So on Saturday we visited gogo (grandmother) and uncle. Sunday was church.
Gogo is raising my sisi (sister) and bhuti (brother) in another town- Claremont, which mama and I got to with a series of mini-bus taxis. These taxis are CRAZY, but it's the only means of transport most people here have. You hold up a finger or make a certain motion to indicate where you want to go- like one finger in Cato Manor means going to town. Then you get into the van, which is big and white, sometimes with colorful words (as in different colors, not off-color) written in big letters across it, crammed with people, and usually blaring loooooud music. Fare is usually around R8. We took about... 4? to get to Claremont (we also bought some groceries for Gogo on the way).
Gogo is 75, but seemed much older. She used a cane and shuffled slow-slow-slowly across the floor, bent about in half. I don't think she had teeth. She could only say hello and goodbye in English, and I could only say hello and goodbye in Zulu, so I didn't get to talk to her much. We dropped off groceries, talked/relaxed for a little while, played with someone's baby, then left to visit mama's brother in the hospital.
This hospital is... different than in the U.S. Her brother had had a stroke, and for some related reason had had his hand amputated (which I can't figure out unless it's diabetes, and mama hadn't had it explained to her so she wasn't sure). He was in the surgical ward healing from the amputation. The ward was dim, with dingy (maybe mildewy? hard to say) walls. There were 8 beds, all filled with pretty severely-injured men. All were black. Mama's brother couldn't speak because of the stroke, and I couldn't tell how much of what we were saying he could understand. The man in the bed to the left was very much out of it. His bed was soiled when we walked in, and it wasn't changed until about half an hour after we got there. He didn't wake up the whole time. The man to the right was very severely burned, he had 3rd degree burns covering most of his upper body and his entire face. Turns out his neighbor (a woman, which mama was shocked by) had tried to kill him by throwing acid on him. His nose, one of the few un-bandaged parts, had big blackened sections. He was very friendly and talkative, though. He also was snacking on chips, though he was on an all-liquid diet. He said (in Zulu, I had it translated by mama) that they dread 6pm coming, because of the night shift nurse. She doesn't always give them the pain medication they ask for, and when she gives injections she just stabs it in, hard. They said the day shift nurse was ok, though. The other men in the ward were also covered in lots of bandages, or had large swathes of thin, pink flesh that was very new. A group came in to pray for a little while, singing and reading from the Bible, doing some preaching.
This all contrasted a lot with what I know about Durban hospitals- they are world-class, the first successful heart transplant was performed in South Africa. It was pretty obvious that this was a question of a disparity of resources.
Sunday I went to church... I'll write about that tomorrow, right now it's time to go home!
No comments:
Post a Comment