Hello everybody!
My name is Jean-Louis, I’m 25 years old, I’ve just graduated in Medicine and I’m working as a volunteer in World Friends Neema Hospital in Nairobi. In the next months I’m going to tell you something about life in the Hospital, but now I’d like to let you feel the climate you feel here in Nairobi, day by day.
If you buy a guidebook of Kenya, you’ll see on the cover wonderful pictures of giraffes, rhinoceroses, lions lying down in the sun with the golden savannah standing out on the horizon. Well, Nairobi is not at all like that! And it’s a jungle, I would say, not a savannah!
A jungle of cars, motorbikes, trucks, vans and matatu (little vans with 11 seats functioning as buses that you can find everywhere); a jungle of sounds, noises, screams, horns, exhaust pipes; a jungle of smells: from the exhaust of the cars that you can feel into your bowels to the sickly smell of the urban wastes, burning on the roads.
There are also lots of savage animals. They run all around, in all directions. They cross crumbling traffic lights, they throw themselves among the cars, they push, they crash and curse. Somebody is now lying on the ground with empty eyes and no hope. Somebody else looks quieter, wearing a business suit and walking along the road in a distinguished way with his head up. Most of them are “Mzungu” (white men, in Swahili “wanderer”). They look the most innocent, but probably they’re the most fierce.
Poverty and wealth stand very close, but the first is well hidden: the slums wherein millions of people live don’t hit you like the skyscrapers in the centre. You can’t see them easily. Continuous contradictions. Western culture, capitalism, our beloved progress, instead of having a good influence have brought their worst sides to Africa, and they are eating away all that is beautiful and genuine in the African culture, while stressing the negative sides of this country.
All this is the daily life in Nairobi. Everyday I have to cope with it.
At 8 I leave home and get on the bus to the centre and try to know how much is the trip: there isn’t actually a fixed price for the ticket, it depends on the traffic!! I get off the bus to get on the matatu and I come face to face with the jungle. I must play up (that’s very hard so early in the morning!) to cope with the crowd, to prevent myself from crashing into people or being run down by some car. It’s not easy, I promise!
I come to the matatu stop, I ask if it gets the Neema Hospital (they always say yes, but half the times it’s not true!), I enter this sardines can, sticking to two other people and most of the times sitting with half my tail off the seat. I’m going to open my Swahili grammar book, but I shut it as soon as we’ve left. The radio is switched on: you feel like in front of the amplifiers in a disco. I can’t hear my voice while I’m talking and, stunned from the noise, I sink in an almost surreal atmosphere, from which I recover only when my head hits against a metallic surface: the small bus is driving off-road to avoid the traffic, raising huge dust clouds that I can’t avoid to inhale.
When I must pay, they often try to cheat me and I have to insist on having the change. Finally, after one hour, as I can see the Neema by far, I try to run away among seats and people, I pull strongly my rucksack that as usual is blocked somewhere in the bus, and I get off the matatu.
I’m very close, but the most difficult thing comes now: crossing Thika road. It’s perhaps the only moment I’m really scared. The cars never stop and sooner or later I must throw myself, whether I like it or not! If there is a native who’s crossing, I feel more confident, I come side by side and I follow him as a shadow. I’d like to hold his hand as I did when I was a child with my mum. If I’m lucky I cross the entire road, otherwise I stay for a while in a limbo, an invisible passageway, neither here nor there, rigid like a pin, among the cars that continue to dart on both sides.
So I think to myself: “No, not now! Damn it, I’m 25, I’m trying to do some good and I can’t die like this!”
I try to keep my eyes open and hold my breath, and as soon as I find a passage I throw myself offside! A sigh of relief, about a hundred metres and I enter the Hospital, saying the usual “jambo” to the watchman.
When the gate opens, I feel in a parallel world, an oasis in the middle of the jungle: the blue of the roofs mixed up with the colour of the sky, the green of the flowerbeds, people who moves quietly, some doctors, a light atmosphere. The patients are sitting in wait in the reception hall. All is clean, tidy and in order. You can feel the attention and the love for the details. I feel at ease, relaxed and I almost forget the previous chaos.
It’s not a privilege for rich people, but thanks to the efforts of World Friends and your support, it’s a reality for poor people who can’t pay the medical cares: about 100 patients a day by now (50 per cent).
Two days ago, in the Casualty (the first aid), I visited a woman in her fifties with an advanced breast cancer: I thought that it was the result of a burn, because the skin seemed burned, wizened and flaking. Probably the cancer has been diagnosed too late and I don’t know how long she will carry on.
Anyway, when I went into her room she was there quiet and she smiled at me. She continued to be quiet during the check-up, except for the moment in which I ripped off the plaster and she felt pain. She smiled even more sweetly when we said good-bye to her and we left the room.
There are many reasons which can explain a similar attitude: maybe she wasn’t completely aware of her problem (because she didn’t know it or she didn’t want to know it), or maybe it’s because of a different way to conceive life and death.
I wonder where she came from to have medical care in the Neema Hospital, what time she woke up and what she had to pass to get there. Who knows what she has to pass everyday. Maybe it is thanks to the special atmosphere you can feel beyond the gate of the Hospital, that this “mama”, as they say, gave us her nicest smile.
Jean-Louis Aillon
World Young Friends