When Worldliness Takes Over

"When you're a nurse you know that every day you will touch a life or a life will touch yours.  ~Author Unknown"


If only the above were true for all the nurses.  The public servants are still striking and the public hospitals are in desperate need of help.  I was fortunate enough to be able to volunteer at a public hospital last week.  What an incredibly humbling experience.  We worked in the labour and maternity ward.  There was heavy security and it wasn't easy to get in at all, not even through the main gate.   Driving up to the hospital, my first impression was that it looks like a prison.  A few members of the army and police were also stationed there.  Walking around, rooms and halls were full with patients, but empty at the same time.  There was nobody to give them care.  Dishes stacked up in the kitchens with what looked like the remainders of the last two meals, security lying back in their chairs, sleeping against the walls, long, cold and dark passages between the wards, laundry piled up here and there, patients' files and papers lying everywhere, rubbish bins filled to the brim.


We got to change nappies, clean, warm up formula, feed, burp, put clothes on the newborns and finally porter them to their moms in another ward after they were out of recovery.  Some babies lay there without clothes, wrapped up in what ever we could find as they had run out of clothes.  I looked at a tiny baby lying in a crib and told the nurse I think that baby is in the wrong place, there was no way that such a tiny baby could weigh 3.3kgs.  Turned out I was right, we moved her and a few others to the right cots.  All of them were tagged, but some tags came loose and we had to retag them.  When we portered the babies to their moms we placed two in a cot, covered with a towel and wheeled them about a km down the dreaded dark and cold passages.  The moms in recovery could hear the wheels so by the tim we entered the ward they had managed to sit up, waiting anxiously to see if their baby had arrived.  The process when you arrive is to call out the name of the mom (to be found on the card, wheel the cot to the mom, make her call out the number on her own tag, and ask her if the baby is a "Ntombazaan or a boy"  I forget the name for a boy, I took so many girls.  Once we knew it was the right baby for the right mom we moved the baby into the bedside cot next to the mom.  Some were so happy to meet their babies for the very first time, and others couldn't be bothered.

We also helped some moms who were in labour.  The sad thing was that they had run out of hospital packs, equipment, clothing as the laundry hasn't been done.  I went to look for a delivery pack and there wasn't one, so another nurse and I were looking for equipment and blades.  When I returned the one nurse told me and a friend to grab this and grab that and we said "hang on we are not medical students, just volunteers!".  She said "Haibo! The baby is coming now".  I stood, motionless with horror, excitement and wonder at the miracle of life about to happen.  It was good to be able to hold another mom's hand for support, and remind her to "breathe".  It was like second nature, like I had done this here before.  No partners or family members were allowed in with the moms, for fear that they were strikers posing as family members.  I am so amazed at those nurses and staff that still work despite the strikes going on, you can see they are really running on empty, but yet they keep going.  Saying good bye was the hardest part.  They were so sad to see us go.  If I didn't have to go to work the next day I would easily have stayed.

There honestly wasn't one moment where I felt unsafe.  It was so rewarding to be able to volunteer, and work with those newborns, and a very real reminder of how blessed we are to have access to private facilities.  I'd go again in a heart beat.  When worldliness takes over, what remains?  What about caring, why is there so little regard for human life?