Dispensary Visit - Saturday, January 21

Today was an exhausting day, taxing on all levels. After a refreshing morning walk towards the foot of the mountain near Same, we drove to a medical dispensary at Bonde la Ruru. The drive to this location was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. After a few kilometers, I would hardly consider what we were driving on a road. It was more like a rugged hardened dirt path filled with gullies and bumps. It wound through what seemed like endless miles of parched earth with brittle-looking, small plants with barely a hint of green in their sparse leaves. Everything looked very dry, yet the land teemed with life; we saw lots of birds, and large lizard, and even a monkey. As we descended onto the large plain near our destination, the vegetation changed and became even sparser. As we reached the medical dispensary, we were very kindly greeted by many people from the village, mostly Maasai men and women.

Seeing the dispensary was a painful reminder of the desperate situation of the majority of the citizens of developing countries across the world. In the women/children wing of the building, beds covered with cracked plastic and no coverings of any kind lined each side of the room. A very sick, young child and his mother laid on one of the beds. A pastor accompanying us blessed the child before we left the room. As we moved into the men’s wing, we saw a dying man with tuberculosis and AIDS. A sense of complete helplessness, shock, and sadness overtook me as we left the building. In the next building, we saw various rooms, including the doctor’s office, a storage space for medicines, etc., and the birthing room. As I entered the medicine storage room, I was distraught to see that the main drug available to fight malaria infections (the leading problem) was guanine sulphate, which is largely ineffective against malaria in this part of the world (as a prophylactic, anyway; maybe it still helps for treatment).

It is important to mention that the observations about the conditions and capabilities of this medical dispensary are from my perspective; in fact, the doctor presented the clinic as something he was (deservedly) proud of, given the severely limited resources available. It’s difficult and appalling for someone from the US to imagine a level of health care this low, and it’s disheartening to know that this dispensary is superior to many others.