One of the things that I didn’t really notice right away is how often everyone gets sick here. And people get sick with things that aren’t run-of-the-mill (by western standards) at all. Since I’ve gotten here (three weeks ago), my co-worker’s son got sick with malaria, the security guard at my old house got sick with typhoid, two acquaintances were diagnosed with malaria two days ago, one acquaintance just got over it and one of my coworkers has tonsillitis that so bad that he can’t swallow and is now sitting across from me, spitting in a bucket.
What’s even more impressive is that wounds don’t really heal here either. I got a cut on my arm five days ago — a little scratch from moving my arm too quickly against the corner of something; in other words, a cut that would normally be insignificant and heal in a couple of days. Well, it’s been five days and the scratch appears bigger to me than it was when I initially got the cut. And it’s telling me to do things — awful things.
You do have to wonder, though: in a place where you absolutely do not want to go to the hospitals (I recently heard a story about a man who went to the hospital last week with a broken arm and ended up dying after their treatment), what recourse do you have when you get sick here?
I mean, this is a place where, when you get sick, you just get fired from your job. Then, as you can probably imagine, it really hits the fan. And I’ve already been asked several times by the people who worked at my old place and the by the people who work at the new one for help with the costs of medical care. Apparently this isn’t an uncommon phenomenon.
Finally, in another weird note, and I haven’t experienced this personally, but apparently people die all the time around here. I realize that this sounds naive, but I’ve been told that it’s not uncommon to see a perfectly healthy person one day and then for them to be stone dead the next, as in:
“Where’s Bodoien today? I thought he was going to meet us for X.”
“He died.”
“oh.”
It’s not that I have no experience with death, and it’s not that it’s a casual thing here. It’s more that it either appears to happen with a greater frequency here — or it, in fact, does. And I’d be willing to bet it’s the latter considering that this place has a life expectancy of about 44.
