Hospitals and Rural Areas

Sannibona! Hello All!

It has been a very long time since my last blog

post, and for that

I apologize. It has been getting quite hectic here, as we are knee deep in the semester now. Paper deadlines are coming up rapidly, and on top of all that we are still taking our excursions which, quite honestly, are a bit disorganized. Nonetheless, the experiences I have had thus far have proven to be very valuable and I hope to share some of them with you below. I have quite a lot to cover yet again, so I hope only to include the highlights more will come though

HOSPITALS: The week before last, all of the SIT community health students visited various clinics and hospitals to volunteer/help

out, as well as to get a sense of the public health care system in South Africa. For the most part, public health care here is free, but the state of the public health care system is deplorable. I visited a hospital with several of my peers (I don’t think I can reveal the name of the hospital on this blog for ethical/legal reasons), but I was absolutely amazed. First of all there was not a computer in sight. Patients handled their own written records, which often got lost/duplicated/ or filed in the wrong place. Moreover the whole chain of treatment gave patients the run around before they could be seen by a doctor. Because doctors are so rare in the public system (and those that are there are only serving their required one year of community service), patients must first stop by their local clinic (staffed entirely by nurses). If the condition cannot be treated there, then the clinic refers them to a local hospital. Each area has a designated public hospital (in the case of the township where I am staying, it was the hospital where I worked…but that is more than 30 minutes away by car!). There at the hospital the patient may wait hours just to retrieve a file, then must wait in more lines to receive vitals testing, followed by any sort of screening or scan that needs to be done. The patient then waits in a queue of 150+ people to see 1 of 2 or 3 fresh-out-of-m

ed-school, community service doctors. If they cannot help as the secondary intervention, patients are then referred to a tertiary provincial hospital where surgeries, treatment, etc. are done. To receive relatively quick and effective service (and by relatively quick I mean 6 months to a year of trying to figure out that you have cancer and get it treated, for example), you must go through this entire chain of command. It is so much different from our system…if I am really sick, I go to the hospital. Simple as that. I can only imagine how many people have died in the process of trying to be treated. Days missed from work, transportation costs, standing, waiting, and more standing in lines could be a huge toll on patients.

Although the situation was so appalling to me at the hospital, I had a blast with the nurses. They affectionately called me “Mr. Uzi” because they could not get my name right. When I told them I was staying in a township with the Zulu’s, they laughed at me (because they were Colored). I got to fetch a stretcher for a lady who passed out while waiting to get her file. I got to conduct patient interviews of people who missed their appointments for the doctor, where I saw so many things. W/hat truly amazed me was

how many people were HIV positive! Not only that, people were finding out that they were positive, and it was as if nothing had changed. As I discussed with my peers later on, if I found out I was HIV positive, I would have had a fit of some kind, but here, it is so common that people don’t stress. One doctor even told me “I don’t ask about HIV status anymore. When a patient comes in, I just ask ‘What’s your CD4 count?’.” Assumption of a positive status is not unwarranted, KwaZulu Natal (the province where I am staying), has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world.

RURAL AREAS: My homestay family in Cato Manor scared me, when telling me about the rural homestays. They said “Kids come back crying,” “It’s so hard!” “You will fall in the poop hole!” Honestly though, I think I may have enjoyed my rural homestays more than I enjoy my homestay in the city! We made our first stop at Umtwalume a semi-rural area not too far from our base of Durban. There I met

with a faith healer (a traditional healer who uses prayer and water). I learned how to bead, a method of craft many women used to generate an income. Can I just say that using those small beads was the hardest thing I have ever done! (I guess my visual disability didn’t help much either). Luckily I had a mama there who was able to help me make m aids ribbon in no time…she was such an expert and so fast with it too! The time it took me to put one bead on the string, she had completed an entire row of the ribbon. At least now I have a memento I can say I made (or rather, I tried to make but the mama made it for me). In Umtwalume, I also had a traditional Zulu dinner—fresh chicken (as in jus

t slaughtered), amadumbe (a type of flour/potato dish), and butternut squash this was served to us on a tray, and we had to eat with our hands (a phenomenon I just cannot get used to).

Next we visited Impendle, which is in the Drakensburg Mountains. What a beautiful sight it was. Impendle was more rural than Umtwalume, complete with dirt, rocky roads. When one thinks of rural Africa, a picture of the landscape of Impendle might be appropriate. Cows were EVERYWHERE. Imagine, walking down the road, and a bull is walking toward you (that actually happened to me). We were walking from our home, and a herd of about thirteen cows greeted us. No harm was done, to my amazement, but being in the midst of a herd of cows that weigh several tons was not an appealing thought to me. The water here was definitely NOT safe to drink, although we did bathe with it. The people were so nice to us...our broken Zulu and their broken English made things a bit complicated, but we transcended those boundaries of language, which was excellent.

We have learned that it is Zulu custom of r a man to have more than one wife, but we had yet to see a husband in the families we have been with, let alone a husband with multiple wives (there is much to talk about in terms of the absence of fathers in the urban Zulu context). In Impindle, however, we stayed with a family with 5 wives! Two of the wives were present on the compound and two were in Joberg. The first wife actually ran away. We stayed with the second wife primarily (who is technically now the first wife). Because of her status as the “first wife” she is known as the head of all of the other wives. When asked if she got along with the other wives, she said “of course.” The way it has been explained to me is that “at least I know where my husband is at night.” But that doesn’t explain how he had the opportunity to recruit more wives Anyway, a man with 5 wives is a very rich man, as he must pay for all of them, and pay to sustain them. Moreover, our baba had twenty-two children! Think about all those people he must support!

Anyway, that’s about all of my stories. I did, for the first time, live without indoor plumbing, and I made use of the long drop toilets! Will I do it again if I had a choice, probably not, but it was definitely an experience I can reflect on. By no standard were the rural staying unlivable, but then again I must take into account that I am an American student, and although these environments have a changing effect on me, I also influence the environment in which I step. I am sure conditions could be much worse for those who are actual residents of the mountain-side town.

I think that is about all for now. Those were just the highlights... I have more stories for DAYS! Including stories about my hike in the Drakensburg (so tiring!), but I will save that for another time. I still would like to write a post on my experience as an African-American student in Africa, and how my experiences may be different from my peers, but that will have to come when I get a little bit more time to work on it. I hope things are well wherever you may be reading this!

Salani Kahle nobenosuku oluhle! (Stay well, and have a good day)