It has been a month since H’s motorcycle-taxi collided head-on with a car speeding in the opposite direction down the same dirt road. Four weeks since the curious crowd surged around him poking at his limp body while TQ and J tried desperately to fend them off, call for help, get him to the hospital.
He arrived, shaking in shock, to iganga hospital; his head, unbandaged for at least an hour, leaving a dark pool on the uncovered vinyl mattress. Everything was a struggle. Our staff ran to pharmacies for the necessary medications, pleaded with nurses to bandage his wounds, negotiated ambulance prices to transport him to kampala.
Faced with the decision of best vs affordable care, we erred on the side of stabilizing H – an amazing man injured in the process of volunteering for Uganda Village Project. Even with our best of intentions, private hospitals will only treat you as long as you can pay. And we couldn’t. so H was moved to the national hospital. A hospital, in theory at least, that is free.
But free doesn’t count for ICU or meds or CT scans. And so bills mounted…even now, in the general ward, they continue to mount.
I saw H last week. The general ward overflowing, there are extra beds on each row, pushed against walls in the hallway. People with obvious trauma, others with who-knows- what…malaria, cancer, TB? Mosquito nets hang knotted above beeping machines and family members huddle over their loved ones, administering medications, reading Bibles or Korans softly, staring blankly into the crowded isolation that is the ward.
Semi conscious, H is breathing on his own and can apparently sit up with some assistance. But I don’t know how much recognition he has. I don’t know if there is pain. If this is the begging of better or as better as he gets. I searched out a doctor, to no avail, and in a doctor’s absence pleaded with a nurse to find out how he was doing. She shuffled through his tattered file.
“fever last night.”
That was all there was…no indication of how it was treated, if it had receded by morning. No indication of the CT scan he should have had. Only, “fever last night.”
We wait, because waiting is all we can do. His family keeps watchful vigil over him, washing his face with a cool cloth, adjusting his body so he seems more comfortable. And they wait. They wait because waiting is all we can do.
Jeganda (running away from me!)
Jeganda isn’t the brightest bird in the nest. When TQ, my roommate, brought her home we blamed it on the traumatic ride. After all, she’d been hung upside-down by her legs on the back of a bicycle. You can imagine she’d be a little off kilter.
We tied her to our mango tree in the back yard to establish this was her home and then the next day let her loose to wander. Only she didn’t wander. She remained, legs splayed out as if she were still tied. TeaQueen eventually resorted to chasing her around the yard to get her to move.
And then move she did, right over our very tall fence where she shacked up with our neighbor’s rooster next door. Little hussy. Dragged back home I still periodically hear the seeming call and response between the two of them through the concrete divide.
Seemingly adjusted, Jeganda has proven she isn’t the Einstein of chickens (of course
Behind these barrels is where she nests and inevitably gets stuck
what follows also proves we aren’t the Einstein’s of chicken owners). While we were all adjusting to our respective housemates we ran into a couple of problems…namely that Jeganda wants to come into the house.
Our doors are often open to let the breeze run through the house (call it nature’s air conditioning) and Jeganda spent her first few days taking the open doors as an invitation. Skittish as she is of me (despite loving our guards) she had no qualms with walking through the kitchen, down the hall, and toward my bedroom door. I had to actually chase her from the house –where usually just the shadow of my presence is enough to send her strutting in the other direction. Repeat this chasing scenario another two times and another two times substituting the hallway for the living room. Sigh.
TQ had similar issues in the office, although her numbers trump mine at 9 circles through the office and one egg laid on a pile of papers in the corner. Like I said, we’re not exactly Einstein either. Hot or not, I’m pretty sure Einstein would have closed the doors.
Where Jeganda chooses to sleep
After all that chasing we realized that the space we’d set up for her to nest wasn’t to her satisfaction – hence the scoping out of new lodging. It isn’t that we hadn’t tried. We’d put out a clay pot with ash, then a plastic bucket with ash and paper. Neither appealed to her as much as the office (who knew she’d be so picky, she picked a can of paint that leans to the side as her evening perch). The one egg she did lay in the place laid out for her she promptly kicked out of the nest– cracking it on the concrete.
