Day 6 Kg Gajah: Err...

Well the lectures today were quite interesting and informative. In general, my mental health is getting pretty stable and especially since the number of days I've been here has exceeded the number of days left. Time is a great healer.

However, things are getting pretty weird in terms of task and what my group has chosen to do. It is all a bit surreal and I feel as though I'm being secretly filmed for 'big brother' or something. It does feel like I'm back in school again and people are behaving rather childish. I mean not in a spoilt way but as in lame, trivial and you know...not how you'd expect mothers, fathers, lecturers, leaders of the future. So, that's all I'm going to say!

I was thinking about how my life was in the UK compared to here especially in terms of work and responsibilities. I suppose I was not a civil servant in the UK and so, had no direct contact with the British government and their policies as such. Being a doctor in the NHS, your role is simply as a doctor. I can't remember going to any courses that talked about how we need to behave as government servants although as part of our training in general practice, we had to discuss about ethics, morals, communication skills but it is more relevant to our work as doctors and how we should behave professionally.

Then, as a GP we barely had lectures about government policies even though we were the target of the NHS changes. The Department of Health (DOH) was always issuing new strategies on health including the white paper, clinical governance (which took me years to understand), and the government kept changing its policies on health, introducing commissioning and all sorts of things. However, it just never seemed so obvious and in your face. The implementation of policies in the UK just seems insidious.

Maybe in the UK, one is made to feel that they have more freedom and that their actions and decisions are not controlled by the government whereas here it just seems like "you must do this" and "you can't do that". Maybe, if we were to compare the two head to head, the outcome is the same that the government is still influencing and controlling people but just in different ways.

Either way, I do not take to people telling me what I can or cannot do but rather, it is only Allah swt who tells us what we can or cannot do.When Allah says "Obey Allah, obey the Messenger and those in authority amongst you". The obedience to the ruler is with the condition that the ruler obeys the rule of Allah and His messenger.

I simply do not like it when they say "...diharamkan" as if they have the authority to make things halal or haram.