Crowds and Passers by...

One of the many things that annoy me about trying to work in the communities

is the passers by.
I can go nowhere without being noticed, and when I linger in one place for longer than a few moments, like when I'm treating a child, give it a few minutes and a crowd has gathered.

Sometimes it's children, who then make lots of noise or start fighting,

distracting the child who is supposed to be working.

Or maybe other women, who chip in their bit of information about the childs history,

hich often makes the story very confusing and often untrue.

It can be the older men in the community, who come to tell me how to do my job,

which I wish they wouldn't.

Or the younger men, who just want to come and watch the white woman

crawl on the floor and 'play' with the children.

The crowds can sometimes be useful, in terms of teaching the value of the disabled child. If I put in the importance to keep visting the child, then they realise that the child is someone special and worth their love too. The crowd can help at traslating information, or help encouraging the carer to do the exercises when we're not there. I often also use them to coax the child into doing what I'm trying to do, often it comes better from a sibling or friend, though generally not by an adult with a cane!

But this afternoon the 'crowd' did nothing but annoy me.

Having chased them off, children and adults alike, as I tried to assess a severly malnourished and dehydrated 1 year old. It took about an hour to get a clear history and make a plan with the carer. It turns out the mother died in childbirth, and the baby has been passed from aunty to aunty, till this aunty got him 3 days ago, and knowing the a white man visits his neighbour every other week, decided to wait for me to arrive and make the child my problem. How women or anyone in fact can leave a baby to become a bag of bones I just don't understand. So I was so cross about this already.

Then as I was trying to take some plaster casts off another 1yr olds feet (who has clubfoot),

2 other men walked past, stopped and stuck their noses in. I refused to continue as I hate working with an audience, and a lapse in concentration could lead to cutting Khallon's leg,

I decided in my fuming it was better to just stop.

When I wouldn't continue, the men proceded to tell me that it was a public walkway, which it was as were were right outside the patients house in a slum area behind a busy market. They told me to go somewhere private if I didnt want anyone watching, but this family for sure would not be able to afford to come to a private clinic even if I had one! Inside the 1 roomed house the floor could not be seen for the mats that they lie on, and it was too dark anyway as obviously no power. So these men persisted in being annoying and rude, and not leaving, till they told me I'd be better going back to where I'd come from. I shouted back in my anger, yes, well I'd love to go back to England, just send me!!

They just laughed at me, and I then added, but

"I won't go because it the children of your country that are benefitting".

It's is only them who would suffer if let the frustrations of working here get to me too much.

So my thought at the end of it, was that if we were not there in the depths of that camp,

the malnourished kid may have died,

and Khallon would always have clubbedfeet and may never walk.
Instead, hopefully, we saved the life of one child,

and enabled a child (in the long run) to have a chance to learn to walk.

So on we went, albeit with smoke coming out of my ears in anger and frustration

and the sun pounding down mercilessly on my head just to help the matter.

Oh Salone!