Back to Bamenda

On the home front the 11mos old little girl with schizencephaly died suddenly en route to getting her CT scan in Bamenda. I don’t know the details of what happened, but I’m not sure I want to. She looked so good the last time I saw her, sitting up in bed, eating fufu on her mom’s lap, smiling. I was shocked to hear the news last night.

I sweat out my fever last night and woke up feeling better after a magical cocktail of Cipro, Benadryl, Zofran, and Excedrin. Doctors really do make the worst patients.

We hitched a ride to Bamenda this morning with one of the “runners” who go into the city once/wk to pick up supplies, mail, etc. There’s no real mail system in rural Cameroon- the roads are too difficult and it overall it not very practical in this setting. Most people out where we are don’t have addresses, just locate themselves as living “between the church and the football field” or “around the corner from the large chicken coup.” Kinda hard to put a stamp on that. Of course if the hospital needs something, the runners make the drive to Bamenda to pick it up.

We met Fanny (study coordinator) in Bamenda this morning to pick up more material for our study. She has been busy acquiring 18 mos HIV ELISA results from the babies in our study, so we will be busy abstracting them into our database over the next couple of days.

Fanny is great, she’s young and beautiful and full of enthusiasm for public health. She says she’s really enjoyed taking part of this study, as she has had the opportunity to work with and befriend a lot of young women with HIV. She says that it is still very stigmatized and often people don’t go to the hospital because they are too ashamed. But it is getting better. She is applying for a Fulbright in various places with plans to return to her Cameroonian community to utilize the skills she has acquired for better public health education. She will do great things.

Almost all of our patients fall in the first category.

We ate Njama njama and Fufu for lunch (our staple) in the health center canteen and walked to a nearby store to check out the goods.

Corn FuFu and Njama njama

Did I mention that you eat it with your hands?

African Guitars!

Williet (the dressmaker) met us at the Health Center and brought us the dresses/skirts that she had made with the material we bought. They look great, although I’m not sure how practical Brooks’ African-style shirt will be. At the very least, it will be a nice photo op.

Handmade dress, handpicked materials

               

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Skirt with matching bag that Wiliet threw in for free :)

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We’ve been told many times since we’ve been here that Mbingo Baptist Hospital is where people go for miracles. Unfortunately, they often go to traditional healers and small clinics before making it here. Often they believe that their ailments are due to witchcraft or revenge, so it would make sense that they see a traditional healer first. The problem is that by the time they make it here, things are often too far-gone to reverse. Many children are brought in in comas, many patients die within hours of making it here. There’s no easy answer to this problem, there are so many barriers. It is the culture of disease, the difficulty of travel, the scarceness of clinics, the cost of travel and healthcare, the fear of the medical system. But when they are at their last wit, their last breath, their last leg to stand on, they show up at our doorsteps and hope for a miracle.