In Swaziland there are two types of people

Mid morning on Thursday we
went back to the Nothando’s house for Wisdom to give her another shot (the
woman I spoke of in blog a few weeks ago). This time I spoke in broken SiSwati
to her son Eric and a little bit to her. I vowed to keep coming back and get to
know her more each time. We were on our way to the hospital. I worried about us
going straight from her house to there. Would we be carrying TB with us and
exposing patients that already had a weakened immune system? I was forgetting
just how common AIDS and TB are in Swaziland.

We were going to visit our
friend Saddam in the hospital about ½ hour’s drive from the center. Saddam
began to have possible symptoms of malaria Saturday before last. (Yes Mom and
Dad, I’m still taking my anti-malaria meds.)

A visit to a hospital in
Swaziland is a mix of old and new worlds. At first you think you’ve stepped
back a few decades in history. There are wards for the males, the females and
children, and for women in labor. When I hear the words ward and hospital, my
mind automatically goes to psychiatric ward and movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or the
beginning of Patch Adams.

            I’ve long
gotten over being surprised at the lack of privacy in Swaziland but this reached
a new level. Saddam’s bed was in one corner of the room. Jessica, Wisdom,
Nombali, Majabane, Siyabonga, and I were all crowding in to visit with him. In
another corner a man was kicked back in the reclining position with many family
members around him, a band-aid covering his left hand where an IV had been
placed. A toddler rested at the foot of his bed and every so often kicked his
(or her) feet up in the air. In another corner was a sleeping man attended to
by his wife. She was sitting down and kept making eye contact with me. In her
eyes was a look of curiosity at what we were doing there and in her body
language a sense of worry for her husband/loved one. And in the last corner a
man obviously in pain and probably dying of TB and AIDS. His breathing was so
labored that when I first heard him I thought he was snoring until I saw his
eyes were open wide as his wife or sister wiped his mouth. Privacy, even in
death, is a luxury only the rich can afford. Now I know why so many of the
young people here have told me they don’t want to get old. I wouldn’t either if
this was my picture of death, of the last moments of life.

            After we prayed
with Saddam, we began to gather our things to leave. We realized it had been a
while since we had seen Wisdom, the nurse that runs the clinic at the center and
has sent Saddam to the hospital because of his symptoms. As we searched I
noticed more and more of the old and new worlds of medicine thrown together,
combined with a country that has the highest percentage of HIV/AIDS. In the
female and children’s ward I spotted a poster that read “Common oral lesions in
children with HIV/AIDS.” In the male ward, I looked at the trash and saw an IV
line with blood in it – no such thing as red biohazard bins here. And in the
maternity ward sat two infant incubators, straight out of the western hospitals
I’m used to. Only these weren’t in air-conditioned, sterile environments.  We finally found Wisdom talking to some other
nurses about Saddam. All of the nurses, it seemed, were busy at a separate
building entitled “TB clinic”. Standing outside I saw a sign for A.R.T.s or
anti-retroviral treatment, in other words HIV/AIDS treatment, with an arrow
pointing to the left. It may not be talked about often, but I’m beginning to
believe a sign I pass by every week going into our local grocery store. In
Swaziland there are two types of people, those living with HIV/AIDS and those
affected by it.