First half of 3rd week in the burns unit

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Snappy title, huh? But I´m not going in for attention-grabbing headlines, I just want to update you all on how things are going in the burns unit.

Things are going ok in the hospital. I feel very accepted here and the main staff that I need to know seem to trust me and let me do my thing in the context of all the medical and physio therapy going on.

Alex is doing great, his gunky wounds around his neck and arms seem to have healed massively. Yesterday, he was NPO (nil by mouth) and someone left a beaker of juice near him and he was screaming for it. So Marianna and I took him out of his cot, I suspect for the first time since he´s been there (and he was there when I got here). It turns out the dear little chap can walk. Well, toddle. So we toddled up and down the ward, sat him on our laps, played with some building bricks on the floor and he just loved it. He kept wanting to wonder off, but he was like a little drunkard toddling without help, so we kept a hold of him. When I came in this morning, he was tied up again (all four limbs) in his cot. I´ll get him out later for another play, I don´t want him to ´get behind´with toddling if that´s where he´s at in his development.

In general, I struggle with the whole tying up thing. I have the impression that the nurses do it to make their own lives easier. I have heard, but don´t know if it´s true, that they have on occasion done the tying up too tightly and kids have lost toes or even feet. If it´s true, that makes me so sick. But to give a balanced view, there are too few staff and they just do what they think is normal to try and keep everyone safe and secure.

While I am bemoaning treatment of the children, there´s the nappy thing. About 60% of the time, the smaller children are given nappies. I won´t say they are all nappy age, but it´s sometimes better for them than bed pans or wetting the bed. It´s unfortunately not uncommon to come across plastic bags tied around the children instead of nappies. This is partly a lack of nappies, but I have the feeling there are more supplies than are used, and that there are other reasons why they take short cuts. It´s horrible for the children.

Anyway, things are tough here, and sometimes things that seem shocking to me are more accepted. But still, Kirsten, Marianna, Renata and I, all from Europe, have learnt where to break with what the children have done to them to make it nicer for them. For a start, I untie those that I know won´t fling themselves off the cot onto the floor (i.e. most of them!).

Gladys had her arm separated from her body last week, and on Monday her bandages were removed. She will be discharged soon, I think. Her poor little left arm is a bit shocking, she has a stump of a thumb, two more stumps of fingers and the rest is like a club. She amazes me how resilient she is, she is not freaked about by the sight of it, and just gets on with activities one-handed. If she is struggling with something, Nelly helps her out, which is really touching. Sharpening a pencil for example, which is very tricky one-handed. She has had a piece of flesh taken out of her leg to help patch together a part of her wrist, but it looks very rough. She is limping a bit because of the leg wound, but it all seems to be healing.

Nelly is still not wearing her mask. It rubs her around the left hand side of her bottom lip. I don´t know if they will adjust it. She really is against wearing it, so I am trying to convince her she will be more like a princess if she wears it. We´ll see. Nelly is making visible progress now with recognising letters. I have struggled a bit on this as I´ve nevre taught a child to read before, and am just trying to remember how I did it with mum when very small. (Side note - I have over 1200 views now on this site - if any of you are professional primary or nursery teachers or just have raised lots of children, any tips would be incredibly appreciated - in particular, how do you start given that there are capitals, small case letters, names of letters vs letter ´sounds´?). Maybe I´m not doing it right vis-á-vis the proper route, but we are making progress with letter recognition. She is desperate to be able to read, and at 9 years old, it is bad that she can´t.

Cristal is over whatever was ailing her last week, and is generally very cheerful, though the nurses have made her cry a couple of times by being a bit impatient. When I say nurses, there are a couple of licenced nurses, who are lovely with the kids. There is one licenced one and a couple of unlicenced (auxiliary) ones who are not so lovely, and I wonder sometimes what their motivation is to be nurses if they are irritated by the children. Hmm. But most staff, physios, psychologists, auxiliaries are lovely and so many of them are working for no salary that you have to admire their dedication. The people who bring the food also seem very kind for the most part.

Erlinda is a tricky one, I wonder if either of the psychologists are writing about her for their papers. She seems to be extremely intelligent, writes and reads very well and as far as I can tell is from a Spanish, not Quechua-speaking family, which often equates to city dwelling, better educated though not necessarily. But she is a difficult one, very very tearful and quite hard to reach. Her burns are extensive from head to foot, and she is terribly troubled. She cries her eyes out while on the treadmill and other physio equipment, and I think the physios get frustrated with her.

