 47 million people have no medical insurance. That’s more people than live in the states of Connecticut, Oregon, Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, New York, Virginia and Utah combined. 2 million people a year file for medical bankruptcy in the USA, meaning every 30 seconds somebody has their life ruined because they’re unlucky enough to be sick, and couldn’t afford to be treated; all this in the richest nation on Earth. Of those people, more than half will have medical insurance.

University education is simply not an option for those at the lower end of the economic ladder. They have to spend their money on not dying. To be treated for leukaemia costs $500,000 and most insurance packages don’t cover that. 1 in 3 of us will get cancer at some stage in our lives. It’s a frightening enough prospect even without knowing you and your family will have to spend the rest of your days paying back debt, just to have a chance of survival.

There are hundreds of examples of insurance companies ruining lives with a loophole, just for a drop in their ocean of profit, but the argument doesn’t need strengthening. To make profit from people’s ill health is wrong. That simple.

An argument given by middle class people is ‘I have to wait too long for treatment.’ What a fantastically selfish, arrogant and small minded view. ‘Yes there may well be people being turned away bleeding from the hospital door because they don’t have the right forms, but there’s just no way I’m going to wait 3 hours for this x-ray.’

At least they’re waiting for something. Those 15 million in the USA with no healthcare could be hit by a drunk driver today and they won’t receive medical attention unless they have insurance. Even then they could well be liable for costs as their insurance company look for any way possible to not pay. In an age when $3 trillion dollars has been spent on the Iraq war alone, that is, in all senses of the word, criminal.

A country with no public healthcare benefits only two groups. The first is drugs companies. It’s no surprise that the USA prescribes more drugs than any country on earth, with around 50% of the country on prescribed medication, yet it comes in 38^th for life expectancy. Below Cuba, Puerto Rico and Greece (where over half the population smokes heavily). Treatment is administered with profit as a priority and patient welfare a sorry second. $70 billion dollars a year is made by insurance companies, and yet more people die each year in the USA from prescribed drugs than through traffic accidents.

The second group of people perceived to benefit from a private system, in terms of reduced queues, is those with enough money to go private in any country. If you can afford the $8,000 a year to be treated in South Korea, then you can afford a full BUPA package in the UK, or to go private in France, Spain, Germany ...

Using queues as an argument is redundant.

Whilst my two hours of waiting and full treatment was a novelty here, I could easily have such an experience back home in England. I’m just not forced to pay if I don’t want to.

Still not convinced? Tell the amputee using a stick he’s carved himself to aid his walking because he can’t walk, due to not having treatment on his legs, as he can’t work to be able to afford the fees. Tell him no public healthcare is acceptable. And then try telling him with a clear conscience.

Can you do that? Then it’s time you signed up for private healthcare; you really can’t afford to wait.