The patients come in many varieties;
There are the broken ones, survivors of horrific
crashes who have been heroically repaired by the surgeons, sport
enormous scars and have been in continuous pain since their accident
– for one man that has been 16 years. No prescription pain killers
here. I give arnica or rhus tox, wishing they could have had these
remedies years ago.
There are the women who have back pain and waist pain
from carrying heavy loads over long distances every day. I find it
hard to believe that a remedy is going to help when the carrying must
continue with no chance to rest and mend, but I know from past
experiences that a remedy that helps the woman to deal with her anger
about her situation or her sense of injustice or hopelessness, is
going to help the pain.
Epilepsy; no medication, just have your fits. We see
patients who have already been given homoeopathic remedies by the
student homoeopaths here in Mzimba. Patients who are having fits once
a month now instead of every day. If you have epilepsy here you
cannot get married, you will have no life. A mother brings a child
who has recently started to have epileptic convulsions and her grief
is palpable, she knows that as of now her little girl has no future.
Why does homoeopathy work so well here? I have no idea but I am
continually blown away seeing people's new lives emerging from the
chaos of their illness.
Babies; I only saw one baby on this visit, Desire.
Ten months old and bright as a button. I had a long conversation
with her, delighted to discover that baby Tombuka is the same language as baby English which is a language I speak, I even got some
smiles. Desire was born at 8 months gestation weighing only 3 lbs,
she is healthy and the doctors say there is nothing wrong with her
but she cannot sit up. She is fat and soft and she has no strength in
her core muscles to hold her upright. Desire's mother sits Desire
facing her on her lap, holds her two hands, looks in her eyes and
says “stand Desire, stand” and Desire, eyes locked on her
mother's in absolute trust and hope, uses every ounce of her
obstinate determination to slowly, slowly, slowly pull herself to
standing. I give her calc carb and hope to hear that she getting on
well when she comes back for her follow up visit next month.
HIV/AIDS, always there in the back ground, mostly
unspoken of. I have a long conversation on a break one day, sitting
in the shade, with a man who speaks English. He talks at length about
the cost of living, inflation – food costing more in the market
each week, the price of rent, cars, houses, funerals, how to make
money and how to make money. He is voluble and friendly, chatting
openly until I ask him about HIV/AIDS but now he is upset. When he
was nine his father died. He does not know if it was HIV/AIDS but his
mother died soon after. When his father died his father's family came
and took all of his father's possessions. They took everything
including the chance for this man and his three sisters to go to
school, get an education and have any kind of future.
We have patients who know they are HIV positive and
are on ARV drugs, patients who know but cannot tell anybody because
of the enormous, life stopping stigma and patients who don't know.
The beauty of homoeopathy is that you treat the person not the
disease so we don't actually have to have a diagnosis of HIV to give
someone a homoeopathic remedy that is really going to help them but
the atmosphere in the room when we have a patient who hasn't dared to
go to the hospital yet is pretty grim.
After a day of seeing patients the overall feeling is
one of endless, enduring, suffering. If I was here for a month I
wouldn't write about it until I could see the good results but I am
on my way home today – we will hear next month when Fulgensio,
Flyness and Lameck do the follow up visits. I would like to stay
forever to do this work but I cannot. Hopefully teaching twelve other
people will have a better result.
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