August 23
It is extremely hard getting through a day of work at QE without a feeling of helplessness or hopelessness washing over you at least once or twice. The disastrous resource limitations, the overburdened medical system, the unfortunate lack of a good work ethic of many here, and the horrendous array of devastating illnesses that this country deals with on an alarmingly regular basis – they all contrive to give some reasonably trying situations. The cultural differences (and not just language) that make communication so difficult, to the sheer impossibility of getting anything done within the hospital, from a simple medication order to a ‘standard’ blood test – we cannot prescribe three times a day dosing for medications for many children because the nurses simply don’t have the time. But it’s far worse than this. The government cannot supply even the most basic medications to those who desperately need them. Every time a donor supplies more money for extra staffing in critically understaffed areas, the government reduces their own funding because they feel that they are now giving too much to an area that is already receiving funding from elsewhere. Sustainability is a completely foreign word to many here; productivity or advancement unthinkable. But can you blame them? The cost of maintaining the roads annually would be the entire country’s GDP. Malawi is one of the worst countries in the world to live in according to the World Health Organisation, where everything and anything that is accomplished seems to take ten times as long as it should, then promptly falls apart anyway. One can’t help thinking that if foreign aide and international personnel suddenly pulled out of this place it would collapse… bloody quickly. Yet this very foreign investment that is theoretically training the country to look after itself, is often doing just as much harm as good. A daunting and some would say fruitless task of development given the presence of foreign aide engendering a ‘they will just do it for us’ attitude in the first place. Catch 22, right? Then there’s the misappropriation of foreign monies by various bodies, poor communication and subsequent duplication of many non-government organisation services, inappropriate restrictions or conditions from misinformed yet often well intentioned donors, and the list goes on. So what’s the point? Not for the first time, after a particularly long and trying day it is difficult to not come back to these thoughts and wonder what difference we are actually making being here. And you wonder why a Green tastes so good at the end of the day!
But then you can look at it from another perspective. Do we actually make a great difference on a day to day basis in Australia, a country with such lofty standards of living and advanced health care standards (for the most part), indulging people in the illusion of medical illness with expert committee-derived social diseases that some would argue are a result of our own society and its expectations anyway. If we leave here another equally qualified and committed person is ready and willing to take our place. Yet by simply being here in Malawi maybe we are contributing something more realistic in our own little way, yet not being able to see it on a day to day level through the constant barrage of negative experiences on the medical front. We are helping to educate a new and previously untapped breed of Malawian medical students, instilling a modicum of dedicated work ethic simply by leading by example, bringing our high quality specialist education and possible funding sources to a resource poor setting that desperately needs them, and spending our own money in the country we are working in, helping the economy of the place by small amounts here and there (except at Shoprite and Game, that’s money straight into the pockets of South Africans). A difficult and unanswerable series of thoughts and questions, and ones that are quite refreshing, yet frustrating, to have to deal with on a regular basis.
