Well, after the rather sobering last entry I thought I’d start with some
positive news. I woke up early this morning. It being Sunday this itself was
miraculous. I had a very large cup of tea, (and of course branflakes - minus
milk!) and headed over to the clinic. Not only had my malaria ridden child
not died during the night (as I was half expecting) but he was showing signs
of improvement. He had stopped convulsing, had spat out his airway and was
breathing well. He was, delightfully, much more responsive. He was shifting
around the treatment bench, where he was laying in the manner of a teenager
in need of an extra five minutes sleep before school. As I was looking at
him his groaning became more formulated sounds, and as his eyes peaked open,
a word…“mama”. A lump the size of a grapefruit formed in my throat.
The childs parents had, convinced he was certain to die, taken home the
mosquito net, and the food we had given them. I told them to go back home
and bring everything back. The child had already ‘died’ once and I was not
about to let it happen again. This is not a time or place for negative
thinking. They are still understandably downbeat, but there is cause here
for very cautious optimism. Certainly those who have seen this sort of thing
before are very happy with progress. We shall see.
I wrote yesterday that the healthcare problems of Africa were encapsulated
on a micro level in the treatment room of two nights ago. I can only add
that, one ingredient was present during that dark night has become more
evident as the day has progressed. Amongst the sorrow and the loss, one
precious commodity is still in evidence. Hope.
A hope for something better, a hope for more good days and fewer bad ones
and a hope that one day the preventable and the treatable will be both
prevented and treated as in other areas of the world.
Who ever claims this aid-work malarkey is glamorous clearly hasn’t been an
outreach nurse. I am up to my eyeballs in human resources and paper work. I
have received the data from the various sites today. One site has seen a
near doubling of its caseload in a month and another is running at half
capacity. “Why is this?” I hear you cry. The simple answer is, I don’t know,
and without actually going there I’m unlikely to find out.
So, in order to fill in numerous reports, I have to make wild stabs in the
dark, which is, incidentally what some of the outreach sites are treating in
huge numbers! Furthermore a whole load of staff are leaving to join the
police, who apparently pay better. And the monthly data analysis needs to be
sorted, though clearly I’m not doing that either because I’m sitting writing
this. Though I’m at least part way there. Excel is, at least, open on my
toolbar.
I’ve found the best way to deal with stuff like this is to ignore it and
hope it goes away. So after an hour of number crunching I went out to the
airstrip and threw a Frisbee round with nearly forty children. A proper way
to spend a Sunday.
Tomorrow stage two of my plan comes into action as I fly out for a holiday
for a few days. Hopefully after this, the paperwork and the human resources
nightmare will have (delete as applicable) evaporated/been forgotten about/
been lost/ been solved by somebody else.
I’ll be on the Hotmail e-mail account as of today.
