Thank you everyone who came to PNK and reached my blog!
I had such a great time to share my experience with you.
At this moment, I don't have any project going on, but I am thinking about make a move.
Anyone who has idea, please let's share, and make the world move!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Good evening, I came here tonight to share my stories with you. I call myself as a story collector who travels around the world and collect stories from people living in various settings. I am interested in collecting story about what people feel happy about especially in difficult living conditions.
As I am an emergency doctor, I had several opportunities to go to areas where it is normally difficult to access.
I went to refugee camps in Kenya from April to July in 2008. I had really good time to work there, but it was rather hard for me to find happy stories from people during my stay.
The refugee camp I visited is the world largest refugee camp, hosting approximately 300 000 people mainly fled from Somalia. I worked as a general physician at hospitals in the refugee camp.
To tell you the truth, I had never seen babies dying daily even if I have been working as an emergency doctor dealing with critically ill and injured patients at ER, I could not get used to the fact I cannot do anything but let them go knowing most of the diseases are curable in developed nations.
One day I saw a baby gasping due to pneumonia. I was switched to ER doctor and tried my best to help the baby. But actually there was nothing I could do. There is no intubation tube, no ventilator, no machine to suck phlegm, in fact, there was no electricity in the hospital. I felt myself completely useless holding a baby in my arms and letting him go.
A local doctor suggested me to go to an operation room in the main hospital. I called a car and rush to there, and on the way, I had to pick up another new born baby who stop breathing soon after he was born. I kept on tapping them to keep them alive. Finally when I get to the operation room what I saw was just a store-like room with an operation table and a tank of oxygen. I put two babies on the table and gave them manual ventilation for each in turn. As long as I kept on doing that, they sometimes open their eyes and gasp by themselves, but once I stopped, they stop breathing and their facial expression turned to be like dolls made from clay. In the mean time, their mothers are in the operation room and sit on the floor and chatting to each other. And they opened up packets of pancake, beans, milk tea and started having lunch next to their dying baby. A moment passed and mothers claimed that they want to go home. I somehow accepted that I should finish this because this treatment is leading the babies to nowhere. Mothers took their babies and went home. Soon after both of them died.
It was my first day at the camp.
And similar things happened every day. I felt pain every time a baby died, and I could not accept that mothers do not express sadness to their babies’ death. One day I asked to the local staffs why, and the answer was that due to their belief, they are ready to accept anything happened because it is lead by God’s will. I also saw many mothers refusing having cesarean section and die in pain with her unborn baby.
I was so frustrated and got so anxious to change something for them. But during the 3 months, I gradually understood that their living condition is extraordinaire and far beyond my imagination and there was a reason behind it.
When I went to a village right next to Somalia where refugees were first put under a protection. Their gaze was sharp like stabbing, my skin felt warning signals released from their body. Those were the people who went through all the man made tragedies happen in anarchy (where there is no government) and survive the exodus by drinking muddy water, delivering babies in the bush, fleeing from danger of wild animals. On the way back from the village, I saw the darkest night on the earth in the middle of nowhere, heard roars, and kept on worrying what may happen if our car broke down. I felt myself so tiny, fragile and powerless in this wild world, and somehow understood why people accept anything happen to them. There is no time for them to regret or stick to something they used to possess.
They are not the people who don’t feel anything, but they are the people who know how to survive and develop their way to protect themselves. At the beginning, I did not understand that, but now I can see more beauty, strength and discipline in their mind.
最近のコメント