Dijo

(DEE-jo) food

The past couple of days at work have been...well there's no one word.

This week I went on home visits with the social workers, which was very interesting. Though everything was in Setswana so I couldn't follow them at the time, the social worker was very nice about translating for me afterwards. We saw the whole range of things, from very young OVCs to be registered in our preschool, to "naughty" teens....naughty was the word she used with her second-language-English, but we would use a different word for it in Canada.

I had a great morning with the patients. I read the newspaper to the one who is visually impaired but has very good english, and then I taught the a patient who speaks no English to play checkers. We had a board, but used dominoes as checker pieces. All of the patients got involved in the game and were very excited!

That is the last cheerful thing I have to say in this post.
(Thats a warning).

The following day we were on home visits with social workers and nurses. I saw a man very very sick with cancer, but he was 90 years old. He was not sad, and his diseasse was not sad, (its not tragedy for a 90 year old to die of cancer, anywhere, its life), but the situation was. A young girl, maybe 17, was caring for him. She looked sombre and tired. And he was laying in a room only big enough to fit the bed, and the blankets he was laying on the floor beside it. When they pulled some blankets away I saw that he was laying on a biohazard bag. While this is practical, and it is obvious why you would put plastic sheeting under a bed, it seemed symbolically very sad.

We then went to the house of a woman we've visited twice, with AIDS and cancer. We were pleased to be visiting her again, but when we arrived, people were sitting in front of the house, and the nurses sat down with them. We finally found out in translation, she'd died that day. The nurses were very sad, as she was from their home village, and one of them had been visiting her on weekends.

This morning at work we found out that two of our clients, a mother and the premature baby she'd recently given birth to, were both very ill. They told us that the mother was extremely malnourished (as is the baby) and she would probably die today or tomorrow without Ensure, the nutritional supplement. Though it seemed like no one was doing anything, we - the students - felt a sense of urgency at this. We agreed among ourselves to donate the equivalent of about 15$ CAN to buy it for today, but then my colleague spent the day on the phone with some contacts, and we helped her work on a donation letter. While the 15$ is nothing to us, 70 Pula is a large sum here, and our one-time donation is not the long-term solution they need. In spite of her condition it wasn't until the end of the day that we handed over the money to a social worker who promised us he would go directly to buy it and take it to her. Though we can't be sure if this was actually the situation or an exaggeration, it was an intense day for us.

On that note, a girl in our group visited a hospital in a nearby town a few days ago. She said it was an enormous, modern, beautiful hospital. Expensive building, poorly run. For a gigantic hospital she said there were only 10 doctors. She saw a baby who she said was the sickest person she'd ever seen. He was 15 months old, severely malnourished, and clearly suffering from a range of nutrient deficiencies. She found out later that day he'd died. The mother was young, younger than us. But still, why didn't she bring her baby in sooner?

I've read it before, but never truly understood that malnutrition is one of the most shockingly common health problems worldwide, and perplexingly easy to solve. And it's not as though Botswana is one of the countries with a problem of hunger and starvation...relatively.
I have no more words about this day.