Namitamguirine

 Dirt road to Namitamguirine, note drop off tarmac!

Our jeep bounced off the tarmac onto a worn dirt path. Ceaseless foot travels of the local people carve these trails out of the thick vegetation or pound them into the hard earth.   It seems that everywhere in Africa people are always moving; moving at all hours, moving to and from.  The dirt paths leading off the highway are endless, all leading to a village that looks just like the countless others.

The rains from the past two weeks had flooded the area.  Like the NGO vehicles we passed on the highway, we were trying to reach these areas to deliver medicines, water purification products and medical care.  The first response organizations had provided large canvas sheets for tents to be erected as temporary housing.  Bags of flour and cornmeal, along with boxes of oil, were being distributed by a religious charity when we arrived.

Temporary Housing for Flood Victims

Instructions for food and medical distribution  

As there were no gardens to work the villagers gathered daily under the large mango tree.  All the crops had been washed away and the land too flooded to replant.  The people sat in the dirt, retelling their stories of the heavy rains and floods, as if the retelling might somehow remove their sense of incomprehension and futility. 

Kids carrying our medical supplies and table and chairs

We unloaded our boxes of supplies and stacked them in the dirt.   Three children ran to us, picked up our supplies, and on their heads carried them, along with a plastic table and chairs.  This was to be our office for the day.  We headed down a sandy path to be closer to the temporary housing.

We were ready for consults and to dispense medicines and vitamins.  Children were given Vitamin B and a de-worming pill. Sweet tasting, the pill leaves a chalky outline around the mouth, ensuring we wouldn’t miss any child.  Mothers crowded around our table, seeing no need to form an orderly line though we repeatedly requested them to do so.   

The Doctor Is In: Malaria Tests, Medicines, Water Purifier
 and Birth Control

One side of the table was arranged for consults, the other for family planning.  The consults were with our hospital pharmacist, the family planning with a technician.  The consults went a bit like this:

Techinician: “How do you feel?”

Patient: (covering their mouth with their hand, whispering and leaning in towards the technician, desperately attempting some sense of privacy though their neighbors were packed up against them.)  “Cough, headache, blisters.”

Technician: “Where do you live?”

Patient: “La” (there) They don’t point to any direction or provide any landmark.  “There” is the only word they utter.

Technician:  “ Age?”

Patient:  No response.  Sometimes a soft giggle.

Technician: “You don’t know.  It’s normal.”

The technician instructs me to count out three to ten pills.  We have three types of pills, various forms of aspirin.  Using square scraps of paper that had served as hospital admission slips the previous day, I try to fold the paper like my colleagues, making small flaps that tuck in, safeguarding any tablets from falling out of either end.  Never having been good at origami, I simply twist the ends, and hand what looks like a wrapped piece of candy to the patient.  The consult is over.

The patients report more or less the same thing and no one is very descriptive. Two or three words at most are offered up to assist the technician in understanding their maladies.  Some patients self-diagnose, telling us they, or their children, have malaria.  Mosquitos are breeding in the standing water near the homes, increasing the already high level of cases in what is now malaria season.  Simple malaria tests are given to the children, all but one positive.

A few patients are instructed to go to the District Hospital, something that is unlikely as the distance and cost of transport is difficult for these people.  After three hours under the hot sun, the crowds are starting to thin out.  Two women come to the table a second time.  They noticed some people were given yellow tablets, not white ones like theirs.  They ask if they can have the yellow ones.

Only woman and children approach us for medical care.  The children are dressed in rags, clothing torn and filthy.  Their faces are coated in snot and spit, flies rest in their spittle.  They could be the African children in the iconic photos used to garner sympathy for donations.  Many of the mothers have one breast hanging outside of their blouse, a baby or small child sucking or grabbing onto the end.  Having breast-fed children before this one, their breasts hang low and heavy, functional and worn.

We’ll return here for the next few weeks or months, trying to do what we can as this community rebuilds.  Now, there is too much rain and not enough sun to make more mud blocks to build the houses.  It will be some time before these people move out of the tents.  And cultivation can’t begin again until the rains stop and the land dries. 

More Temporary Housing

I often wonder why it is such hardship exists in these places.  And, I am saddened and confused and angry to witness the suffering.  At times I engage in mental gymnastics trying to ascertain some logic, a shred of understanding.   But it doesn’t come.  And I don’t think it ever will.