Road Work

After a few weeks of being here, I've realized how often traveling occur, since I am the "mobile clinic" nurse. Now, there really isn't anything "mobile" about the clinic, rather, it is me and my lovely team that is mobile. We have five clinics that we travel to, and the time it takes to get to these clinics can really vary. Some are physically closer but that really doesn't mean anything in terms of the time it takes to travel there. So these trips can range from one and a half hours to four hours - one way. And then you have to come back before sunset. It can be really be ridiculous at times - travel four hours, stay an hour at a clinic, see a handful of patients, refuse the rest, then leave to travel another four hours to get back.

It is a given already that the roads are generally very poor and that we can expect to be stuck every time we travel, especially in the rainy season. So we are always equipped with not only ropes, jacks, planks, and metal traction, but also with machetes and axes. Now I would not have seen these tools come out if we did not run into a road block, literally. A tree had fallen over and we could not cross over. Naturally all the men jumped out, grabbed the tools and started hacking away at this tree. The goal was to cut it to pieces so that we can move it. Now this is no small tree. As I watched, I can see the head of the axe falling off the handle and the men had to stop every so often to reposition the head. I was so scared that it was going to come flying off and take someone's head with it! The work took slightly under an hour and we finally were able to move the cut-up tree off the road.

You'd think that fallen trees and muddy roads would be obstacle enough in a given trip. DREAM ON! Sandy roads are also a problem - a big problem. For some reason, the road sinks in so much that the vehicle slides and at some point we were slanted at a forty-five degree angle, right up against the wall of a hill. The vehicle could not move forward because there was not enough "road" to drive on. So we had to dig into the walls of the hill and the road itself to fill it and make it more flat. Again we spend another hour basically reconstructing the road. Once the road becomes flat enough, the vehicle moved forward (now perhaps at a twenty to thirty degree angle away from the wall).