Gandhi Hospital

My teammate Annie was wanting to start a project where we could help out with whatever  we could in the hospital, so we were able to get a tour of it with a woman named Solochina. She’s a member of the LDS ward here and is currently the head nurse of the cancer, poison, and HIV wing. 

When we showed up there were people sitting everywhere. . It’s a government hospital  so naturally there were tons of people there as the care is free, but I figured they were either waiting for medical attention, or they were waiting for family who already were. When we walked in I was super stunned to find the place dirty and crowded. People were sitting in the halls outside the rooms where their friends or family lay, and the whole place was pretty dirty. I don’t even know where to begin. The walls had stains on them, the windows looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned for a veerrry long time. The floors were dirty enough that I would never want to walk around bare foot through the halls, and it smelled wrank.  It was mind-blowing because I had it in my mind that it was going to be similar to hospitals in the states….and I hadn’t even prepared myself for anything different.   

 

Being on a tight schedule, we had to cruise through, but we managed to see a few wards.Tthe first being the ICU for newborn babies. We didn’t actually go in the room that the babies were in, but we got view them from outside. They were such small little babies, but we didn’t stay long and moved on to the pediatrics wing…That’s when I first realized that there is no privacy in that hospital. It was a room full of children in beds on either side of the room. I felt like I was tourist sight-seeing as we walked through quickly. The kids and their parents were watching us watch them. 

From there we visited either the Leper or Burn ward. I’m gonna go with the Leper ward……So we walked into a small room with about 10 patients lying on their beds.  Most of them sat up and let us inspect their deformities and ask them questions. Most of them didn’t speak English so we would ask Solochina about them and she would tell us how long they had been patients and what not. But it was cool because they could come to the hospital and they would be fed and taken care of and had a place to rest. I can’t remember exactly how it worked for them, but I think it was like they could come in every other day or something along those lines.

From there we went to the burn ward. That was probably the saddest thing I have ever seen. I have the image clearly in my mind of the first woman I saw. She was sitting on the side of her bed with her chest and stomach exposed. Third degree burns covered every part of her body, and her hair was gone.  When I looked into her eyes I saw someone who looked as if they had no will or desire to live. I’m not quite sure how to explain it, but my whole being felt heavy with sadness. I had to try so hard to conceal my grief as I looked over about 30 other patients, ranging from all ages, in the same condition. Solochina said that about 80% of the burns were due to suicide which broke my heart. I have never felt so sad walking between the beds through the middle of those women and their families.

Our last ward to visit was Solochina’s own. We entered a room where the patients each had various problems, but the first that we visited was a man in a coma with his wife holding on to him by the side. Solochina grabbed his file which had a big red Z+ written on the front. She told us that it meant that he had aids and in addition to that he had tuberculosis and that he wasn’t going to survive much longer. She told us that his wife didn’t know, but she couldn’t understand what was said because she didn’t speak English. We were then told that the wife was only 22 years old with 2 new babies at home. The wife started crying as she watched us talking there and I think it’s because our facial expressions expressed a bad situation. As soon as she started crying I had to try so hard to not cry. Not only for her husband’s, but for her future.

We visited a few more rooms, but the burn ward and the experience with the man and his wife were the most sad things I have experienced in a very, very long time. Additionally, we realized that we couldn’t really help out in any way because we didn’t have the certification to do most of what they needed, and we could not communicate with the patients due to the language barrier.

In the end it was a very interesting experience to see and feel such different things. But I would never want to work in such an environment as that one. The stress and sadness would overcome me as there was so much to do with few of those who could do it.