The Rains Cometh!

When I woke up yesterday, there was something crazy flapping behind the curtain. I pulled it away and found this little guy just sort of watching things from the wrong side of the window.

We had a pretty gnarly thunderstorm during the night and apparently he decided that my room would be good shelter from the storm. Fine by me. I opened up the little glass slats that is my window and let him go on his way.

In the morning, I headed down to the clinic to help out and try to do some damage control on the drug shortage issue. While I was there, I helped one of the staff reorganize the store-room into something a bit more coherent. Previously, all of the drugs and supplies were just sort of stored haphazardly in quarter full cardboard boxes around the tiny room. As we started shelving the supplies, I realized quite how out of drugs they were. Aside from a few bottles of antibiotics and Lidocaine, not much else was there. For some reason, though, there was a ton of dextrose saline bags meant for IV drips. Which is great, but it’s tough when there isn’t much else to give.

On my last few visits, I’ve been meeting with patients, which is strange, since many people assume that I’m a doctor because I am white. Which could be bad given that I don’t have any drugs. Two days ago I visited a guy with severe advanced Pneumonia. If you put a stethoscope up to his back, his left lung sounded fine but not much was going on in the right one. Not even much of a rattle or wheeze. Not good. He’s been on, you guessed it, an IV drip as well a high dose of antibiotics. Yesterday the staff was feeding him a plate of brown gruel covered with cloudy murky water.

After I returned to the compound, the sky opened up. Not quite like before, but much worse. It was only about 12:30, but the sky looked like it was about eight at night. Not good. Within about 20 minutes, everything started flooding. 

There is a shallow drainage channel that funnels the water from the center of the compound out onto the airstrip. The problem occurs when it comes down faster than the channel can handle. One side of the compound, the one on slightly higher ground, was fine. As for the other one, well…

Oddly enough, by the end of the day the water was gone and things were just back to mudtown as usual. The heavy rains that were supposed to have started weeks ago now seem to be upon us after a brief delay.