Today was a good day in Africa. The jet lag was mostly gone. Food was starting to taste better. The clinic was bustling to the point where I had very little time to think about anything else other than the task at the hand. And the task at hand was helping the physicians tend to sick patients. Unfortunately, the patients were usually fairly sick and the cases followed an extremely frustratingly tragic pattern: malaria-malaria-typhoid-typhoid-malaria-HIV-malaria-malaria-typhoid-typhoid-tuberculosis-malaria. While the work was rewarding and the patients were an absolute delight to work with, the reality of the patients’ diseases was unsettling. Take the last case of the day for example. A three year old boy comes in with fever and a dry cough. He tests positive for a serious case of malaria. The father admits that he is giving his son malarial medicine at home but it does not seem to be working (the meds are outdated and the dosage is insufficient). Naturally, we try explaining to his this fact, but he is insistent that he continues the regimen that he has at home rather than accept and fill the prescription that we gave him. The unfortunate truth is that unless the father changes his opinion soon, the boy will die.
As Paula would say: T-I-T.
On a sweeter note, one of the security guards in the compound named Johanna (Kirarasha) took us to a place to play some basketball. We ended up at a boarding school for girls playing a modified version of basketball. I say a modified version because the court was grass with sparse patches of dirt and the hoops were rusted, mangled, and crooked. The girls, however, were absolute sweethearts. At the end of it all, the girls implored us to come back another day.
May I never become cold-hearted enough to say “no” in a situation like that.
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