I’ve had several experiences recently that have really showed me how poverty and the difficult climate shapes the African mindset.
I’m in the hospital treating a man with florid heart failure. I don’t have a probe to adequately ultrasound his heart. I can’t measure creatinine, so I don’t know when I’m pushing his kidneys too hard with Lasix. He’s been deteriorating over the past 2 days and I’ve been warning the family that things are worsening. More and more family arrive as the end draws near and every day I’m seeing new faces. I get called to the ward because he is having agonal gasps. I give medicines to keep him comfortable and I call for a man in the family. One of the newer faces shows up and says “I’m the small Pekin.” I tell him that his father is dying imminently. 20 minutes later he dies. I call the family and witness their pain. This is the second patient I’ve lost in the span of 4 hours and I sit in the ward quietly weeping while the nurses prepare the body for the morgue. The family packs up their stuff.
Less than an hour later I get called the ward to check on the patient across the way. He says, “I can see that you really care for your patients and I appreciate that.” And oh, by the way, can I have the bed that is now vacant? He can see the shock on my face as the bed is hardly cool and hasn’t been cleaned yet. He quickly clarifies, ‘That bed is under the one working fan in the room.’ It’s heart breaking to me that death is so frequent and our wards are so under furnished that patients are asking for transfers less than an hour after their neighbor dies.
Later, the accounts office comes to find me so I can do the death certificate. There’s lots of shouting going on from the family. I ignore it, as I don’t really like being around when people are talking money. But even 30 minutes after I finish the paperwork, the shouting is still going on. I go to see what is causing people to be so vexed (as they say). After asking 3 people who are all shouting, I find out that the family’s fan has been stolen. The ‘small Pekin’ wasn’t part of the family at all. He was just hanging around to steal stuff. He came to me as family, kept a sober face when I told him of his “father’s” impending death. All for one standing fan.
This story is just crazy to me: A long con, through a tragic death, to steal during a time of crisis. And while I will always feel shock, I had an opportunity to watch a man work about a week later. We hiked up a local mountain and met a man making gravel. And by ‘make gravel’ I mean that he chisels off big pieces of rock, then smashes them with a hammer into smaller pieces of rock. He told me it would take 3-4 days to finish smashing the big rock pile. It was impressive how much he's worn down the metal on his hammer. Plus, he holds the victim rock with his flip flop foot before he smashes it. I wouldn't have 10 toes if I had his job. It really take some strong character to work when your alternatives are to smash rocks for almost no pay or to steal while people are mourning…
I still live in awe of these hard working people who are scrounging a life from nothing. But I’m going to be asking more questions of the families in the future.
Incredible.
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing.