Working 9 to 5

Since I was a teen, I’ve known absolutely that I never wanted to work a Nine-to-five.  From that first part-time job as a cashier/waitress at a dingy streak house when I was sixteen, I knew. It’s funny how sometimes we create these absolutes in our minds without the slightest consideration for an alternate scenario. So, here I am, currently working what we, for all intent and purpose, will call a Nine-to-five. Clinic starts at 9am and, on all days but Monday, I am going home right about 5pm. But, folks, this isn’t something that I ever in a million years would have pictured being classified as what I think of as a “nine-to-five.”  I ran headlong into this realization today.

Captian’s Log, Friday the 13^th of April, 2012:

“What my Nine-to-Five Consists Of”

With Jenny away in the States to do fund-raising, my clinic duties have been elevated to include doing all of the dressings, injections, HIV tests, and anything else that doesn’t involve giving medical advice. This is on top of my regular duties of pulling cards, packing pills, weighing patients, filling medications, doing all of the paperwork and filing, taking care of our TB patients, and transporting patients, etc. That being said, dressings, injections, and HIV tests aren’t really something that we have a lot of in a day; maybe one or two of each, if that. Today, however, I bandaged 7 people, one of whom was an infant with burns from scalding water from the thigh down on one leg (his mother was also badly burnt on her ankle and foot). I would be lying to you if I told you I didn’t think that part was really insanely cool. Not the burnt baby, but the dressing wounds. I felt like I was getting to play doctor (or at least nurse) and actually getting to use all of that stuff that I learned from the Red Cross. On top of that, I also gave 4 injections today – a record in a single day for me. I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at them by now, but am very grateful for my dear friend, Thobeka Kiliva, who had to put up with 60 streptomycin shots done by my hands, the first 10 of which I’m sure hurt like hell. Luckily, she was very gracious about it and agreed to let me do it knowing I was an amateur. She’s a great lady. But, as Jenny would say in her wonderful British accent, “that is another kettle of fish entirely.” All in all, clinic was pretty intense today.

After clinic, about 2:30, I had high school tutoring. We’ve just embarked on reading Charlotte’s Web and, so far, the kids seem to like it and think it’s quite comical. I also think it’s comical to hear them pronounce names from the book; I adore the way they all say Avery. They say it like “a-VER-y” with the emphasis in on the second syllable and kind of rolling the R a bit. It’s great. Towards the end of our time today, all of a sudden, my students are scattering like roaches and Luleka literally dove over my lap to get behind the couch. I look up from the book and there’s some man in the doorway with a gun pointed into our shipping container. Yes, a GUN. I immediately stood up (which seems like the last thing you’d want to do with a gun pointed at you), and when the guy saw me, immediately put it down and cracked a smile and said something that I meant to take as he was just playing around. But it wasn’t funny. I walked out of the container and gave him a whole slew of reprimands about bringing a gun anywhere near the project and especially having it out and pointed at people, whether he was joking or not. I don’t think he really understood a thing I said, but he got the meaning of my tone and promptly left the premises. But my kids were now terrified, (and, quite frankly, so was I) and they didn’t want to walk home to Vezinyawo (where most of them have moved since the events mentioned in my previous post). Thus, I loaded up about 12 of them in my truck and took them home.  That was around 4 o’clock. 

From there, I needed to go to Bethany Home to check in on our little ones there. We have a child named Linamandla, whose mother has been an ongoing TB patient, that I took back there a few weeks ago (she’d done a good stint there the last time her mother was really down-and-out). She is an absolute peach and I really enjoy going to see her and being able to give her the one-on-one attention that the kids don’t get a lot of there. I also take pictures of her most times I go so that I can report back to her mother about how she is doing. So I went to see her and also to check on another little girl that was supposed to be taken there yesterday. This other little girl, whose name is Ntombizanele and is 4-years-old, we found out on Wednesday had been a victim of rape by the hands of her 19-year-old brother. I won’t even go into that situation and how furious it makes me. The point is, she was supposed to be taken there by the Ngangalizwe police because she had to be taken there first to open a case and what-what so that her brother could be arrested. But when I got to Bethany, I couldn’t find her, none of the mamas knew anything about it, and the women who work in the office had already gone home early because it’s Friday. So I called our social worker, Lusanda, so that she could call whoever they’d been in contact with at the police station (since I didn’t actually go to the station with them). In the meantime, I decided just to pop into the police station and see if she was still there. She wasn’t. And the cops on duty couldn’t tell me anything except that they’d heard about the case, but didn’t know anything about where the child was because it was officers from the morning shift that had handled it. Now, this is kind of typical in dealing with associates of any business in Mthatha – unless you’re talking to who you were talking to to begin with, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to have any clue what you’re talking about. But because this wasn’t a supermarket and the item in question was a victimized child and not a block of cheese, I was losing my cool. (This was, I'm sure, compounded by the fact that I was tired and still hadn't eaten any lunch that day.) They tried to call of few people and still couldn’t tell me where she was. I asked how could they just loose a 4-year-old girl and, if they just sent her back home, didn’t they think that was the most reckless and irresponsible thing they could have done since the violence was inside the home? This is when they told me, no, they had arrested the brother that morning and gave me some name that was close to his, but still slightly incorrect. I was about to go back to Itipini to find the child myself and take her to Bethany when Lusanda called back to assure me that the other social worker they’d been working with had indeed taken the child to Bethany home today. Call me cynical, but I am still a bit suspicious about if the child is at Bethany. Social workers here aren’t really known for being the best. But, I could have overlooked her or maybe she was in the bathroom or something. I don’t know. I will go back and check again tomorrow morning when the office lady is back.

At a little after 5pm, I run to drop off sputum samples at the lab – my last piece of work for the day. Then swing by the supermarket to get some milk and eggs and now here we are.  So maybe today was a pretty intense day and a little out of the usual, but even on a normal day, this job is not your average day job. In conclusion, though I swore I’d never have one, I love my current “nine-to-five,” and all of the random, exciting, terrifying, frustrating, fulfilling, ridiculous things that it encompasses from day-to-day. Like I said before… there is never a dull moment in Mthatha.

Captain out.

Linamandla Gcume ready to go to Bethany home on a rainy day.