This is a journey through the reality of Sierra Leone, a country in which the Augustinian Recollects have left their mark. The author, with his soul in pain but in love with Sierra Leone after a year in the country, tells us the story sometimes in the first person, other times from the point of view of the objective observer, with traces of humor and dreams for the future of this country.
In the container they send us milk and baby food for the children. In a place with a level of malnutrition as high as it is this is like gold and it saves lives. To hand it out, I stared with a criteria which seemed to me objective: I would only give it to those children who for medical reasons need it. We do not have enough milk for all of Biriwa.
This time the anger was more or less immediate. ¿Do you know of the hyperbolic example of “There was once a man with a stuck-on nose” from Quevedo? Well, this time there was no exaggeration: a mother came with a receipt signed by a certain Sesay, the nurse but not doctor from Kamabai. The woman had full breasts and carried on her back a smiling, handsome and well-fed child. Only he wasn’t rosy cheeked.
Something wasn’t right so I probed further. The mystery was resolved: our Sesay had started to sell receipts for malnutrition. Yes, sell because in the mission they give out milk free to those who have a receipt. A profitable business: sell what you don’t give.
This is how things work in the health sector here. In the region of Biriwa there is only one titular doctor, and there are few health centres which in all cases are run by nurses who practice as doctors and charge ridiculous fees for everything
The law is clear: the attention to minors under five and pregnant women are free. But this is one more of the many of the worthless laws in Sierra Leona. In the public hospitals they sell without shame medicines from a box which has written in English “Selling prohibited. Donation from the European Union”. No one knows how to read ¿what difference does it make that is written? Also no one, even if they knew, would protest: they all want to be doctors so that they can do the same thing.
Sanitary attention shines out for its absence. In a simple walk of observation you will see wounds badly or never healed, horrible infections, deaths of children and adolescents for stupidities that are cured with a simple antibiotic.
A look at the first step, prevention, is even more distressing. An absolute lack of hygiene, promiscuous sexual relations without protection, the absolute belief in traditional healers and magic herbs, the lack of security at work even if it is dangerous, the lack of caution in the face of danger, children left in the hands of God in the street as soon as they can crawl, the lack of treatment of water or food preservation…In short: everyday life is a time bomb for people´s health.
One of the most important places of action for volunteering in the mission of Kamabai is sanitary attention. In 2010, some 2,500 have been treated, which reflects the enormous need in this area. I say this because the mission is not a hospital and only opens for consultations when there is a professional volunteer there. The greater part have been minors of five years old (about 65%).
The principal pathologies detected have been malaria, typhus, sexual transmitted diseases, infections for wounds not cured, physical problems because of work in the fields or the custom of carrying large weights on the head, high tension because of malnutrition, wound cures, pneumonias, elephantis, hernias and hydroceles.
The doctors and nurses do not only have consultancies in Kamabai. They also go and carry out specialized treatments to people with poor mobility. In this way, the villages of Kakendema, Kathathina, Kathekeyan, Mile 14, Kayonkro and Kassassie II receive the visit of health specialists on various occasions.
Possibly this is one of the tasks which most discomfort provokes in the missionaries and volunteers. When faced with this reality, there always occur unexpected things, which are unexplainable, incongruous, and incompatible with human dignity.
One of the volunteer nurses started to attend to a woman. The woman complained of pains commonplace in those who work in forced positions. Suddenly, the volunteer realized that the baby on the mother´s back had hands completely burnt, in living flesh, infected and with a very high fever. A wound that without treatment would mean death in a few weeks. But the mother…had rung because of a pain in her back!
Obviously, the nurse treated the baby and told the mother that instead of medicine for the pain he should have put her in prison. I believe that it isn’t done because of malice. It is a mixture of factors changeable in every person: ignorance, lack of feelings towards a child which is the product of a marriage of convenience not love, egoism, the law of the jungle (only the strong survive, it doesn’t matter who falls by the way nor how not even how many).
The cases and the stories in this area are so many, perhaps too many, that if all of them were told the reader would believe that they are invented by a malevolent mind of some Czech writer of the absurd or pessimistic existentialism. But, sadly, it is not made up, It’s what there is.
NEXT PAGE: 7. Ethnic groups
