My office phone rang. This is almost notable in itself for several reasons: mostly because it doesn’t happen very often, but also because it’s been changed three times in the last month or so. Apparently we are ‘upgrading’ our ‘system’ here in the hopes it will be closer to possible to make phone calls like normal people. I picked up.
Me: Hello.
Her: Helloooo [crackling sound]
Me: Hello?
Her: Yes, hellooo [more crackling]
This is going to be good, I thought. I have no idea who this is so let’s commence with the niceties expected when answering the phone here. See, you don’t just identify yourself. You greet each other first and carry on a bit. It’s rude to just announce who it is without showing your interest in the other person’s wellbeing.
Me: How are you?
Her: Ah, I’m just fine, mma, how are you?
Me: I’m also fine, mma, thank you.
Her: This is Mma [garbled someone-or-other I couldn’t hear] calling from Main Campus.
Oh, crap. Maybe this isn’t going to be good. Someone actually initiating contact from Gabs is a bad sign. Bad. Now I’m nervous.
Her: And is this Dr. DeMotts?
Me: [oh well] Yes, mma, it is.
Her: Oh, good! How are you?
Me: I’m still fine, mma, thank you.
Her: Oh, good! And this is your extension, number 7239?
Me: Uhhh…yes, mma, it is. [you DID call ME, after all]
Her: Oh, good! Mma, I’m calling all the extensions in the book and checking to be sure they are right. See, we can call you from main campus now!
You have GOT to be kidding me. I choked back a powerful desire to laugh.
Me: Well, mma, yes, that’s pretty great. And good luck with all those phone calls.
Her: Yes, thank you! Thanks, mma.
And she hung up.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Thursday, March 15, 2007
maun desperate housewives association
About a month ago I snuck into a very exclusive gathering here in Maun – the book club. My friend Monica, our librarian at the centre, had worked her way in and was hosting, so she invited me. Stupidly, I assumed that reading was involved. “What book are you all reading?” I queried. She laughed. “Oh, Rachel, it’s not really about that…”
It is about white expat women getting together, having a few drinks, and trading copies of books they’ve read. There is no discussion of anything that’s been read. It’s more like a traveling library with booze and snacks. And the library is mostly “chick lit” - books by ‘writers’ like Danielle Steele with flaming pink covers and drawings of skinny women in spiky heels who are always after a man. Or men.
I admit, I went out of a sense of something like arrogant curiosity. What do these mostly South African wives of safari guys talk about? They insulate themselves from life here in their big houses with razor wire, snarling Rhodesian ridgebacks (dogs bred to fight lions), and security systems, coming out to take the kids somewhere or shop at the Safari Spar. I couldn’t imagine.
I went early to help Monica cook and set out the books, which travel from hostess to hostess in a set of lopsided cardboard boxes. The more trashy paperbacks I pulled out, the more I wondered what I would have to say in conversation. Then again, if I were to play the voyeur, it didn’t really matter if I were at a loss for words.
It was a small gathering; apparently word had not made it all the way around to the usual suspects. But about half a dozen women pitched up, dressed in sparkly sandals, cropped pants, topped with carefully styled hair. One woman had brought her kids. But she left them in the car to sleep, with the whole vehicle draped in a mosquito net.
We served carrot salad, spicy chickpeas, basmati rice, pakoras, yogurt dip, and sliced cucumbers. It was more food than usually accompanied the evening’s non-bookish banter. As we settled in, talk revolved around three things.
Food. A lot of this was about weight loss. “It just makes sense not to eat carbs and protein together!” “I lost ten kilos on that diet!” “The gluten in wheat is just not good for you!” And on and on. I had another pakora. And another. They’re made with chickpea flour, after all.
Illness. Here I thought I could relate to the tales of malaria. But I couldn’t get a word in. Not that I tried very hard, mind you. But I felt a bit like I was looked through rather than at. I became quieter. Every time I got up my chair edged back from the circle a bit more, and a bit more. Then, we got onto the subject of HIV. The human resources director of a major local safari company – apparently they were not ALL desperate housewives – held court on the costs of caring for all their employees who are positive. “We have to fly them down here to get their medications, and pay for treatment, and we’re overstaffed by 25% to make up for when people are away or sick, it’s just a huge burden and it’s so expensive! It costs money to fly them down here, and you know they’re only making 700 pula a month anyway [about $115], so we have to pay for them to stay here, and the flights…” There were so many things I wanted to say, simmering quietly in my growing anger. ‘THEY’ are human beings, I thought. And what does it say about your profits if you can overstaff by 25% and still make a shitload of money doing it?
