Trip to the hospital

I'm writing this sitting in a lush green garden in a guest house in
Kitwe, drinking a cold Mosi lager as the sun goes down. There are
glamorous Zambians and hairy-legged, safari-shorted white men all
around – probably linked with the mining companies or maybe tourism.

Kitwe Hospital is just down the road, but I bet I'm the only one here,
apart from the staff, who's ever been near it. And believe me, if you
had any choice at all, you would stay well away.

My colleague took me to the private ward first, which was bleak enough
in a chipped paint, echoing corridors and ancient equipment sort of
way, but it's quiet, and there are only three or four beds to a room.
To come here for basic medical treatment costs about £35. Many people
are emaciated and on drips, and I know what that means now.

But then she took me upstairs to the 'low cost' women's ward. People
travel from all over three provinces to get here, when they are too
sick to stay at home or they need drugs other than basic painkillers.
You don't get any house calls in Zambia, and there are almost no
doctors in rural health centres either.

Not that there are many at Kitwe Hospital. This is a last resort of
the desperate. There was a huge room, packed with beds, with no
sheets, just blankets, and on each a very sick woman, surrounded by
standing, staring relatives. The must have been hundreds of people in
there, all dying or watching someone die. It was verging on
apocalyptic.

That, my colleague said to me as we left, is what poverty means. I
have never felt so rich in my life.

jo