I have found that if I stay with her while she is having to do her exercises and chant ´no pares, sigue sigue´, which means ´don´t stop, go on, go on´and was a chant in a chart song in Spain when I lived there all those years ago, she at least starts walking again. Her shoes are these awful workman-type shoes, at least 3 sizes too big. I´m going to ask her what size she is and buy her some, and I´ll have to hope nobody steals them.

Who else? Jarol, a little boy of about 6 or 7 with bad wounds from head to foot has been bed-bound all this week. I have done some jigsaws with him, but finding activities for him while he is horizontal is sometimes tough. I really like him, he´s a little trooper, but it´s hard for him as he has such bad burns.

I am now going to update you on the town. There are three separate crises going on currently. These are apart from the shortage of gas (caused by the fact that the road from Santa Cruz has been in part destroyed by the floods, and this is the way gas arrives). In my family we have gas at the moment, but there is none in the shop and prices are rocketing and queues are massive to get the next canister. So the new crises are a strike by the public works employees, who want rid of their union leader. The main effect of this one is that the town hall is shut and around the main square are lots of protests. I´ve seen it on TV but haven´t been and won´t go there for now.

Secondly, there is a row between neighbouring Sacaba and Cochabamba over the ownership of Pacata, a district which is between the two. Cochabamba has taken ownership from Sacaba (more taxes for them to collect) and Sacaba is against this, though apparently it once belonged to Cocha. Anyway, the Sacaba guys have blockaded the roads and so deliveries via Sacaba are currently not happening. On a personal level, nearly all my clothes are now temporarily ´lost´ because I delivered them to the launderette on Monday, but when I went yesterday to pick them up, they didn´t have them as they are washed in Sacaba and currently they are not getting their van through to deliver clean laundry or pick up stuff to be washed. Mine should be washed but is at loose in Sacaba (hopefully, anyway). On my last lot of underwear today (sure you wanted to know that), so will need to do some hand washing at some point.

Thirdly, and with most impact to me personally, there is a 48 hour strike as of today of all transport. Taxi drivers have blockaded major streets and so have micro drivers. Lucho is not striking and will try to work a bit if he can, but he has to be careful because other taxi drivers will attack him and his car if they see him working. The reason for the strike is to protest against other transport operators working in the city, taking away fares from the micros and taxistas. As there were no micros today, my options were a) walk - probably a 70 minute walk b) hitch with Lucho, departing at 7am or c) stay at home. I went for b), which has left me tired from the early start and hungry and thirsty, so before coming here I got a snack (a salteña, which is kinda like a pastie) and a Coke. As I started in the hospital at 7.30am, I have given myself a mid morning break to eat, drink and write this. Gotta go in a moment, though.

I won´t go back up the hill at lunch time, though Maritza wants me to, because I don´t want to risk not being able to give my lessons this afternoon. I have 13 including todays, and if I don´t give them, we are losing an opportunity for me to bring them forward with their English. A different question will be if my pupils make it in. There was no sign of them at 10am this morning, but Jhamil promised me he´d make it in. Whilst some Bolivians say things they don´t mean, I think Jhamil will do his best to come in. I hope we have the evening lesson and that the doc can take me back up the hill like he normally does, else I don´t quite know what I´ll do. It´d be more than 70 mins home as it´s nearly all uphill and the sun continues to shine.

Tomorrow I might stay home in the morning to do a bit of hand washing, and then come in for the afternoon if I can. We´ll see.

Better go for now. Lots of love

Liz
xx

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Comments

[Mark W]

Protests and strikes
I'm not sure how it is when you are English, but for Americans it's advised to always stay away from strikes, protests, and areas of political unrest. So I agree with your plan to stay away. I hope things look up and you get your laundry back soon!

[The Constant Gardener]

Strikes and laundry!
It´s hard to judge, how dodgy it is when protests are on. I tend to take advice from Maritza, my ´mum´here. She is super-protective of me, so if she says it´s ok, then it probably really is, to go into town, but just not the parts where people are getting agitated. Meanwhile, the strike has lifted, some kind of solution has been reached re the transportation within the city and the town has gone from ghost town to buzzing again. Also, traffic is now getting through from Sacaba so I´ve collected my clothing. Hurrah!