Travel. A truck-driving short-haired woman in boy’s sandals and cargo shorts talked about her upcoming trip to the family farm in South Africa. And a deeply tanned woman in a white miniskirt had just returned from three weeks in Argentina, after having spent the holidays in the Cape before that. Her flights were late getting in, so apparently she did the unthinkable. “I just got my bags and I WALKED OUT of the airport! I mean, you don’t DO that!” She and her husband stayed at a lodge set up mostly for people who wanted to come and hunt birds. They were surrounded by fields of sunflowers – planted, well, to attract birds. I wish she’d stuck to the birds, because her discourse on race relations in the former Spanish colony was even more sickening than the notion of growing gorgeous flowers so birds could be shot. “It’s so much more harmonious than here. I mean, they all speak the same language, it’s one culture, everyone’s white. Or at least not really black.” Silently choking, I pushed back even further. How does someone actually think like that, and then decide it’s ok to let it come out of her mouth? The obliteration and subjugation of indigenous cultures in Latin (case in point) America was no less brutal than it was here. And the idea that speaking Spanish was just naturally what everyone did, well, the parallels with Afrikaans must have utterly escaped her.
But the shopping in Buenos Aires is brilliant, apparently, and oh, it was delightful to hear about how much red meat and wine she consumed. I guess we were back to food after all.
It is about white expat women getting together, having a few drinks, and trading copies of books they’ve read. There is no discussion of anything that’s been read. It’s more like a traveling library with booze and snacks. And the library is mostly “chick lit” - books by ‘writers’ like Danielle Steele with flaming pink covers and drawings of skinny women in spiky heels who are always after a man. Or men.
I admit, I went out of a sense of something like arrogant curiosity. What do these mostly South African wives of safari guys talk about? They insulate themselves from life here in their big houses with razor wire, snarling Rhodesian ridgebacks (dogs bred to fight lions), and security systems, coming out to take the kids somewhere or shop at the Safari Spar. I couldn’t imagine.
I went early to help Monica cook and set out the books, which travel from hostess to hostess in a set of lopsided cardboard boxes. The more trashy paperbacks I pulled out, the more I wondered what I would have to say in conversation. Then again, if I were to play the voyeur, it didn’t really matter if I were at a loss for words.
It was a small gathering; apparently word had not made it all the way around to the usual suspects. But about half a dozen women pitched up, dressed in sparkly sandals, cropped pants, topped with carefully styled hair. One woman had brought her kids. But she left them in the car to sleep, with the whole vehicle draped in a mosquito net.
We served carrot salad, spicy chickpeas, basmati rice, pakoras, yogurt dip, and sliced cucumbers. It was more food than usually accompanied the evening’s non-bookish banter. As we settled in, talk revolved around three things.
Food. A lot of this was about weight loss. “It just makes sense not to eat carbs and protein together!” “I lost ten kilos on that diet!” “The gluten in wheat is just not good for you!” And on and on. I had another pakora. And another. They’re made with chickpea flour, after all.
Illness. Here I thought I could relate to the tales of malaria. But I couldn’t get a word in. Not that I tried very hard, mind you. But I felt a bit like I was looked through rather than at. I became quieter. Every time I got up my chair edged back from the circle a bit more, and a bit more. Then, we got onto the subject of HIV. The human resources director of a major local safari company – apparently they were not ALL desperate housewives – held court on the costs of caring for all their employees who are positive. “We have to fly them down here to get their medications, and pay for treatment, and we’re overstaffed by 25% to make up for when people are away or sick, it’s just a huge burden and it’s so expensive! It costs money to fly them down here, and you know they’re only making 700 pula a month anyway [about $115], so we have to pay for them to stay here, and the flights…” There were so many things I wanted to say, simmering quietly in my growing anger. ‘THEY’ are human beings, I thought. And what does it say about your profits if you can overstaff by 25% and still make a shitload of money doing it?
Travel. A truck-driving short-haired woman in boy’s sandals and cargo shorts talked about her upcoming trip to the family farm in South Africa. And a deeply tanned woman in a white miniskirt had just returned from three weeks in Argentina, after having spent the holidays in the Cape before that. Her flights were late getting in, so apparently she did the unthinkable. “I just got my bags and I WALKED OUT of the airport! I mean, you don’t DO that!” She and her husband stayed at a lodge set up mostly for people who wanted to come and hunt birds. They were surrounded by fields of sunflowers – planted, well, to attract birds. I wish she’d stuck to the birds, because her discourse on race relations in the former Spanish colony was even more sickening than the notion of growing gorgeous flowers so birds could be shot. “It’s so much more harmonious than here. I mean, they all speak the same language, it’s one culture, everyone’s white. Or at least not really black.” Silently choking, I pushed back even further. How does someone actually think like that, and then decide it’s ok to let it come out of her mouth? The obliteration and subjugation of indigenous cultures in Latin (case in point) America was no less brutal than it was here. And the idea that speaking Spanish was just naturally what everyone did, well, the parallels with Afrikaans must have utterly escaped her.
