"There are times you feel the Holy Spirit just needs a typist"

Here's something a lot of us can relate to: being brand new on the job and approaching your first big challenge.

In this case, the job is being newly ordained -- and the challenge is a little something called Easter.

From the Baltimore Sun:

With Sunday rapidly approaching, the Rev. Mervin McKenney admitted to being a bit nervous as he prepared his first Easter sermon as an ordained minister.

The former bank examiner expected a large turnout for this, the holiest of Christian holidays, and he wanted to seize the moment to inspire his flock.

"When I'm in the pulpit and I'm preaching, that's God speaking through me," said McKenney, 38, the pastor of Our Saviour Lutheran Church in the Ednor Gardens-Lakeside neighborhood of Northeast Baltimore. "But for that to happen, I've got to do the work beforehand."

For ministers new to their calling, the first Easter is one of many trials as they get to know their congregation, learn day-to-day church management and shoulder responsibility for the spiritual well-being of their parishioners.

Seminary may instill a sense of purpose and teach the basics of the profession, but the hardest lessons are learned afterward, in the routine of preparing weekly sermons, performing jubilant wedding ceremonies and laying the dead to rest.

"A lot of it you can't learn until you are in the midst of the ministry," said the Rev. Michael Foppiano, 28, associate pastor at the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Towson. "How do you corral five babies who are being baptized at one time - and their families? What do you say to a dying person's family?"

Foppiano graduated from Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg in June and has served Immaculate Conception since July. The parish has 3,000 families and celebrates seven Masses every Sunday.

"At Christmas I had to stand up in front of about 600 people stuffed into the church," he said. "I feel much less nervous after that."

In delivering homilies, he has adopted a conservative approach and eschewed improvisation. "I think my style is more reserved," he said, "I like to have a prepared text, and I don't like to wander away from the pulpit."

Like Foppiano, McKenney was ordained early last summer and has spent less than a year at his church. He worked as a bank examiner for the federal government in Richmond, Va., before entering the seminary in 2001.

He also tries to err on the side of over-preparation for sermons. He pores over Scripture, prays and reads commentaries from other ministers for oratorical tips.

For his first Easter sermon, he planned to cast the story of Jesus' Resurrection as a call to spread the message of Christianity. "I want to make sure that what I say about Jesus connects to their lives," he said. "Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. I'm sort of always nervous."

In trading the organized minutiae of bank operations for the clutter of human souls, he says he's struggled to acquire a new set of skills.

"I've learned that a church is a family - in all the good and bad that goes with that," he said. "Within each congregation there may be different things they do that reflect their faith. Being a first-time pastor, I don't want to overstep or miss those."

He has, however, taken a few chances. Once, when a man who had suffered an aneurysm asked the congregation to pray for him after the service, McKenney broke with tradition and urged the congregation to pray right then. "People said they really felt God's spirit," McKenney recalled of the service.

A few blocks north on the Alameda, the Rev. M. Dion Thompson, the 51-year-old pastor of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Covenant, has also floated some new ideas with his congregation. But not without trepidation.

Like the other two pastors, Thompson is green, as clergy go. He finished training at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in Manhattan last spring after leaving a career in journalism at The Sun, and has served as Holy Covenant's pastor since September.

During a New Year's service, he borrowed a custom from the African-American celebration of Kwanzaa, urging parishioners to pass a chalice around the church and share their hopes and fears for the new year.

He worried that his congregation might take offense at the ritual, but was delighted with the outcome. "The church had become a sacred and safe place," he said, "where people could talk about those things."

Providing spiritual comfort to the sick and elderly, and presiding for the first time at a funeral were more daunting.

"These are awesome responsibilities, not to be taken lightly," he said. "These are moments when people are at their most fragile, and I have to think about how to carry myself. It's a profound experience."

Easter weekend reflects the range of emotion - both sadness and joy - that he's experienced in his first months as a priest. On Good Friday the church's altar was stripped bare to evoke the solemnity of Jesus' entombment. The hymns were somber. "It's the low point," said Thompson, "the counterweight to Easter."

Today, in celebration of the Resurrection, the church was to be decorated with lilies and colorful banners. Women and girls wear bright dresses, and the congregation sings uplifting songs of praise.