She finally found a spot that suited her, between our water collection barrels on the back porch of the office. It is sheltered from view and probably feels safe. Too safe actually. That dumb bird flies or squeezes behind them to lay her eggs and then can’t get herself out again. This morning I heard her squawking up a storm (unusual for her as she is generally pretty quiet). After the third time I went to check it out only to find her wings fluttering about behind the barrel. I pushed it aside and just like that she was fine. Free to walk in the yard and peck at anything moving.
Not so bright antics aside, Jeganda is definitely paying her way. TQ paid 9,000UGX for her (roughly $4) and she has left us 4 eggs so far (250UGX each) with bright yellow yolks so different from the dull pale yolks so hard to distinguish from the whites of the eggs we generally buy. At this rate she’ll be in the black before she knows it and we’ll be in poached eggs and hollandaise sauce heaven (TQ’s weekend specialty breakfast!).
The air is thick with the ash of trash fires and old engine emissions. It is like breathing gravy and my lungs stretch themselves to capacity to keep me conscious. Walking up the hill to mulago hospital’s other entrance, because the guard wouldn’t let me through the gate, my backpack pulling each step back a little, I could feel my lungs straining, feel the wheeze in my chest.
I was angry by the time I made it the entrance and half-heartedly directed by a guard past a malaria research building funded by University of California San Francisco, down crumbling concrete steps, beyond the stench of an old pit toilet or a long-broken flush one, only to end up a few meters from the original entrance.
Sigh.
But this mission was about H so I swallowed the irritation and walked into the massive complex. Floors upon floors with no one offering information or directions. I walked to a pair of metal doors at the end of the hall, women on woven mats sat quietly with their legs tucked under them or to the side, waiting patiently – for what, I’m not sure. The man behind the door, guarding the occupants beyond it, directed me down a floor.
3D. I was looking for the ICU on 3D. and in short order I found it. The door with multiple “do not enter” signs of various wording. I started to walk in but the second pair of swinging doors had “no man’s land” above the door. All I could think was infection. This was the ICU. I hesitated and backed out.
Scanning the people walking by, I stopped someone in a uniform and she laughed and directed me through the doors, assuring me it was fine. Shoes cluttered the doorway- fading red tape the demarcation line for outside shoes vs ICU ward slippers. I stood indecisively, waiting to be yelled at. Two nurses approached.
“who are you looking for?”
I stated H’s name. They both shrugged, perhaps my accent mangled it making it more foreign sounding than it should be. I began to explain.
“he was transferred from IHK yesterday. He has severe head trauma.”
One nurse’s face lit up and she turned to the other and reminded him of H’s arrival the previous day. suddenly they were pointing down the hall; I walked into a bright room with one bed in each corner. H was in the far corner on the right, by the huge window.
He looked like I imagine he does when he’s sleeping, except for the large tube in his mouth breathing for him. But his eyes were closed. His skin clear and unmarked. Even the place on his scalp where his wound was sewed with dark green stitches was discreet. He looked like he could open his eyes at any moment. But he didn’t.
Instead he lay unmoving, his roasted coffee colored complexion in stark contrast to the white sheet around him. His frame looking tiny in the giant bed.
Machines clicked and whirred, the ventilator inhaled and exhaled and I cried silently.
Around the corner from the ICU entrance in an open air alcove like the one I’d seen the women in earlier, I leaned my back against the wall and slid to the ground breathing as deeply as my lungs would allow. I watched a gurney with a man laid out on it get pushed down the hall, wheels wobbling like a supermarket basket.
There were three family clusters with their belongings stacked neatly beside them. Colored mats rolled out with people sitting on them, buckets filled with cooking utensils, blankets folded, fruit being cut and handed out as people spoke softly to each other. They were there for the long haul. Indefinite diagnosis and recovery, they set up temporary lodging tucked away in the nooks and crannies of the hospital.
A nurse came out to request a straw for a patient, he was Ethiopian and didn’t speak luganda and so the need was pantomimed instead. I wonder how he pantomimes diagnosis. What happens then?
