A DAY IN MALAWI
11/07/03
Patrick was very quiet last night. Not a squeak was coming out from his room in the evening and when I asked if he was alright, he just whispered quietly ’yes’. I thought I should be more sociable, but selfishly locked my door and indulged in a hot bath. In my whole long life has a bath not felt so wonderful. We had had a busy day moving my things from the backyard house to this new home and as I had given Patrick a room to stay as well, he had been carrying his few possessions from the house, other side of Manja. We both had injured ourselves on a kitchen door on the previous day. I hit my head and an hour later Patrick’s eyebrow had quite a nasty cut and blood was dripping from his cheeks. It soon stopped and he didn’t seem to be overly worried about it. I was quite surprised therefore when a knife slipped into his finger yesterday when trying to open a tin, few drops of blood poured out and he said very anxiously: ‘I am loosing all this blood’. Every day, almost every hour here gives a chance for a bit of education and I pointed a 500ml washing up liquid bottle to him telling that he could easily loose one pint of blood and not feel any different. He nodded and crept into his room. This morning he was quite cheerful and when I asked whether he had been ok on the previous night he said: ‘I thought I was dying.’ ‘Why did you think that Patrick?’ I uttered. ‘Because of my finger, I thought I will die because of my finger. It was bleeding.’ So the lesson about plasma and white blood cells and red blood cells continued and I just hope that next time when he is loosing 500 micro litres of blood, he won’t think that is the end.
The end, however, does seem to come here quite differently than in our western world. People literally just drop dead and nobody questions the reasons. I visited my old village Mjamba today (what a joy that was!) and was saddened to hear that many people I knew had died. ‘Mum said she wasn’t feeling well and following day she died; Mai Nkolesya went to church, sat down and died.’ The list could continue… Life expectancy is 39 years now because of AIDS, but these people hadn’t died of AIDS, so maybe Patrick had a reason to worry after all.