31/5/12 Made it to June!!
Power off 95% of the time this week. The worst I have seen. As usual, it is not me who is bringing change . It is Africa that is changing me. I have no answer for the lack of diesel and the lack of electricity. So like everyone else here you adapt to living in a blackout.But not everyone can adapt. Particularly the very sick and young. More deaths this week because no lighting, no refrigeration (read Blood Bank), no lab work, no x-ray. At night it’s one nurse, 30pts per ward with one anemic flashlight. Walking the wards at Biharamulo Hospital at night when there is no electricity is a memory air hammered into my brain that I will never forget. People are literally calling out in the dark. There is complete darkness. It is stinky and dirty. My iphone “torch” (flashlight) and headlamp are the brightest things around and I mean around as in the whole hospital. At this point, after 2 months, its “hakuna matata “or you’ll go out of your mind. Given the chance, I will change to cooking with charcoal ( like most do). Forget about electric lights and computers and the internet. Hubristic western thinking shrinks here over time. Appliances are nice but Kagera is not ready for them yet. So why spend your few dollars on something that might not work and if it breaks, like in a power surge, there is no one or way to get it fixed. This is just one of the million reasons things are not changing here like they did in Asia. Poor infrastructure, poor service, no money. and disbelief in change.
I always want to start singing “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, it will soon be here, it will be here, better then before, yesterdays gone, yesterdays gone”. But yesterday and today are here ,they are strong, they are in your face and they are safer then gambling on the uncertain , broken future known as tomorrow.
Impressions this week:
1) no pillows…anywhere. Anesthetist folds your arm under your head to prop up your head after surgery.
2) No clocks in this hospital, O.R, offices or wards. Clocks break, electricity stops. Want to know the time?? Look out the window.
3) Tape? You want tape? Forget that, just cut a strip of bandage and tie the bandage to the wound
4) the 12ish year old peasant kid who had never seen a glove!!! I am not kidding!!
5) Live chickens, tied together, at the alter in mass……we ate them later. Not to be confused with the consecration/transfiguration,
6) Strong families take care of the patient and live under the bed. There is no going to work when someone in the family is sick. Chores divided up, somebody gets the food and brings it to the bedside, somebody washes the clothes and sheets…..OK, maybe no sheets, kangas, somebody takes the kids. Job?, work? that is so secondary. I have never been asked to write an absence from work note to an employer.
7) Scary impression of this week: Typhoid fever on the rise here.
Rainy season is ending, the hot dry season is coming. The sun is in the north, shadows are a little longer as equatorial “winter” comes and The Southern Cross beams bright in the sky every night.
I will be leaving here in 2 weeks( or so) with mixed feelings. A love for Africa a paranoid mistrust for the World Bank and a beat up GI tract. Will continue to TRY to post at barbaraandlarry.blogspot.com Whether you know it or not I have, at some time this past year , leaned on everyone of you. Thanks for that. July in New England sounds like heaven. L.
