>Africa
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On February 18th of this year, 2010, I started a life long dream to Africa. Kenya to be exact. I have not written about this subject since I returned home 2 weeks later. Now it has been months…and I fear I am losing her, that experience I had….was it just a dream? Did it really happen? Let’s just say that I will never be the same again….Africa is in my blood. I yearn to go back there. To see the people, smell the markets, see the smiles, laughter, and joy in the children. To hear that eerily, spooky chanting at 5:30 am….the Muslim call to prayer….summoning the faithful of the city by loudspeaker to come pray….I knew I was faraway from home when I heard that every morning. We laughed at breakfast over, “can you imagine if they did that back home?!”
The people of Kenya are strong, resilient, happy people. They will always have a meal for you….and you can’t say no. I found out the hard way….ended up eating roasted goat! I adamantly refused the goat bone soup….I figured it would be more rude if I puked in their laps! While I was there I had to keep reminding myself that I was on the continent of Africa….I kept picturing that huge land mass on the globe that we spun around playfully in elementary school as kids….never once even imagining that someday I would actually go there. While I was there it DID seem so far away. I had virtually no contact with my family back home. I was only able to make one phone call and email during those two weeks. Except for not having the connection with the ones I love I have to admit something. I didn’t miss it. I didn’t miss my country, technology, my job or even my freedoms. It is strange. About the only thing I really missed were clean toilets and bathrooms with soap and paper towels! I am sure that sooner or later I would have come to miss much more, but I was so content on the simplicity of the life there. To even try to write about it here seems overwhelming. As, I watch our country at war with each other regarding the right to health care my mind goes back to Africa. To a country where healthcare truly is a luxury. The average American has no idea what the world looks like when the right to healthcare is actually a privelege for the wealthy. I witnessed a two week old baby at the hospital in Maua being turned away because she had pneumonia and her parents did not have the money to have her admitted. After a couple of hours her family was able to come up with the money through various family members and she was whisked away for treatment. We had the privilege and honor to make home visits with the hospice nurse that works from the hospital and makes visits to dying patients in their homes. These homes were really what we would call shacks here in this country. No electricity, no plumbing, no refrigerators, BCBS, or pile of prescriptions. No chance of being hospitalized for the tumors growing at rapid speed through both patients we visited. The missionary nurse pulled out a huge bottle of morphine and that was it. He had no money for anything else. Yet, as we sat and talked with this man his concerns were the same as the hospice patients we care for here in the United States. How will his family survive without him? What will happen to his land after his death? Will this morphine continue to make him comfortable until his death? How will his wife care for his children?
Or what about Alice? She was at the HIV/AIDS clinic that we worked at for two days later in the week. She had walked miles to this rural clinic with her two year old brother Emmanuel. They waited in the “waiting room” for their medication and follow up appointments. The clinics are held in a different village every day of the week. Most of the time these clinics are held in abandoned church buildings or homes. They had no electricity, no privacy. Just examinations and medications. Alice and Emmanuel were orphans. Their parents were dead from the same disease that they themselves were now fighting. They were now on their own. You see, in Africa, not only is healthcare a luxury but social services or any kind of “government assistance” is as well. Nope, don’t have to worry about socialism here. These orphans live by themselves. They fend for themselves, grow crops to survive on, try to go to school….But on days like this day, Alice had missed school to take her younger brother to the clinic for his medications. People waited there all day. Sitting under the trees, sleeping on the ground while flies buzzed around their mouths and nose. The clinic workers, doctors and nurses usually saw 50-100 patients a day. Their “charts” were papers stapled together. Papers that they would take home and bring back next month. Most of the patients there were not only infected with HIV but malaria, TB, and other opportunistic infections that their immune systems just couldn’t fight off. These people came to these clinics in shame. If they were found out by others in the village, they were shunned and became outcasts…and their surviving children would be as well.
The stories that I could tell could go on. And they will….for now that I have started, I can’t stop telling their stories. The state of affairs over healthcare sickens me. You want healthcare to be a luxury for only those that can afford it? You want an end to social programs? Really? Think about it….for I have seen it.It is not so pretty.
And still, I miss it, I miss them. I will be back…to help “the least of these…” These people who were so gracious, caring, loving and joyful. They had such faith in God. The praised him feverently….and prayed without ceasing. While in Africa I thought to myself, “how can they be so happy when they have so little?” But after I came home it was then that I realized, these were the richest people in the world.
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