Tuesday, March 21, 2006

where are the bandaids????

It is World Water Day tomorrow. Ironic when once again I had no water for 2 days and I live in the heart of the capital. My neighbours and I called for the water truck to come so we could fill up our bottles and rubbish bins so that we could then boil it and attempt to go about day-to-day life. I now have a sense of just how precious water is and I really know now that I absolutely cannot live without it. The water truck never came to our end of the street. My neighbour heard the truck driver and his girlfriend having a good argument in the next street so when we rang to complain about the lack of water, we also complained about that. They told us the water would come 7am the next day and when we clarified that by asking if that was Fiji time 7am or real time 7am, they laughed. The truck came at midday of course. So when you have a kidney stone that you are trying to flush out by drinking 3 litres of water a day (as per Dr’s orders), you start to get preoccupied about where that water is going to come from, let alone if it is safe to drink.

I don’t want to rave on about my health problems but I will. I have 2 infected sores on each foot at the moment and I have had for about 3 weeks now. I have lost count of how many packets of bandaids I have had to buy. So walking is hard work and I have to wear thongs. Luckily they are considered to be appropriate footwear for work. At the end of the day I have aching feet because I am not walking properly and compensating for where my sores are. This morning as I rushed to work, I stopped at a Pharmacy on the way to buy some more bandaids and merchurochrome (not sure how you spell it, a bright red antiseptic liquid that is used a lot here). After numerous attempts to make myself understood (we were both speaking English) they told me they had none of either. I erupted in frustration and also I was astounded that a Pharmacy would not have these basic basic health products. I stormed out of the shop.

We have been having a conjunctivitis epidemic in Suva. Every 5th person you see on the street has the red streaming eyes or is suspiciously wearing sunglasses indoors. People are going to work and being sent home as are many students. I don’t think I have ever seen conjunctivitis before. The newspaper printed a blurb about it, how infectious it is and that people need to be isolated but I don’t see that being practiced too much. I with my already bad health here am paranoid about getting it so have taken to wearing sunglasses as well to protect myself and avoid anyone with it. I have probably been an insensitive European by talking loudly about how people need to isolate themselves and how so and so should probably go home.

There has been a story in the newspaper about some dead babies that have gone missing from Lautoka hospital. The newspaper implied that the babies were stolen for use in some terrible way. Anyway it turns out that the hospital had not lost the babies. They had cremated them as is the practice when no family come to claim the dead baby from the morgue. The reason for this is that some families cannot afford the funeral or burial so they stay away until the hospital has to depose of the dead baby themselves. Sad eh?

Hospitals are known here for incredibly long waits. Same as in Australia but more extreme. A friend of mine who is an American nurse was telling me how she went with one of the Deaf boys who had broken his arm to get it looked at. It was broken a month ago but he was in a lot of pain with a huge lump over where it has been broken. They went to a GP who said the lump was just a boil and to give it a massage and it would go away. Suspecting a break that had not been set properly and was not healing they decided to take him to the hospital to get it looked at. The poor boy also could not move his fingers so could not sign – very problematic for a deaf boy who only communicates in sign. So the first day they rock up, had to wait 6 hours to be seen. They were bumped back down the line when a group of 20 policemen rock up for routine x-rays. My friend repeatedly asked for pain medication as the poor boy was in agony. She was told to wait and that the nurses were too busy. If you want to eat or drink at the hospital you have to bring your own bowl, cup and plate so bad luck if you don’t know that beforehand. After the long wait, a visiting American hand surgeon just happened to look up from his desk to ask if they were being attended to. The next day was a 3 hour wait and they had lost the file and x-ray from the day before and then the day of surgery was a 9 hour wait. During this time my friend was in the ward and started doing some of her own nursing when she could see some things were not going well. She took out a huge air bubble from someone’s IV drip. Another man had a huge lump over where his IV was wrongly inserted and was in obvious pain. When he complained to the nurse she massaged it with the needle still inserted (massage is the answer for everything here) causing him more pain. When the nurse left the room, my friend took it out and reinserted it. Of course she felt bad, interfering in people’s work.

I don’t know about the volunteer thing. I am starting to think if the organization can’t get its act together to do what they want to achieve then they are not ready for it. The culture in Fiji seems to be distrusting of white Europeans telling them what to do (rightly so probably) or having more expertise than them. You are often thrust into a leadership or management role but local distrust makes that difficult to carry out no matter how hard you try to be inclusive and not autocratic. The culture also seems to respect that more traditional hierarchy where you have the person at the top who is the boss and what he says goes and you don’t question it. They also seem to like that more authoritarian way of ruling. But if you act like that you get told you are trying to take over when you are only a ‘volunteer’. As you can see I have issues I need to work through!

Loloma

Kate