But the shopping in Buenos Aires is brilliant, apparently, and oh, it was delightful to hear about how much red meat and wine she consumed. I guess we were back to food after all.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
march in the delta (clinic)
I absolutely thought it was malaria again – the fever, the aching muscles pulling on aching bones, my increasingly lack of ability to comprehend what was going on around me. Even as I sat on it, I felt like the couch got further and further away. The 104 degree thermometer in my armpit confirmed it. So I called a friend and she took me to the clinic. Malaria, I said, she said. A nurse called the doctor and the next thing I knew I had a handful of little bags – quinine for the malaria, paracetamol for pain and fever, some antibiotic for my guts that was not the loperamide the doctor wanted me to have (“we don’t seem to have any…”). After refusing to be admitted I went home to my friend’s guest room to sweat and hallucinate and shake with wrenching chills while ghostly paperwork flew around the room and my head…manila file folders, pink sheets of paper, envelopes, stacks of things I had done and not done over the previous week haunted me. I must be a nerd if the only things bubbling up when I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep are office supplies.
Anyway, the next day was worse. I threw up the water I was trying to drink, which meant the meds would not stay in my stomach. So back to the hospital we went, and I stayed – even though there was no IV quinine on which to put me, which was the whole point of going in. But then, it’s gastroenteritis, the doctor said, when for a second time they didn’t see malaria in my blood. I was infected with a raging unknown parasite, but he added: “It doesn’t really matter what it is as long as the fever’s coming down.” I was in no shape to argue. Having started the treatment for malaria, I had to finish it or risk developing resistance to it in the future. Quinine, by the way, makes your ears screech while the bitter yellow pills turn your stomach against you. It also wreaks more havoc with your liver than a month of nights at the Maun Sports Bar.
I SMS’d my brother and his wife. “So are you gonna die or what?” he yelled into his cell phone, standing in their kitchen in Italy. The nurses were lovely people but they did not really inspire confidence. Pushing burning antibiotics into my veins every four hours, they seemed to only enter the room when I was in just enough of a stupor to think I might be sleeping. Once I rolled over and my IV tube, hooked into a small bottle of liquid pharmaceutical fire, fell onto the floor. Medicine poured onto the floor. I grabbed for the bottle, twisting it upright while my other arm flailed at the nurse call button. After she stuck the tube back in, I pointed out that at least a third of the bottle was not coursing through me but pooled under the edge of the bed. “Oh, well, that’s too bad, because it’s the last one!” Next, a syringe full of one of the other kinds of antibiotics I was shot full of didn’t want to pour into the IV. So she leaned on the plunger. Hard. The back of my hand swelled with a germinating golf ball of penicillin, my distended vein making my eyes go wide with pain. “Let’s just take this out,” another nurse said softly, later, pulling out the IV needle. And shoving a new one into my inner wrist, so that I could not move my left hand without feeling the drag of the newly embedded needle against tendons and flesh.
I bled into the IV. My guts got me up every hour to go the bathroom. My bed and I slowly took on the smell of my gym bag. My head throbbed and my hips ached with the strain of trying to be absolutely still. I didn’t leave the little room with the indigo-swirled comforter (“It makes me think of water and bugs swimming in it,” said my friend) and pepto-pink door for three nights. I swung at mosquitoes with my dirty flipflop, figuring if I didn’t have malaria when I went in I might well have it by the time I got out.
The fever shrank, but the infection in my guts was unrelenting. Two days in, the doctor commented on my loperamide dosage while doing his morning rounds. “I’m not getting loperamide, you didn’t have any,” I said weakly. “How am I supposed to be taking it?”
“You take a double dose to start, then one more after every time you go to the bathroom,” he said. For the first time I felt despairing tears well up. “They gave me something once yesterday but that was it,” I said. I wasn’t taking the drugs I was supposed to have. No wonder. I have a friend in med school who thinks he wants to be a doctor in Africa. At some point, I remember thinking, maybe I should ask him if he really wants to work under these kinds of conditions. That is, what medication? You mean we should have quinine in stock during prime malaria season? And that there should be a close relationship between what gets written down on a chart and what happens to the patient?