I walked back up the stairs, into the lobby, and out the door. I passed other gurneys in transit, crisscrossing my path headed who knows where. But all I could see was H. all I could hear was his ventilator. All I could wonder was his fate.
The street in front of mulago hospital is lined with tropical plants and flowering foliage, yellow roses and pink hibiscus, tiny other flowers in blue and red; a beautiful, if misplaced splendor in the shadow of and ICU visit.
It is extortion. Beyond amoral, it is cruel. It is inhuman…not inhumane but actually absent of all humanity.
The hospital TeaQueen took our friend to on Monday was holding him hostage with an ever rising ransom disguised as a hospital bill.
IHK is known as the best hospital in Uganda. When Shoes and T were injured they were not initially taken there but, with their medical connections, that was quickly rectified. And so when our friend and UVP volunteer was in a boda accident Monday and the district hospital was unable to treat him, we insisted he be taken to IHK.
Care comes at a price though. And IHK care$. And so the bill was estimated at a million shillings (roughly $500) a day.
Once stabilized we were pushing to move him to the public hospital. Both the family and my small non-profit are unable to afford the exorbitant price. But only hospital excuses reigned down. Tuesday was Eid (a public holiday) so we were told he couldn’t be moved until the next morning. Wednesday morning the 1.7 shilling bill was increased to 3 million and a refusal to transfer him until the bill was paid in full. Every hour it was unpaid and he remained there the bill threatened to increase.
The only “compromise” initially provided was to turn off the ventilator breathing for him.
TeaQueen, already traumatized by the accident she witnessed, voice cracked into the phone. She’d held it together for three days but the brutality of it all was too much.
Her tears managed to soften someone…the payment was deferred until after the hospital transfer and the amount still outstanding reduced to 1.55 million shillings (in addition to the 1.3 we’d already given them).
I don’t have words for the kind of helpless I felt. I didn’t know where the money would come from – but kindness is at least as abundant as cruelty and MK, part of the UVP family, raised funds in a day and had the money wired over. TQ was able to settle the hospital fees and we all breathed a little easier.
I wish that were all of it. I wish the worries ended there. But the public hospital has fees for ICU care (far less but still fees). I wonder how care will continue. We are living from day to night, crisis to solution, despair to hope, and then the reverse all over again.
I ask for prayers of recovery. I ask for strength in the meantime. I ask Uganda not to sacrifice another beautiful life.
Two years living in rural South Africa, where the lucky pulled their water from a bore hole and the unlucky walked miles away to gather theirs from a questionable open source, I began to realize the luxury of potable water. And as my eyes and my habits adjusted to village life, I began to understand the luxuries of adequate food, competent care, and available medications. Ultimately, everything comes back to health. The ability of a baby to grow, a father to work, a sister to study, all of those things rely on a healthy body. And so if a few words penned by me can be a part of the solution, packaged in with the vision and efforts of governments, NGOs, private sector, and people – people attempting to exceed survival, people wanting the chance to thrive – then I offer my ink and hope you will offer an email and click in the blue box to your right!
I was returned to my college days, my peace corps ones. returned to the joy that a tiny slip of paper in my mailbox can conjure.
Yesterday I got a package from my parents. And the timing couldn’t have been more perfect, a day more in need of pepping. I almost didn’t trudge down to the post office. The extra distance not particularly long, but made longer when the return journey is empty-handed. my mood was dodgy, my temperament brooding. I craved a sign from something someone somewhere external of me that would call me by my name (granted the post office transcribed it as Linnia but tiny details) and leave the mzungu moniker somewhere distant.
And there it was. dusty beyond anything I’d seen. It looked as if it had been kicked from kampala to iganga by a hoard of world cup aspiring seventh graders. Like it had played a game of hide and seek and the only place to hide was within a pile of cinnamon toast.
The lady behind the counter laughed at me as I ecstaticly handed her 3000shillings, as I skipped down the concrete steps holding the package to my chest.
In a way it feels silly. I’m old. Too old to expect anything more than letters from home. Too old to be homesick and clamor from confirmations of love from beyond the borders I live within.
