Drops of dried blood trail
the sidewalk outside where I am walking. Sad lonely people sit waiting to hear
news of their loved ones. A body completely covered with a sheet and a shrouded
blanket rolls passed me on a bed as I move along the outside corridors. There’s
no warning. There is no preparation for
what you will see and experience in this place.
The overall feeling I have gotten the few times I have visited the country’s
main government hospital in the last 10 years, is just sadness and despair. Or maybe despair isn’t the right word,
because I think at times despair can drive you to action or it can drive you to
do something. But this, it’s a resignation. Left to itself to think, well what
more can be done? I guess this is what it has to be?
Many of the patients at UTH
the University Teaching Hospital are there because they cannot afford to go
anywhere else. Their only hope for help and healing is there, in this hospital
where the poverty of the country shows itself so clearly.
For the last 3 years this
place has been on my heart. So much so that at the beginning of the year one of
my goals for 2019 was to begin visiting patients at the hospital. The year
didn’t start off like I had hoped and so I just now in August found myself
thinking I really need to try to find a way to go there.
I had tried to get connected
via phone with different people to tell me HOW to go about helping. There are
no candy stripe positions or volunteer desks where sweet old ladies with white
hair, or teenagers in said pink striped uniforms can give out information and a
smile to help those in need.
So, after waiting too long,
especially when something is on your heart - one day I was driving by the
hospital and just decided today was the day to start “trying”.
That very week, a post my
cousin had put on her FB account encouraged me, it said, “Be someone who makes someone else look
forward to tomorrow”.
And I was reminded, “yes”, I
can be that someone.
So I drove into the massive
confusing complex of nowhere to park at the hospital and found a guard who was
willing to give me a spot for “the lady”. I parked and began to walk around the
hospital. It’s almost impossible to describe the hospital to a foreigners mind…
but much of it is outdoors and lots of courtyards. There are lots of people and
even more doctors and nurses and wanna-be doctors and nurses milling
about. There is no designated area for
the random white woman who wants to help to go and sign in. So I walked around
and around. I saw an administration office and thought about it but didn’t go
in. Then I walked a second time the entirety of the hospital campus, trying to
get up the courage to just walk into an office and start talking. I was
nervous. I am not sure why, I think mostly because I knew this wasn’t a typical
thing and also I feel often misunderstood in the Zambian cultural context. Its
nothing at this point that I can do, but it is there. So I literally was speaking to myself, “Come
on Megan, you can do this. You are strong.
You are brave. Come on…”
Finally I heeded my own
advice and walked into the administration wing and knocked on a random office
door and explained what I wanted. The gentleman then referred me to another
office, public relations. There I met a
nice lady who was happy to talk to me and in fact had a specific person that
had needed help. So I got the proper
permissions and wrote the appropriate letters and after that I was given the ok
to go to one of the wards and pass out fruit and toiletries and give assistance.
And so the awkward phase of
it began. ME walking around while
everyone else is staring at me especially the staff coming up and wanting to
see what’s going on and why am I here, etc. But, the good thing was that I was
introduced to a young man Jonathon who has been in the hospital for the last 5
months. His younger sister Given is there staying with him at the hospital. They
are double orphans and have no other family coming to help them. He is oxygen
dependent and so he has had to stay there until an oxygen concentrator machine
could be purchased for him. So I started visiting him each week. And this was
exactly what I needed to feel comfortable to then go around to all the other
patients in the ward on the given day of the week passing out fruit.
On one of my recent visits
with Jonathon a man 3 beds over from them in the ward was calling for me to
come. He had no strength to even lift his head or his arms but was beckoning me
to go by his bedside. I had seen him a few weeks earlier and had given him fruit
and briefly spoken to him and knew he was in bad shape. His stomach was very bloated
and there in the bed laid a man with extreme malnourishment. Kwashiokor.
Since the time I was a young
child watching TV, like everyone else in the Western world, I had seen the
videos of starving children in Africa. Bloated bellies, pronounced ribcages,
tight skin and lethargy. I had never seen an adult like this, let alone had any
interaction with someone. But now right in front of me was a man begging for
help. For food.
The hospital provides a soya
porridge for breakfast and then nshima and beans for lunch. Many patients have food brought in to them by
the “bedsitter” the person who is allowed to stay at the hospital with the
patient the entire time. But this man, Robbie could not eat the food that the
hospital provided and he had no one staying with him and taking care of
him. His huge belly over the weeks was
seeming to decrease a bit as the fluid was being drained often from his
stomach.
Draining fluid seems to be a
very common practice at the hospital, as about every 8-10 patients I visit will
have a drainage tube coming out of their side, flowing into an open basin or
bucket underneath or to the side of their bed.
So for the past several weeks he just lay on his bed with a single drainage
tube coming out of his stomach.
Languishing.
When he called me over
begging for food, I have never felt more clearly the passage of scripture where
Jesus says, “I was hungry and you fed me.” So I went to the cafeteria bought
him some vegetables and some food and tried to ask him a bit more about his
situation and what he could eat. One of
the nurses later came back to me to say that he needed a low protein diet. So
when I left the hospital I told him next time I came I would bring him some
food.
I thought about him the next
several days, and when I couldn’t sleep at night and he was on my mind I
started researching Malnourishment- more specifically Kwashiokor. I tried to
see what other foods to bring him and so when I went to the hospital on Tuesday
I was weighed down with a backpack full of food for him and the fruit for all
the other patients in the ward. I showed him the things I brought and offered
to organize it in his bedside cabinet. I opened it up and cockroaches were crawling
around inside of it. A cup of porridge sat on the top of it with about 10 dead
flies in it. I warned him not to drink it anymore, that he needed to throw it
out.
From his sunken in eyes, he
looked at me and said thank you. I told him that this food was really from God.
He was using me but it was ultimately Him that was giving it.
Though the temperature was
about 95degrees outside and his bed lay by the window, (windows are kept open
as there is no air conditioning and the room definitely needs ventilation) he
was covered up in a blanket and was not doing well. He kept telling me that
they had brought some medicines and fluid but they couldn’t get the cannula in
his arm because he had no blood so they couldn’t give him anything. As he
talked to me a fly landed on his face, just like the children in the TV ads-
and he couldn’t even wipe it away. I moved to swipe it away from his hollow
cheek.
I finished my visits and
before leaving he told a nurse to come bring me back to his bedside. He was
asking for help to buy a $3 medicine. So I walked off the hospital campus
across the street to the chemist to buy him his medicine.
I brought it back and found
an orange in my bag and gave it to him. He smiled and said thank you- I have no
one staying here to help me.
Since I last saw him on
Tuesday, I found out he passed away yesterday.
Alone.
No one was there with him.
My heart aches.
I don’t know
anything. I don’t know the backstory, or why at the end of his life there was
no one with him. I don’t even know his official diagnosis.
But He died alone.
That makes me very sad.
The same week 3 other
patients died, 2 of whom I had several interactions with and was seeking to
give help to. If I am honest, it has left me feeling so emotionally drained and
raw. I don’t even know how to respond.
The encouragement both the
kids and James have told me is that at least for this particular man, in his last
days, he received kindness.
And that thought,
today
Sunday evening, in the wake of a total personal emotional breakdown Saturday
morning exhausted and spent, crying more than I have in a while due to life but
most especially Zambia hardships of these terrible weeks we have had lately (with
no electricity for 12-16 hours a day, water problems and excessive heat)…
That thought that if I look
away from myself and my problems and hardships, I can clearly see some
“purpose.” That even a cup of cold water given to this man, was done for
Christ.
