The President is Coming… ‘TIA’
January 2
The road into Queen’s, the largest and most well known hospital in the entire country, is disputably one of the worst in Malawi. A series of ever increasing potholes literally chew away the remaining bitumen with every rain as they merge into one, making each trip to and from work an adventure in itself. The wards here are also a kaleidoscope of chaos, a true tragedy by international standards in so many ways. Although we are now almost immune to the stunning odours, the noise, the squalid overcrowding, they exist on a level not known by many other parts of the world.
Yet as we returned from our brief getaway to the lake for the New Year period to begin another day of work, we met with an altogether unbelievable sight. Our road, the one that we do battle with every day in our low clearance saloon, was being filled in, smoothed over. And not just with the usual smashed up bricks that some benevolent person decides to temporize with (they usually last around a week before the potholes are growing cancerously away again)… this was real bitumen (well okay, it was actualy incinerator waste mixed with water, but let's not split hairs). Amazing!
Bouyant from our smooth passage into our offices we were then greeted with the next overwhelming, almost surreal, sight. The wards were clean. No bodies lying scattered over the floor, no foodstuffs or clothes spread carelessly about, a crisp disinfectant aroma replacing the usual fog of deodorant-devoid Africa, new bed sheets and blankets adorned each bed, and the walls and windows cleaned to a sparkle. Maybe we had entered the wrong hospital? This was certainly not the Queen’s we had come to know.
Half an hour later, in both our handover meetings, the reason for this twilight zone metamorphosis was made abundantly clear… the President was coming. Of course, there had to be a very good reason for people to suddenly care about the big ugly monster that is the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, the place that sees many hundred of the country’s sickest and poorest every single day of the year. And one may rightly question the sense in cleaning up one of the more abhorrent places in the country just to appease the President when it is the very place that he should see at its worst in order to generate desperately needed, yet absurdly denied, funding? Why wait until Mr. Mutharika pays a visit to do the cleaning and tidying and simple maintenance that would be a regular occurrence in any other hospital elsewhere? Shouldn’t the President be greeted by lobbying for help and extra staffing rather than smiling cleanly washed faces, nurses brimming at the site of their elected leader, music, song and festivity? They had even overfilled certain adult wards that would be hidden from view so that the showpiece wards would retain some semblance of sanity and order.
Interestingly, one of the previous Presidents toured the hospital several years prior and one of the Malawian doctors in charge of obstetrics decided that nothing would be cleaned outside the norm, women would lie crowded on the floors just as they always did and the place would look just as it does every other day. Despite the protestations of all the other staff that they would lose their jobs for performing to such a low standard if the President were to see this, his reaction was the complete opposite.
‘My women, lying on the floor like this! This cannot be. We will build them somewhere to sleep!’ We now have an entire wing of the hospital, purpose built, dedicated purely to obstetrics and gynaecology. Yet even with this example, the reaction is still the same.
We watched a rather chilling and disturbingly truthful movie last night, Blood Diamond (very enjoyable once you get over Leonardo diCaprio’s attempt at a white Zimbabwean accent). In this insight into the horrific violence precipitated by the illegal diamond trade in Sierra Leone in the 90’s, they give a very simple and very accurate (although ever so slightly tongue in cheek) answer to all the problems and questions of this rather perplexing and idiosyncratic continent… ‘T.I.A.’
This is Africa.
