Tuesday, September 13, 2011
ARTICLE - MY JUDGEMENT DAY
The following article is written by a person from another country other than Haiti but the story is the same from one failing and struggling country to another. As the country struggles the people struggle. The article below speaks about a strike of civil servants in Botswana. I can identify with what the woman in the article speaks of. Haiti recently had a strike at the General Hospital and patients were left on their beds on their own. People who had money found other hospitals. Those who didn't died in their beds or waited in the hope that the strike would soon be over. I know that people died during the last hospital strike because I was a witness to a lady's struggle with a gangrenous foot. Her infection started out at the end of June with the tips of a couple toes being severely infected. The family brought her to General Hospital. There she waited in emergency while the strike went on week after week. I tried to convince the family to transfer her to another hospital but her husband insisted the strike would be over soon. The strike didn't end soon enough. This woman died of gangrene. She died a terrible death as her foot progressively rotted until it started rotting her leg as well. The photo above is this lady (taken when only her toes were infected). Pray for Haiti's health care system, for Botswana's and for other struggling countries of the world. The following article explains how one poor individual struggles in a struggling country.
MY JUDGEMENT DAY
(Botswana Gazette) - By Mpho Koketso Zacharia
May 21st; the day the 16% strike stole my baby
“There shall come diseases of no cure, that’s when you will know that the end is near,” thus said the Lord. It is happening shame!Earth quakes, Cancer, AIDS, and the lots. People in Haiti know better, so do people who saw the Tsunami.
Zimbabwe, Libya, Somalia and sadly, Botswana, the so called peaceful country felt the heat. The 16 percent salary increase strike by civil servants. Amongst all these people, there is one person who knows that this strike was no joke. Me.
Moving around Gaborone, there used to be some billboards advertising that the day of judgement is on the twenty first of May, 2011. The civil servants strike was on from 18th April going on and on. The same April, I was a happy expecting mother. I was approaching my semester-four examinations, glowing and hyper at all times. Things were smooth sailing. Despite the morning sicknesses now and then, bunking school just to go home and sulk. I told all my friends of this new experience. Wrote a journal about all my check ups, even about the first time I went for a scan. School work was not a problem though, the only thing different about my life was that I was having another life growing inside me. The strike started off smooth, then went on to be hard, when students started reacting and then their schools closed, I got too nervous. Still there was nothing wrong, but I was not settled, I had this bad feeling that something would go wrong. I thought there might start to be war in our country. I was picturing thousands of our children dead, lying around the streets, with no ambulances to help because the drivers were on strike. But I brushed it all aside. Every day I passed the Gaborone Senior School grounds, I saw a great number of cars and people gathered and this disturbed me. Secretly I meditated, recalled the scene so that I captured it, stored it in my long term memory, so that I could tell my child what was happening in the country by the time I was pregnant. It was a hectic time for all. Media printed and broadcasted daily this chaos.
The month of May came, my tummy was a small heap then, still the cars and people were packed daily at the ground. I was still high spirited, until the afternoon of Thursday, May 17th. It was our reading week, my body got too tired and ached a bit. I thought I was catching flu so I took a hot bath then rested. I woke up in the evening but still feeling sick. I slept again, woke up at midnight and felt a whole lot better. So I took a walk around the room. No pains at all, then suddenly SPLASH! My water broke. I panicked then got back to bed, no way, am only five months pregnant; maybe it’s a false alarm. It was not, I ran to my mother`s room and told her, she just told me to rest because at night, there was no one at the clinics due to the strike. I cried the whole night. In the morning, I went to see my doctor. She referred me to the hospital where they told me to have bed rest and antibodies. Princess Marina was packed. I was admitted around eight in the evening. In the bitter May cold, I was told that there were no beds available, so I had to sleep on the floor, with one sheet and one light blanket. Gynecology ward was full of screaming women with no hope and lots of pain. I thought I would be just a day; well I had another thing coming. I was there for seven days. Every night was worse than the previous one. Women were yelling ‘Nurse, Nurse, Nurse…’ In return they got shouted at by the nurse in duty or either ignored.
Blood on the floor was a taboo. If one got out of bed when bleeding she was told to wipe it off. If any bleeding occurred on the sheets, we sleep on the bloody sheets because the cleaners were on strike.
Sheets were only changed when a patient left, because there were very few people to wash them. Food was tasteless and served on disposables. All those hellish days, we were all given the Amoxylen pill. There were lots of women at different stages of pregnancy. Some were on normal labour months, while some, like me, were just too early. Doctors took rounds only in the mornings and jotted down our conditions. Those who were waiting for operations were discharged on weekends, to come back on week days because there was no blood in the blood bank. The people who donate most of the blood are students, but because schools were closed, there was nowhere to get quantity of blood. No operations were carried out. The second day I slept of being admitted, I was given a bed because some patients were discharged. That same day, a woman bled and passed away; a few others delivered still born babies. Because many children were still-born, I was gripped with fear. Realising we were on our own, we, patients started taking care of each other, the older ones assisted when someone was giving birth because the nurses were rarely around.
My labor pains started after three days of admission, I called the nurse and she said “just ignore that, I will come help you afterwards,” and walked out. I was a first time mother, who had a complicated labour, but the nurse had no time for me. It was left up to the older patients to assist me. The labour was long and painful, lasting 27 hours. They stopped at intervals of up to five hours. The doctors tried to induce them, but to no avail. They thought of an operation, but soon dismissed it because of the blood bank problem. I had to pray that time. It was scared, confused and in great pain.
My family was in distress because the longer it took, the riskier it was for my life. On May 21st, my baby girl was still born. The wonders of strike hit me hard. The umbilical cord came out first, then the baby afterwards. It was a shock to most of the women.
By then two of my examinations were already written. I thought my schooling was over. I was dry-eyed, numb and too tired. A nicer and more considerate nurse was on duty. She came and showed me my child. She was too small. There was no receiver or towel for my child. She took her on a paper and went away with her. As if that was not enough, she came back with a sheet of paper for me to fill. At first I did not understand it, I re-read and asked her. It said I had to sign that I agree that my child should be burnt. I was like ‘burn? We do not cremate in our culture’. She told me that the child was under weight so she cannot be kept. Any corpse weighing under 500g was burnt according to the hospital policy. With shaking hands, I signed. That was the end of my happy life.
I still touch my stomach and struggle with the reality that my child did not make it into life. I wonder if those who were admitted during strike with me have the same effect. All those lives lost, because people who could have saved them were striking for just 16%.
My child died on the Day of Judgment, May 21st, 2011 – as pronounced on the billboards. All I have now is a lot of questions. Is this for real? How come I am the only one who felt the loss? I don’t have the answers, but what I know is that the public sector strike ended with my child.
What did not kill me made me stronger. I limped back to school, with physical and emotional pain, wrote my remaining exams. I studied hard and wrote well. Day by day, I deal with my loss and gains.
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