Thompson believes that God has helped him prepare for his first Easter sermon. "There are times," he said, "when you feel like the Holy Spirit just needs a typist."

Chinese Medicine?

I was listening to NPR this morning and they had a story about a scientist in China called Doctor Who (sorry - couldn't resist) Doctor Hu whose company is offering stem cell treatments for a variety of conditions.

Jena Teague and her husband Terry Williams are among these new visitors. They traveled to China to seek stem-cell treatment for their blind, 7-month-old baby daughter, Laylah.

[…]

the family traveled to the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, where Beike is based. They are spending $23,000 for Laylah to have infusions of stem cells harvested from umbilical cord.

[…]

The doctors have told Laylah's parents that the baby now sees light through one eye, while the other eye is dilating almost to the point where she can see light.

Of course, we can't know if the treatment is really working. The Chinese scientists don't know what method might be behind it, which isn't encouraging. No clinical trials have been carried out and no research has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The risks are unknown. And doctors in the US are not recommending that patients go to China for this treatment.

Also, other scientists in China have their doubts:

Dr. Naihe Jing is the deputy director of one of China's top stem-cell research labs and a member of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences. He fears Beike could ruin the reputation of China's entire biotech industry.

Still, whether it proves to be a breakthrough or not, one thing struck me – how ludicrous the labels of "western medicine" and "Chinese medicine" are. For example, the idiot Bill Maher on TV recently advised quintuple bypass survivor David Letterman to stop taking the pills his doctor had prescribed him, because this was "western medicine" - something Maher doesn't accept. So was Maher suggesting Letterman visit China for stem cell treatment?  What is stem cell therapy anyway? It's practiced in China – a country that also apparently has a biotech industry – so does that mean it's not western? Perhaps Maher was warning Letterman off humors and bloodletting – western medicine for sure, although rather an unconventional treatment in Europe today.

Or perhaps Maher is just a confused idiot.

The truth is, ancient people, who did not understand how the body works or what really made people ill, just made stuff up about these things. The ancient Chinese made up stuff about meridians and chi. Ancient Indians made up stuff about chakras. Ancient Europeans made up stuff about humors. We now know better, and so have abandoned humors and bloodletting. The only mystery is why people still insist that chi and chakras are real. But whatever you believe is real, the distinction clearly is not between "western" and "eastern" (fill in your preferred country) therapies. The distinction is between therapies that work and those that don't. Scientists in China are researching real medicine, and trying to find out what works and what doesn't, just like scientists in the west. Maybe some have oversold their results, but scientific procedures, not ancient myth, will ultimately decide what works and what doesn't

So can we now please abandon this pretence that doctors in the west practice something called "western medicine", while the Chinese have access to some secret knowledge that "western science" still hasn't yet caught up with? There is only medicine that works – or at least, is backed by reliable evidence that it does – and pre-scientific superstitious quackery that doesn't. The East/West labels mean nothing. And the next time some twit like Maher intones gravely against "western medicine", just say, "yeah, I don't fancy bloodletting either" - and advise him to go visit Doctor Hu in Hangzhou. Preferably on a one-way ticket.

March 19 - Update

Steven Novella is even less impressed with this Chinese stem cell therapy than I was.

Health magazine has named the top ten healthiest ... [Food]

Health magazine has named the top ten healthiest sit-down chain restaurants in the U.S., as well as the top five fast-food joints and the best-all around indie restaurants in the nation. Sounds like a lot to swallow? The winners in the respective lists are Uno Chicago Grill, Noodles & Company and Blue Hill in NYC. [via]

The Working Girls of Hong Kong [Hong Kong]

A while back, I wrote about the go-go bar scene in Hong Kong's Wan Chai red light district. These palaces of neon and sex are seen by the locals as tourist traps rather than reliable places to score. After I published the post, I heard from a blogger named "Spike." His site, Spike In Hong Kong, chronicled his journeys through Hong Kong's underbelly. The blog's gone now, but Spike sent me some of the information from his archives describing exactly what happens inside these gaudy brothels — and also information on the more hidden "freelance" hooker scene in Wan Chai. After the jump, hear an expert's view of the Hong Kong sex scene. (photo)

In Wan Chai, there are a number of discos and bars that fill up with "freelance" prostitutes on a nightly basis. I put the word "freelance" in quotes because quite often, these women are brought over to HK by pimps. The pimps provide the visa, an airplane ticket, and a place to stay. In return, the women pay them off on a daily rate, which often adds up to up to three times the amount the pimp has laid out.