I’d actually forgotten the sensation. New Zealand, never seemed to garner warm and fuzzies from anyone. It was like I was in another state rather than another country. I called home. I emailed. As far away as I was it never seemed to register as such. And Liberia, although folks requested an address for my short stint there, the mail was too unreliable. I didn’t have the patience (or the money for the oft times necessary bribe) to deal with a system still shell-shocked from years of mismanagement and war.
So imagine my surprise a few months ago, when my dear sweet friend Kali sent my first care package in so many years. Sour patch kids, a book, and sweet words of friendship, all conspired to give me a long distance hug. I found myself there again yesterday. In that touchless embrace that thoughtfulness a world away can conjure up for me.
I am too old to expect the world to stop and minister to the life and sometimes trials I willingly introduce myself to. This isn’t college – my first time away from home, or Peace Corps-I don’t know what to expect. I’ve been here. I’ve done this. Still, I appreciate the waving away of age. The willingness to disregard the truth that any hard patch I find myself in – pissy day, bewildered moment- is by own design. And I am moved by the long distance love.
in my south african village, so many years ago the fortunate pumped their water from private bore holes (deep wells) – the public one in the center of the village long broken. the less fortunate walked miles to a questionable open source.
one ran clear and tasted like no other water i’ve ever had (filtered as it was through meters and meters of rock), the other most likely contributed to a cholera outbreak in a nearby village. Clicking this link can help make sure water isn’t just for the fortunate.
Places sink into me, routines form around my actions like crust on freshly baking bread. Walking through the moist darkness after an evening deluge, the stars obscured by lingering clouds and the smell of sorghum home-brew floating headily in the air, I adjusted my eyes do the darkness and dodged puddles in the ruts of the road.
“mzungu come here,” a bicycle boda driver motioned to me and I curtly answered, “no mzungu” as I climbed side-saddle onto another waiting boda. He was unsure of where to go but we managed, crashing lightly into the back of another bicycle at the main road, narrowly missing a crazy motorcycle a little beyond that.
He steered us onto the feeder street, the purpose of which is lost on me. A bevy of mutatus loaded green bananas, boxes, and passengers; the doors flung open and people milling about busy lifting and staring. We stopped abruptly as he gestured halfheartedly for them to move.
I assume it was on purpose. Just shy of the restaurant, it was easier to walk.
Settled into my chair, picking at the remains of my dinner while the cricket match and Ugandan music vied for the attention I was lavishing on my NaNoWriMo pages (still unclear of where it is headed, it walks steadily none the less) I chatted with acquaintances and enjoyed a night away from home.
I walked briskly, the street emptier than usual, the rain or the hour, difficult to discern the culprit. My sweater scrunched and forgotten in my dinner chair, the coolness that searched it out to escort me to dinner later deserted me when my fish tikka and naan arrived.
Side-saddling home, half-way there before I realize that I’m in pants and could straddle the seat for better leverage; but habit, that crispy crusted habit, sat me demurely to the side, holding my bag and maintaining my balance unaided. A ride through iganga as I settle into it and it settles deeply into me.
Mickey was cute…at first. Funny in his lack of fear and disregard of anyone sitting and watching him meander across the concrete floor, climb the book shelf, and nestle there like we were all pals.
He was Ralph S. Mouse minus the motorcycle. Ralph S. Mouse with the added benefit of fleas and disease.
Mickey was funny, but only when I assumed he was an outside mouse come to visit. I should have known better, he looked too comfortable. So when my roommate discovered a mouse hole in her room – impressive because our walls are solid concrete – she decided it was time to wage war. Everything came off of her floor (leading the discovery of piles of excavated chunks of concrete wall and an additional two mouse holes).
More than war – this was mousekrieg.
Dedicated, she went into town in search of mousetraps, only to discover there are only rat traps and the necessary lusoga phrase to find them in the store is akatego. Then there was the poison and the sticky sheet traps…a sticky sheet and spring trap in her room, a spring trap under the kitchen sink, one behind my door.
At first it wasn’t working. The previous war, waged on the office side, yielded three quick kills in rapid succession. Apparently their neighbors – our rodent roommates – had evolved.
