The Saint, the Pimp, and the Prostitute

---

We went up to Jimma University prior to a meeting with our preceptor. Their faculty lounge has wifi and we tried in vain to connect. A man sat down near us. We started talking a bit and as it turns out, he is a surgeon who is working for the University. He asked us what we were doing here and we told him we are in public health; he asked if we had seen the hospital to which I said: only the out-patient, no in-patient. Classes were cancelled for some reason and he said he would show us around after our meeting if we so wished.

Our meeting was off campus and lasted maybe an hour. It went well. We called the doctor and he told us to meet him at the hospital. He introduced us to the in-patient wards which we hadn’t seen. There were two main rooms for the patients, one for women and children and one for men. Each room was fairly dilapidated and the beds were placed about 3 feet from each other; 15 beds per room and no space or bed was left vacant. Beddings were old and worn; IVs were dirty in appearance, rooms smelled like infected wounds. He took us by each patient and described their condition. There were a lot of burn victims. Evidently each family has a fire inside their house and sometimes while breast feeding the mother will fall asleep and the baby will roll into the fire. There were also several epileptics with burns. In a side room there was a mentally challenged man with several stabbing wounds inflicted by his family in an attempt to drive out the evil spirits that cause his mental retardation, along with several other men whose conditions were caused by violence. The doctor was amazing with his patients; he was very jovial and personable and he would tickle the women and children to get them to smile. We left in-patient and went to the ICU. There were about 4 patients in the ward; two children, two women. The last patient he showed was on a respirator and he simple said “this woman…this woman is going to die.” She had some sort of abscess that was not treated quickly enough.

You could see the doctor’s frustrations. In in-patient there was a man who was receiving a drug to help him lose fluid that he was taken off of. He told a resident and a nurse to put him back on the drug and he later told us the odds of the man actually receiving the drug were less than 50-50. A young boy in the ICU was on his back and the doctor asked the attending physician if a boy with his condition should be on his back or upright, should he be receiving oxygen, can he physically drink liquids, etc. He said he was scheduled to begin surgery at 8 and it took him until 10 to get people to stop drinking tea and coffee and prep the patient for surgery. He would tell us that this person needs surgery immediately, but has not got the “ok” from all the right people, this person needs to go to Addis for surgery, this person should not even be in the hospital at all. You could see his amazing dedication, his frustrations, the inefficiency of the health care here, and the apathy of the health care workers. The man is a saint.

Regina was wearing shorts and she had said she was getting a lot of stares; more than usual. The doctor informed us that usually it is just the prostitutes that wear shorts and men who wear shorts are considered low class. I guess I won’t be wearing the two pairs of shorts I brought anytime soon. Regina said “well if I am a prostitute, I guess that makes you my pimp!” We bid farewell to the doctor and thanked him; we will hopefully be having dinner with him sometime soon. As we walked home we both noticed the stares a lot more.

---