These women come from all over the world. Most are from Thailand and the Philippines, but I have also met women from Korea, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Eastern Europe, and South America. I don't want to appear to be racist, but it's a fact that in Wan Chai, when you're in a bar and see women who are Asian but not Chinese, the odds are strong that they're "working."

Some bars are more low-key about it than others. The rule of thumb is that if the bar has commission drinks, the girls will go up to the guys. If you offer to buy a girl a drink (or she asks you to buy one for her), she'll request something called "tequila rock 'n roll." It costs HK$140, or US$20. When the waitress brings the drink, she will slip a little piece of paper into the girl's hand, trying hard not to let you see it. At the end of the night, the girl brings all the commission slips to the bar and collects HK$80 per slip.

That's how it works in most bars. One of them works things differently because it's basically been taken over by the triads. A year or two ago, some girl got smart and printed up a whole bunch of fake commission slips and gave them out to her friends. The bar got taken fo HK$100k or so before they caught on.

Back in the 90's, if you went to these bars, the women were mostly maids on their day or night off. If you were looking for a hooker, your basic options were the expensive night clubs, the rip off go-go bars or "a rub and a tug" at some dodgy sauna. The prevailing wisdom at the time was that if you wanted to get laid, it was cheaper to fly to Manila and stay in a five-star hotel for the weekend than have a single night out in Hong Kong.

I believe that the turning point was the Asian currency crisis in the late 90's. It was around '98 or '99 that Southeast Asian women started turning up in increasing numbers in Wan Chai on short-term tourist visas. Sometimes, these women were sex workers in their native countries; more often it seems they are poor, down-on-their-luck women looking to make some fast cash away from the watchful eyes of their friends and families. The good ones can make as much in a month as they can make in a year back home. The unlucky ones barely earn enough to pay off their pimps and may go home practically empty-handed. The past few years has seen a larger influx of the eastern Europeans and South Americans but I can't identify a "tipping point" there — there were always some, working in the nightclubs or prowling the casinos in Macau - but now you see dozens of them in the HK discos and seemingly more every week.

Because these girls are freelance to some extent, they have the freedom to say no to you. Some will just give you the cold shoulder, others might use the excuse that it's their time of the month, or that they just work off commissions. Each girl is different. Some are hardcore and strictly in it for the money, others are actually looking for steady boyfriends — either to get out of "the life" or for some form of stability in between working nights.

In terms of price, your mileage will vary. It can also change according to the time of day. The average price for Southeast Asian girls is HK$1,000 for short time or HK$1,500 for all night. I've heard of some girls going for much lower, while the non-Asians will try for double. The Chinese girls will say, "you should pay me more, I'm Chinese, not some Filipino." When some Thai girl says to me that she wants HK$2,000, I will always respond by saying, "you know I've lived here a long time, I know the prices."

Where do you take your new sweetheart? If you're not staying in a hotel and you can't (or don't want to) bring her back to your home, there are a number of "love hotels," nearby spots with hourly rates. The girls know them all and they don't require ID.

It's all illegal. True, in Hong Kong, prostitution is legal, as long as it is one woman who is a legal resident working on her own. "Living off the earnings of prostitution" — being a pimp — is illegal. And for someone who is in town on a tourist visa, work of any kind is illegal. So all of these girls are working illegally and they are liable to arrest and deportation.

The police raid these places on a semiregular basis. You'll know when they are there — the music will stop, the lights will come on, and the cops come in force to check IDs for illegal immigrants and overstayers. Every now and then they'll send in some undercover cops to work the bar and, if I recall correctly, in the course of their duties, courts have said it's okay for the cops to get a handjob "collecting evidence," but not full-on intercourse.

So that's the Wan Chai disco scene. Hong Kong also has a wide selection of brothels, escort services, saunas, expensive nightclubs, internet cafes, and streetwalkers. Commercial sex is widespread here and not in any way just limited to white guys.

Tomorrow: a look at the go-go bars along Lockhart Road.