Today I laughed, cried, was inspired, and was outraged, in the first 4 hours of the day.
After breakfast, Sylvester, the youth group chairman when we came to Mombassa in 2005, met me at the rectory and took me to the CRS nurse, Scolastica. We also met one of the Health Care Workers, the volunteers who assist Scolastica. We visited around 20 patients in their homes. We would visit 4 or so with one HCW, visiting the patients she saw regularly (usually several times a wseek and sometimes they visit the HCW at her home since they all live in the same neighborhood), then she would drop off and in 3 minutes or less another HCW was with us. We walked throughout most of the neighborhood that comprises Bomu parish.
The first person we saw was lying on her couch, unable to get up to greet us. She was extremely thin, literally just skin and bones. She was in fairly advanced stages of HIV when she first came to Scolastica, which limits how much can be done to help her. She had no food in the apartment, and she had not eaten at all today, and perhaps for an indeterminate time before that.
Scolastica explained that she needs to take food with the meds prescribed for HIV. Therefore, she had not been taking the meds. We did not have anything to give her to eat. Scolastica often has something at the parish, millet or maize flour or beans, etc., but she ran out last week. We decided to come back later in the day after getting something for her.
I guess the blog isn't big enough to allow me to describe each person we visited. Most of the patients are HIV suffers, although not all. Scolastica checks their meds to see if they are running low and to determine if they are being faithful to the prescription regimen, checks their general physical and mental health, and prescribes meds if they need them.
One woman we visited had had a "C" section in 2004. It looked like the doctors had not closed up the muscles and viscera when they did the operation. She was wearing an elastic girdle to support her abdomen. When she pulled it down, her stomach protruded as if she swallowed a soccer ball. The hospital told her it would take about 30,000 KSh to fix the problem (about $400). Listening to her describe how they kept putting her off when the problem first manifested, right after the surgery, you have to wonder if they could or would fix the problem if she had the operation. I certainly have no medical training but it looked to me that, after 4 years, they would need some fairly sophisticated surgery to correct the problem and taking her back to the same place that caused the problem would more likely cure the problem by killing the patient. That was my moment of outrage, a medical system that turns its back on its own mistakes.
We also talked to a young lady (late teens) who had an ulcerous infection on her leg. Her leg was pretty swollen and if she did not have blood poisoning, it sure appeared that it was going to happen in the near future. She told Scolastica that she had not gone to the hospital because she was afraid that when they tested her and found out that she had HIV, they would tell her parents. If her parents found out, she believed they would expel her from the family. Scolastica told her how to get the treatment she needed without that disclosure to her parents, and prescribed some antibiotics for her to take until she got herself to the hospital.
The saddest moment of several throughout the morning was a young man who appeared to have something like Parkinson's Disease. His head, hands, arms, legs and feet shook constantly, and he could barely walk. When we walked into his complex, he was sitting on a pile of rubble with his head on his hand and he would not look up at us. We went into his apartment and his cousin told us that he got malaria earlier in the year, and had been like this since. He had been to the hospital, and they could not find what was wrong with him. He could not answer our questions, though he tried and clearly understood, because he was shaking so badly. He sat in a chair facing me and after a few minutes of unsuccessfully trying to communicate, he looked up to me with eyes filled with hope, pleading, and despair, all at once. I held my head down and fought the tears. Scolastica said there is nothing we can do and asked if I would pray for him. So we all stood around him and begged God to help him.
Our last patient was like the first, an HIV sufferer who had no food and could barely sit up. The apartment was the worst I have seen. There were holes in the roof, an iron table with a large hole rusted through the middle, squalid living conditions and only one piece of furniture in the room, the couch/bed on which she was lying. She clearly had had nothing to eat. As we left I gave the HCW money (none of them carry money on their rounds) and she bought food for this patient and the first one we visited.
I have never been closer to a Mother Teresa. This nurse is firm with patients that are not following her advice, but she left almost every person we visited smiling when we left. She combined humor with a practical optimism that brightened their day, even in the suffering. Her faith is a taken for granted aspect of her work with the patients, as is their faith (Christians and Muslims). To everyone she introduced me as "brother deacon Frank."
I told Scolastica that I would ask our committee to come up with a system of sending her money through the committee to buy her own supply of food. That way, when she makes her rounds, which she does twice a week, she can have food on hand to feed the starving. A small amount of money can do a great deal of good in her hands.
At 4:00pm, Jack Odhiambo picked me up to go to his jumulya (sp?). We followed the same format that we did the evening prior, except that it was pretty short. One of their members was getting married this weekend, so they wanted to spend their time together planning for the wedding.
After evening mass, the youth group stopped by to say good-bye, followed by Consolata, Mary, and Elizabeth (the Mt. Philomena small church community, followed by Peter, Sebastian, and Jack. It's hard saying farewell to such good people with whom I have become so close.
