On Thursday, I was helping out with the child vaccination again and one of the nurses came to say hello to me, so I asked where he was working today and he told me he was working in psychiatry that day for people who were affected by the genocide. I didn’t know we had this service, so I asked him if I could come see and he showed me the paper he fills out while talking to people. It went over trauma, mental health problems, asked if the patient has any scars, and a few other things, that I couldn’t translate. He saw people of all ages, from old widows to young girls in secondary school. I am very interested in and elated that we have this type of service. Mental health care is very difficult to come across in lower income countries. Before teaching English and the crazy rain, the neighbors came to visit again and the oldest girl and one of the smaller ones braided my hair into about 10 lopsided uneven braids. I didn’t care. It felt so good to have someone touch my head. I gathered them all up and put them into a pony to go to class.
So, on Friday during the testing of pregnant mothers, one woman came in whose husband was HIV+ and she was not. The nun had me get everyone else out of the room and she shut the door to talk to this woman. She was asking her if her husband uses condoms and the woman said that he refuses and started crying. We tried to console her and talk to her and the nun asked her to bring her husband in and they would test her again and talk to the husband, but I could see the fear and frustration and pain that this woman felt. There is no way for her to make her husband use a condom and she knows that she will contract the virus and die. Her husband is dealing her the card of death, putting the whole family at risk. The children already born will be orphaned and the one in her belly might also get the virus and die, but there is nothing she can do about it. She cannot say no, and even if she does, it won’t help because there is no such thing as rape inside of marriage. I almost started to cry, but my friend came in, so I went to meet her. I tried telling Emily about it, but found that I could not without bursting into tears in front of everyone. Its just so frustrating having no hope, knowing that there is this thing you can prevent, but not having the power to prevent it. I am still so angry about it and so sad for the woman, but know that I can’t do anything about it and she is unable to do anything about it. I just hope that the nun will be able to talk some sense into the husband and let him know that he needs to protect his family; he cannot leave his children without any parents. Its terrible and sad that he has this virus, but it wont do any good for his wife to contract it as well.
Monday, I helped out with family planning and then got the list of drugs in our pharmacy to make a pharmacy sheet. Right now, everything is hand written in a book, as it comes up, so you have to look through what you wrote for the day every time you have another patient (to record how much is being used), so I decided to make a sheet in alphabetical order with a place to record how much is used and the totals for the day. Then we went to the market, ate lunch and went to teach English. While I was rounding up students, one of the girls took me into the birthing room and I thought she was going to check how much one of the women was dilated, but instead ended up pulling out two fetuses and showed them to me. I knew what was it was before I saw them. They were wrapped in paper and put into a box and just sitting on the shelf. I am pretty surprised that I had no reaction to them. I still don’t really. I don’t know how I feel about it. I am not disgusted, or sad or angry. I feel very nonchalant. I don’t know the circumstances around the babies. I don’t know if the mother went into early labor and they just couldn’t survive, or if she was having complications and they needed too be aborted or if she had an elected abortion. I am trying to figure out if all those anti-abortion pictures and videos of aborted fetuses and the ones I saw in formaldehyde during biology lab prepared me enough to be able to see theses babies without feeling, but I just don’t know.
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