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Letter Home: First week, first mission, Trish Schwerdtle in South Sudan
As I stepped off the plane in South Sudan, in the middle of nowhere, on a continent I had only seen as a tourist, I realised no amount of briefing, videos, books, nor courses could prepare me for the tour I was about to take. Seeing people live in absolute poverty, deprived of human dignity, was something that slaps you in the face and makes you wonder why you have ever complained. It is one thing to travel and work and prepare yourself, but another to add the depressing heat, the dust, the smell, the stress and simply the reality to it. These people have literally nothing, maybe a blanket stained with urine and diarrhoea from lost children, a bucket and a spoon for the entire family, the kids play with dirt and old batteries. During decades of war, nothing has been considered ‘a right’, as we say in developed countries, not food, water, education, nor healthcare. The project coordinator took me on a tour and while my Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) colleagues were greeting and smiling and coping, I was fighting back a big lump in my throat, struggling to comprehend the tragedy of it, clenching my teeth to get over it and toughen up. After the tour, I went down to the clinic to see if I could orientate myself, instead I ended up resuscitating a dehydrated, unconscious 3 year old, fumbling through protocols on a case we would be talking about for weeks, back home on the Emergency Department. At first, it was hard to go to the clinic everyday in a new t-shirt and skirt, when many siblings have a pair of undies between them. The water pumps MSF built here are busy day and night and most diseases are the result of a lack of hygiene. These communities have not been vaccinated at all and that, together with their malnourished status, makes them extremely susceptible to epidemics. Initially, the clinic seemed like total chaos, which was ‘band-aiding up’ a problem in desperate need of an international outcry and a thousand times more people and resources. But after a while, it appeared to be a huge achievement considering ‘what was’ and for the people here, absolutely vital to their survival. Once you’ve thrown out a placenta in a dirty bin, assessed kids dying of measles, put in an IV in a hot, dark, sweaty mud hut crowded by coughing TB patients and asked a gun shot wound victim to wait ‘a few’ more weeks for a plane, it’s pretty hard to complain about the hot nights, the fly hole toilet and the lack of fresh food. Having said that, the people are still laughing and the kids still enjoy playing with their rubbish. I picked up a disabled, blind, 4 year old boy today by the arms and swung him gently around, he seemed to be having the time of his life. The kid we thought would never make it, did this time and the woman who we couldn’t help, is still happy we were there. It’s been a week now and I’ve delivered and lost babies, learnt more than in 3 months back home and I’ve even started running a cholera treatment unit. Although I am tired, stressed and hot, it isn’t really possible to be ‘homesick’ because home seems like another planet and century. You just realise this is the most important work you will ever do and you should be thankful everyday that you have a safe home to go to where your relatives and friends will grow old with you, where you can learn and work without being hungry and where you can have children who will grow up.
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