Situation room

Think you can fight a protracted battle in this type of environment? Come, let me fill you in on the details. If you put things into perspective, you’ll realize whoa some things be crazy.

I want to know what happened to the water. We haven’t had water in this house for about a month now. It was alright because my host father would gather water in a bunch of containers from the local watering hole a few kilometers away in his truck. I was cool with it through week 3 until I realized, dude this is frickin ridiculous. It took me awhile to realize that I was taking baths once every 6 days. I’m as whack as anyone but that’s just nasty. How could you blame me? I need that water for drinking. The surprising part is no one complained about it. I guess I don’t sweat as much anymore and people are just used to people not bathing around here. Huh go figure. Maybe the coca cola company forced the water to shut down so all the people would buy coke and soda from the local shops who knows. So what about the people around me. Let’s put things in really simple terms to give an overly simplified perspective. I won’t go into really deep details, but think about it a bit. Doctors say oh you should wash your hands after you go to the bathroom, before you eat, and I read on a pamphlet somewhere that you should wash your hands after touching yourself in dirty areas, I’m not kidding that’s what it said. Then I think, with what water? You could use those alcohol based solution things. Buy them with what money? I read somewhere that you could stop 99 percent of all communicable diseases if everyone just washed their hands… all the time. I guess I’m realizing, easy for you to say. Most people do wash their hands regularly but if you think about it. It shouldn’t be a trade-off. If I drink this water then my hands will be dirty or if I wash my hands then I will be thirsty. I guess we just got pwned by microeconomics 101 and it said, “there is no free lunch biotch”. Let’s not even talk about why there aren’t any gardens in the village.

The area that I am in is one of the most impoverished areas in the country. I have heard numbers indicating how high the unemployment is. I hear things like the region has a 60 percent unemployment rate, or even a 70 percent unemployment rate. Some people took it up a notch one time and said there was a 81 percent unemployment rate. Then I asked, “you gave an estimate with a non-rounded number?” He then said it’s because he liked Terrell Owens (his number) and the Dallas Cowboys were his favorite team. I proceeded to not talk to this person for a week. Whether this official unemployment or if it excludes people that are self employed I’m not sure. I’m sure the official number is a lot lower, but come on, if you’re estimating over 10 percent, it warrants a WTF.

It is rumored that the HIV prevalence rate hovers around 30 to 35 percent. I have heard numbers that could be higher. Just ponder that for a minute. Put yourself in a room of 100 people and the chances are the person on your right is going to punch you in the face, or have HIV maybe even both I don’t know. This is a staggering rate, a crippling rate, a (insert adjective to show how dire and serious the situation is) rate. It’s a tough tough situation for everyone here to be in. And with no answers coming anytime to soon, it may get worse before it gets better.
I was given a chance to visit some of the schools. I walked into one school and tried to set up an appointment to meet the principal and the receptionist came out and yelled, “What are you selling!? We don’t want to buy anything from you!” You could only imagine how shocked I was. I politely explained who I was and tried to convince her that this crazy “Indian” (apparently I’m straight out of Mumbai) guy just wanted to tell some of the kids he was a peace corps volunteer and indeed was not an Indian salesman and after awhile she allowed me to visit the principal. They say that a classroom should be no larger than 20 students or it is at risk of overcrowding and the teacher cannot be effective in giving students the one on one teaching they need. If any of you went to public school, you would know this. So what would you say if I told you that the average classroom size of these schools that I visited was about 50 students each with one teacher to teach them? How do I know? I counted and each class had no less than 40 students in it.

My town is lucky enough to have a clinic. It is pretty sweet since there are a lot of people here that have ailments that can’t be easily fixed (HIV/AIDS and TB to name the two big ones). I remember shadowing 2 orthopedic surgeons for 2 weeks when I was studying abroad in Australia. I always remembered the exhausted look on their faces at the end of the day. The 2 of them together saw on average a total of 60 patients a day (30 each). According to some health professionals you really don’t want to see more than 15 patients in one day or you risk being burned out, and you actually don’t spend enough time with your patient to assess their situation. You know what I’m going to say and I’m still going to say it. The clinic in our town has 7 nurses, 4 of which are not allowed to consult patients directly by themselves (Nursing assistants I take it, probably take vital signs and things like that), and no doctors. Want to take a guess at how many patients they see in a day? If you guessed over 150 you’d be correct. Crazy, the 3 nurses that are allowed to consult patients have to take in about 50 patients themselves a day. The clinic is open for 8 hours. 60 minutes in an hour makes 480 minutes in a day divided by 50 equals just a little under 10 minutes per patient (not factoring breaks or lunch). Confound this by a few factors such as lack of education or health literacy among patients and you realize, dude it’s just not enough time.

I think the people that actually read this entire thing are getting the point so I’ll stop here. What can we do? How can we stop one thing leading to another? I might have some ideas I’d be willing to try and I guess we’ll just have to see if they do anything.

Later