The next day, after nine kinds of medications, half a dozen rotating nurses, three different doctors, the payment equivalent of about forty bucks, and my signature on 34 separate invoices, they let me go home from the Delta Clinic. Mostly I was tired – of more chemicals circulating inside me than blood, of the deafening ring in my ears, of not being able to sleep, of being poked at for what seemed like no reason. But I was also ok. Folks from work had come to visit, called, asked about me. Even the cleaning ladies gushed with relief to see me back in the office, eight days later. And I reminded myself, at least I wasn’t out in the bush. At least I didn’t have a major trip planned. At least my friends were around to look after me. At least I could afford to GO to the hospital. At least, at least. “What the hell were you doin’ in the hospital?” my boss cried over the phone from Gabs when he found out.
Maybe I should have said, I just needed a few days of air conditioning.
Anyway, the next day was worse. I threw up the water I was trying to drink, which meant the meds would not stay in my stomach. So back to the hospital we went, and I stayed – even though there was no IV quinine on which to put me, which was the whole point of going in. But then, it’s gastroenteritis, the doctor said, when for a second time they didn’t see malaria in my blood. I was infected with a raging unknown parasite, but he added: “It doesn’t really matter what it is as long as the fever’s coming down.” I was in no shape to argue. Having started the treatment for malaria, I had to finish it or risk developing resistance to it in the future. Quinine, by the way, makes your ears screech while the bitter yellow pills turn your stomach against you. It also wreaks more havoc with your liver than a month of nights at the Maun Sports Bar.
I SMS’d my brother and his wife. “So are you gonna die or what?” he yelled into his cell phone, standing in their kitchen in Italy. The nurses were lovely people but they did not really inspire confidence. Pushing burning antibiotics into my veins every four hours, they seemed to only enter the room when I was in just enough of a stupor to think I might be sleeping. Once I rolled over and my IV tube, hooked into a small bottle of liquid pharmaceutical fire, fell onto the floor. Medicine poured onto the floor. I grabbed for the bottle, twisting it upright while my other arm flailed at the nurse call button. After she stuck the tube back in, I pointed out that at least a third of the bottle was not coursing through me but pooled under the edge of the bed. “Oh, well, that’s too bad, because it’s the last one!” Next, a syringe full of one of the other kinds of antibiotics I was shot full of didn’t want to pour into the IV. So she leaned on the plunger. Hard. The back of my hand swelled with a germinating golf ball of penicillin, my distended vein making my eyes go wide with pain. “Let’s just take this out,” another nurse said softly, later, pulling out the IV needle. And shoving a new one into my inner wrist, so that I could not move my left hand without feeling the drag of the newly embedded needle against tendons and flesh.
I bled into the IV. My guts got me up every hour to go the bathroom. My bed and I slowly took on the smell of my gym bag. My head throbbed and my hips ached with the strain of trying to be absolutely still. I didn’t leave the little room with the indigo-swirled comforter (“It makes me think of water and bugs swimming in it,” said my friend) and pepto-pink door for three nights. I swung at mosquitoes with my dirty flipflop, figuring if I didn’t have malaria when I went in I might well have it by the time I got out.
The fever shrank, but the infection in my guts was unrelenting. Two days in, the doctor commented on my loperamide dosage while doing his morning rounds. “I’m not getting loperamide, you didn’t have any,” I said weakly. “How am I supposed to be taking it?”
“You take a double dose to start, then one more after every time you go to the bathroom,” he said. For the first time I felt despairing tears well up. “They gave me something once yesterday but that was it,” I said. I wasn’t taking the drugs I was supposed to have. No wonder. I have a friend in med school who thinks he wants to be a doctor in Africa. At some point, I remember thinking, maybe I should ask him if he really wants to work under these kinds of conditions. That is, what medication? You mean we should have quinine in stock during prime malaria season? And that there should be a close relationship between what gets written down on a chart and what happens to the patient?
The next day, after nine kinds of medications, half a dozen rotating nurses, three different doctors, the payment equivalent of about forty bucks, and my signature on 34 separate invoices, they let me go home from the Delta Clinic. Mostly I was tired – of more chemicals circulating inside me than blood, of the deafening ring in my ears, of not being able to sleep, of being poked at for what seemed like no reason. But I was also ok. Folks from work had come to visit, called, asked about me. Even the cleaning ladies gushed with relief to see me back in the office, eight days later. And I reminded myself, at least I wasn’t out in the bush. At least I didn’t have a major trip planned. At least my friends were around to look after me. At least I could afford to GO to the hospital. At least, at least. “What the hell were you doin’ in the hospital?” my boss cried over the phone from Gabs when he found out.
Maybe I should have said, I just needed a few days of air conditioning.
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