They evaded us for days. My roommate was losing heart. Then, sadly, she caught a gecko. they eat mosquitoes and are ugly cute and familiar in that “gieco will save you money” kind of way. sadder still because she caught it in a sticky trap and a brick had to finish the job.
But a few days later she was all smiles. She’d caught one. And it was as if a damn burst: two in her room, one in the kitchen. Then, the other night, I came home to one in my trap. Too late and too gross to deal with the deceptively cute and fuzzy corpse, I went to sleep. My roomie, having heard the snap the previous night, inquired first thing the following morning. Then she rolled her eyes and grumbled loudly, “you are such a girl” when she asked if I wanted her to take it out of the trap.
Hey, who am I to look a gift mousekrieger in the trap?
The traps have been quiet for a few days. I’d like to be naïve enough to believe the inactivity is proof that they are all gone, but I know better. Mice reproduce much like their hoppy long-eared twitchy-nose friends.
We haven’t figured out what they’re eating. Our food is carefully stored in the kitchen and only the concrete walls seem to have holes. It might be as simple as shelter, the rains have come and our place is mostly dry and just a quick scurry away from the compost heap in the backyard. Compost, a veritable feast if you into that kind of thing…and they are.
Unsure of how many extra roommates remain, for now I’ll call the uneasy quiet a temporary peace…all is quiet on the mouse-strewn front.
the body of an accident
They were staring.
Crowding and staring.
When J was finally able to move from where he stood vigil over his cousin’s body, his view obstructed by a set of swinging doors and multiple rows of beds with people languishing in various degrees of care or lack thereof, he was crowded and people stared. Unseeing – or maybe just unable to care about such trivialities – he sat under the shade of a tree beside the male ward, staring ahead.
At first he was alone. But one by one, and then in groups, people began to encircle him, hovering over him in ever closer proximity. No words, no comfort, just invasive stares that waited expectantly for some form of entertainment. They stared as we tried to coax him to drink water. As TeaQueen (TQ) washed blood from her hands. As we hugged, her shaking from the trauma of watching her friend fly into the air and land on the windshield of the car his motorcycle boda hit at top speed.
“they were grabbing at him and shaking him and reaching into his pockets,” she recounted, a blue helmet dangling from her hand instead of the white one she normally carried. someone stole that one during the confusion. Amid the screaming and blood.
Inside the ward, the walls a prison gray despite the windows lining them, H’s head rested on a blue plastic mattress in a pool of blood. His mother unfolded a thin sheet and pulled it over his body, his clear IV drip connected to his arm. I watched his torso move in and out with such profound effort, his legs shaking uncontrollably from the shock.
At home, in America, there would be no family work. In such severe circumstances family, let alone friends, would most likely not be permitted to watch as his injuries were attended to. But here, here TQ searched out the nurse assigned to tending to H’s head, staring her down in a failed attempt to shame her into moving faster, T talked to doctors, and I worked on finding an ambulance to carry H to Kampala.
This isn’t America.
Unable to treat his wounds the hospital was also unable to transport him; the ambulance was in some other undetermined place. Instead we bargained with the county council for theirs, paid for 45 liters of petrol and the driver’s fee before H could be on his way.
About the time the ambulance arrived at Iganga’s hospital it had just been decided to stitch up his head in an effort to stop the bleeding. And by the time that was complete a crowd had swelled around the ambulance, pushing closer, blocking the path and ambulance entrance. Crowding and staring, staring and crowding.
TQ pushed through the crowd at first; murmured angrily to herself. But the crowd remained unmoved, watching as if it were television, as if lives weren’t at stake. TQ’s voice grew louder. found a target; a woman blocking the way, craning her neck for a better view. “why do you stand here? Why are you blocking the way? there is nothing to see you should move. Move.” Her voice, forced politeness, but the edges were barbed in agitation. Kampala is three hours away and, in the absence of medical tests, we had no way of knowing the severity of H’s wounds.
Dropped off at Jinja hospital, the boda driver died.
H was admitted to ICU.
…and we wait.
Uganda is becoming a place of death and injury for me.
Tags: friends, socialcommentary, uganda, work