North of Unreal
Recently, in Malawi, I encountered my very first “rhinoceros”.
It was a fat-assed SUV from the World Food Programme, leading the charge
through traffic with its impressive hard black tusk of radio antennae.
In this season of hunger, Malawi is thick with 4-wheel-drive SUVs,
whizzing through the country carrying aid workers and foreign delegations and visiting young journalists down red soil tracks through the maize fields to meet villagers who’ve eaten but one meal that day, to talk with mothers
who say their breast milk is drying up. The land rovers speed through villages,
dodging women hiking to town with their
babies slung lovingly on their backs, past roadside stands selling corn cobs grilled
dry and black and delicious. Occasionally, one of these big foreign cars
may narrowly avoid hitting a small child in a yellow T-Shirt.
Every once in a while, in this rush of foreign aid, a local on bicycle carrying
firewood or a twiggy bouquet of radish root may be
nudged off the road onto the shoulder of rough rocks.
At restaurant tables, over the course of several dark, humid nights in February,
this reporter from northern BC found herself rubbing shoulders with
friendly, culture-shocked Norwegians who had come bearing computers for
nursing students; a jolly Zimbabwean consulting engineer; and a haughty World Food
Program professional from Sudan who issued stern instructions to his
car and driver over his cell phone.
In the morning, the reporter watched a parade of chauffeured cars and SUVs pull
in and load up for another day of aid work. And one of the cars was there for her. Today, the northern reporter was off to Lilongwe’s central hospital in air-conditioned comfort, her belly full of toast and eggs.
Two large white cholera tents had been set up near the hospital’s front gates. “Ah-hah,” smiled a local doctor with equal measures of weariness and irony. “This way, you can catch cholera going in to the hospital OR coming out.”
Inside the hospital, a woman in a green smock shouted at the mothers of
patients who’d been herded into the hallway so the ward could be cleaned. She poured brown water from a bucket onto the stone floor and flailed away with her mop. Inside the
ward, a small boy with a tube up his nose wailed and cried and the sound
was something that hurt. He was shirtless, maybe seven years old, and sharing his hospital bed
with another patient. He had severe malaria. A passing foreign doctor laid a hand on his head
and said the fever seemed to be coming down.
Down the hall, a group of young Malawians with white coats and stethoscopes sat down for their morning meeting. They were not doctors, but Clinical Officers in training—the backbone of the health system in a country where there are just 100 doctors for 12 million people. They were being trained to diagnose, to operate, and to try to save lives. That morning, one student stood up to deliver the last night’s death toll. Six children.
Malaria, cholera, pneumonia. Through the windows of the meeting room, as
they talked of death and disease, the Clinical Officers in training could watch the mothers
and grandmothers of the patients doing laundry at stone sinks:
washing the bedding, the clothes, and the rags for mopping up. It was also their job to
feed the young patients…whether or not they had any food to give them.
Inside the room, several students set up a computer to deliver their class assignment – a Power-Point presentation on malaria, incongruously illustrated with a graphic of fireworks. At the end of the presentation, a tall, bearded medical student—one of just 20 trained every year in this country – stood up and said he would give the presentation a 7 out of 10.
In the hallway, a very thin mother was sitting on the floor with a tiny baby in her arms. Despite the heat, her infant had a yellow wool hat on his head. He was not moving. The baby had severe pneumonia, a viral infection that was making its deadly rounds here. The mother was HIV positive and had no food to eat.
The next day, on the road back from Salima, four of us were stopped by the Malawian military. The soldiers held shiny, long M-16 rifles, and they ordered the men to one side of
the road to be searched and the women to the other side. The local women and children we went to wait with were hungry. As the men were searched on the far side of the road, a young woman said to us in English: “Suffering!! SUFFERING!!” And I started to play hand games with the children—hand pancakes—black hand over white hand over black hand over white – and then we got back in the car and drove the rest of the way at high speed, the villages and the maize fields whizzing by in a blur.
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