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It's 3:20 for me and I'm just finishing my lunch -- a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a "coca cola light" ie, a diet coke. My lunch -- and food and general -- have been perhaps the least foreign things in my trip thus far. I've had mostly sandwiches and other western food -- the only really African food I've had was grilled chicken with peri peri sauce. And all it was is grilled chicken -- nothing all that different. Delicious, but not different.
In case you are curious -- you probably aren't, but I'm going to babble anyway -- most people in Lesotho primarily eat pa pa, which is like polenta -- a porridge made out of corn meal -- and depending on what they can afford, serve it with beans, lentils or meat. They also grow pumpkins and spinach.
But that's not all that interesting. More interesting is what I've been doing, but not by much. So far I've been following around doctors and watching them treat children for HIV and various HIV complications, including TB, malnutrition, dermatitis, and pneumonia. All the kids are painfully cute -- even the sickest ones are totally adorable. I've been having a running disagreement with one of the doctors here -- I maintain that there is no such thing as a not-cute little kid, because I think the ugly ones are even cuter for being ugly. But I'm sort of twisted like that.
It's really heart breaking sometimes, actually. Yesterday I saw a little boy that has been having intense abdominal pain for over four years. His mother had just died over Christmas. He had been treated at the clinic for a few months already and the doctors here have tried everything they can think of --- but they just don't know what was causing his pain. During the visit with the doctor, he got another attack, just whimpering and moaning form pain, and we all just had to stand there and watch. There was nothing we could do.
We couldn't even give him narcotic pain meds, because they would hurt his bladder problems. The really frustrating thing is that if we were back in the states -- or any developed country-- he would have had millions of dollars worth of tests. We still might not know what it is, but we would have damn well tried. Here, the fucking CT scanner in the biggest hospital in the entire country is broken. We don't know when it will be fixed.
Oh, and, ha. Here's a fun fact. You know how many pediatricians the government of Lesotho (they do all the medical care through the state, the commie bastards) has on payroll? One. Yes. One. IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. The particularly hilarious part of this story is that she's currently on leave and her job sucks so bad that the entire staff at the hospital is convinced she's not going to come back. I think she will -- she's been there fourteen years already, and the job has only gotten a little better as support has grown.
Today I drove to Mafeteng, which is a fairly big town in Maseru. They have a pediatric AIDS clinic that the doctor I was working with had to check up on. The goal of BIPAI, the program that staffs this clinic and hires the Western doctors that work here, is to build local infrastructure and get people in this area to be able to support themselves. But, of course, that's harder than it seems -- for example, the clinic that we visited today was run entirely by a nurse assistant. He wasn't even trained as a full nurse and he was having to care for hundreds of HIV positive children all by himself.
These people are pretty incredible. He was especially cool, actually, although he was totally exhausted. When he spoke Sesotho, the native tongue, he was animated and encouraging, firm and authoritative. He sounded just like a good doctor. But when he spoke to us, in English, his voice softened and grew weary. He just seemed like he was about to drop; I don't blame him. I can't really think of a more tiring person to be. Once and a while he would smile at the babies and try to get them to laugh at him, playing with their fingers. That was especially beautiful -- he has such passion, obviously, to continue doing this all by himself and with insufficient training and resources.
I promised Sarah I wouldn't get pretentious and preachy, so I'm going to stop now and end with something that is total tragi-comedy. Lesotho's biggest export? Water.
ETA: I have really limited internet time, but I'm feeling sort of mopey, so. GIVE ME LINKS TO THINGS THAT DON'T INVOLVE CHILDREN DYING. preferably fluffy adorable bandom things. preferably involve patrick, who always makes me cheerful.