from bullets to bazookas

healing in a mud hut hospital room

Chief Sourie of Kono has received salvation! The answer to prayers.

I had occasion to visit one of the local hospitals close to Lumpa which is the next town after Waterloo. It's a Korean hospital about 7 minutes away by "Honda." It's what they call motorbikes out here. That's because Honda has stolen the market for motorbikes and almost every motorbike out here is a Honda dirt bike. These things are much more expensive to ride on compared to the poda-podas and taxies. The one way fare was Le1500. We bargained down to Le1000. Only one adult passenger can ride on a bike. These bikes are essential when you have to go into the interior parts of the land. These bikes travel the small dirt roads that other modes of transportation cannot take. It's a scary ride. We arrived safely at the hospital and asked for the patient. We were directed to a section of small mud shacks. When the hospital runs out of rooms, patients are required to rent a room in these shacks. There is one open shack in the middle and this is the shared kitchen. Relatives of the patient will buy their food from the market and cook in this kitchen. From the logs that held up the tin roof of the shack I visited, there hung an IV. The other end was injected into the patients wrist. The tall patient was laid on a slightly raised dirt floor, over a few blankets, his legs almost reaching the opposite wall. All around him was his luggage and clothes. There is barely enough room for four more people to come into the room to visit with the patient. The only light comes from a tiny window on the clay wall. Empty IV bottles were strewn around in the room along with the wrappers of bandages. The patient I visited had Typhoid and four worms in his body. The doctors told him that they had to flush out the Typhoid first and then take care of the worms.

In the words of the locals, "Oh Salone!"

posted by bthomas24 @ 1:33 PM