Tuesday, June 03, 2008

comfort zones



Hello to all!  It's been too long since I've been in touch from Mukinge!  I admit that I've been playing a little bit of hooky over the past few months as I took some time out to visit with my parents and see some beautiful animals in Botswana.  Those times are really hard to express well in an email -- the scale is just too big to get across with pictures or words.  There's a comfort, or peace, to put it better, in time spent looking into a red sunset with your family as the tower of giraffes gracefully graze in the distance.

I've found my role at the hospital changing a little bit over the past few months as I try to get involved more with the local communities doing education and mobile clinics.  In April as the result of brainstorming with the district health nutritionist, our nurses on the malnutrition ward, and some of the doctors, we decided to put together a community-based malnutrition project aiming to address barriers to growing protein-rich foods, and then to provide seed for protein-rich foods like beans and peanuts to the families that successfully completed the educational part of the program.  So far we've had a lot of interest from the local community and we have had close to 300 families sign up -- could be quite a challenge providing food for that many families come October!  Right now, we still don't know where the funds will come from to provide seed for that many people, but we are confident that we will be able to provide.  It's been a stretch for me to do something like that without having all my 'ducks in a row' before I get started, but I've been changing what I feel comfortable with in the knowledge that we will be cared for, like we've been cared for 50 years.  I don't really like the phrase 'out of my comfort zone' -- it seems overused these days, and maybe not all that applicable to a place like Africa where the entire continent is sort of one big 'uncomfortable zone' as you face issues of malaria and overwork and problems with things like water and electricity.  But I've consistently found that the places where I need to be working are often just a little bit outside what I think I 'should' be doing.  Gracefully, I also find that when I arrive at those places, they are just the place where I am supposed to be.

Last week I substituted
for our executive director, Mr. Fumpa, in the hospital's mobile eye clinic.  I drove off for two days to what was perhaps the center of the dust universe to see people complaining of 'smoke' and 'darkness' in their vision.  After two days of peering through dust and smoke myself (it's now burning season in Zambia, when they burn all the fields) I could sympathize well with them and their vision problems.  These community experiences have been a change for what's comfortable for me as well -- doing work in the hospital -- as I face life without the comforts of electricity or running water or the comfort of people who can help translate for me if I'm getting stuck with my Kaonde.  One of the things weighing on me as I begin to contemplate what will happen after I leave is the general discomfort of needing to leave the programs behind in the hands of the local people, who may or may not be able to carry on after I've left.  I'm starting to face the reality of my leaving more and more and am doing my best to encourage and identify local people to provide the impetus that most of these programs will continue to need.  So much of development aid these days is focused on 'sustainability', which is a concept that falls well short of the mark in places as poor as rural Zambia.  You often need outside resources to overcome barriers like transportation and communication that we take for granted at home.  I think what we need is 'sustained interest' from the rest of the world, which is perhaps a concept that's even trickier than sustainability.

There's a lot more going on the hospital that I could tell you about -- the fruits of some of the seeds that we planted last year are coming ripe: a new restaurant, a rehab of the admin block, the new nursing student dormitory, a HIV counseling center, internet access in the hospital, completing the construction of two more staff houses, beginning on our apartment complex, and so forth.  We've seen some miraculous recoveries that have had the docs scratching their heads and wondering how that person pulled through
.  I have enjoyed seeing the basketball/tennis court put to good use almost every single day by the local youths and kids of the community -- makes the effort worth it.  My current goal is to find an ice cream machine for our new restaurant (a person can dream, huh?).  And as always at Mukinge, for every up there is a down -- this week we had a 14 year old boy die from cancer after traveling 4 days to get to the hospital.  I had a 1 year old boy die under my hands while doing my eye clinics because there were no IV cannulas to transfuse the patients with severe malaria at the clinic where we were at.  And despite our overall infrastructure progress we've continued to have issues -- the telephone system is down, the electrical transformer is about to go and causing electrical fluctuations which have caused the burnout of two water pumps, leaving us with a tenuous water supply.  Funds that we've raised have lost value as the dollar becomes weaker and the price of oil continues to rise, making transport in the rural areas even more expensive.

You all have been so generous with your support, emails, and finances to the hospital while I've been here, and I wanted to say thank you once again.  My current goals are to be finishing up around 6 months from now and spend some time in the states working and thinking about my future, so hopefully I can catch up with all come next Christmas season!

All the best,
Matt

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