September 14, 2009
June 5
Friday, June 5
I was awoken by the boiling heat that hit particularly early this morning. Josh’s text arrived late, but I had been preparing since last night for the unexpected. After several delays (missing volunteers and my difficulty in reaching the meeting point), some volunteers, a translator, and a nun occupied a ridiculously large sixteen-seat van while the rest rode their motorbikes. It was an unusual choice in transportation, but I did not want to question the odd doings of tourists because I realized I was going to be one for the next seven weeks. After a short ride in the air-conditioned van, everyone gathered into a small motor boat that took us directly to the leper colony.
The scenery was picturesque but not enough to mask my anxiety. Lively conversations between new acquaintances quickly became noise pollutants that I zoned out as I sat in contemplative silence for the large part of the trip. Our boat started to slow down after entering a bowl-shaped bay, and I knew better than to look for a dock leading to a leper colony. Throwing my shoes onto the sandy beach, I plunged feet-first into the water. I lucked out and barely got wet, but the nun that went after me got half of her robe soaked in salt-water.
The events between the plunge and our arrival at the medical center blur in my mind, but I can recount everything that happened once we there. We all laid our packs in a clean corner and began our individual duties. Josh was settled and began to see patients, so I went over to the nurse’s station to offer my assistance--thinking that I would mostly observe since it was only my second day of work. How wrong I was. Almost immediately the nurses were demanding from the staff at the medical center for clean steel bowls to benches. On their behalf, I invited the head of the medical center into the station to watch our standard procedure so he could implement it during our absence. He declined several times and left the center when I became too busy translating for the nurse and patients. It was obvious to me that the villagers wanted nothing to do with the Hansen’s Disease patients. The social stigma of leprosy that I had heard all my life began to play in my mind like a short, overrated clip on YouTube. Leprosy continues to be labeled a highly contagious and incurable disease, and the villagers on the island used the patients as living proof of “a lifetime of pain and suffering.”
In less than five minutes I went from translator to assistant nurse, throwing out old bandages and emptying dirty bowls with bare hands and a committed heart. It was so easy to lose myself amidst risky drug users, irresponsible health care providers, and negligent government leaders. The government had isolated these patients on a rural island that could only be reached by boat. Although medical workers were there to help, they were insufficient in number, poorly trained in medicine, and most importantly socially negligent to patients of a stigmatized disease. When I thought about all of these factors and the number of patients lined up with supplies of antibiotics they simply didn’t need, I forgot about the probabilities of contracting leprosy and devoted myself to my immediate surroundings. The second patient was comparatively younger than most, and her pickiness revealed a lot about her physical and mental health. The nurse wanted to place her in charge of supplies, particularly unused bandages and extra paracetamol (more commonly known as acetaminophen in the United States and sold under the name brand Tylenol), so that patients with limited accessibility to the clinic could pick them up on a more convenient day. She strongly refused. All the patients were quick to agree with her because no one wanted to be responsible for distributing the bandages and dressing once we were gone.
“What responsibility?!” I silently shouted.
Like an optimistic college kid, I had developed a positive connotation about the island’s state of unity simply because others had labeled it a leper “colony. ” These isolated and, to a larger degree, medically neglected people would benefit from a community where they helped each other out, especially since the infection worsened at different times of the year for different individuals. So ideally the strongest members can help the weakest and vice versa, depending on the course of their own infection.
Then we saw a woman with a prosthetic leg came in expecting pain relievers for her wound but left teaching me an unforgettable lesson. Her left leg had been amputated before the cure for leprosy was widely available in Viet Nam. She wore a regular tube sock on her amputated limb because the prosthetic was scarring her wound. I was a few steps away from the old lady, but I could still smell the light odor that came from the wound. The bandage was old and dirty even though she had just washed it before coming this morning. After we replaced her gauze bandage with better crepe bandages, we instructed her to not wear the prosthetic leg for one week so the wound could heal quicker. She agreed, only to put the leg on as soon as I turned my head –-less than one minute later. How wise she was! She cried that her children were busy working, and she would not wear the leg for a week once she got home.
“Can’t anyone take you home?” the nurse asked. She replied in the negative. The nurse asked again if there was anyone available that could take her home. They replied in the negative. I will never let myself forget how all the villagers, who had nothing better to do than satisfy their curiosity about the foreign volunteers by observing us work non-stop, would rather see this old and disabled woman walk home on her fresh wound than push her wheelchair. There were too many social stigmas attached to helping a person with leprosy.
I had been working tirelessly until that moment. Suddenly my arms became too weak to empty the bowls, and I was too small to erase the age-old stigma attached with leprosy – contagious, filthy, and incurable.
Posted by Cherilyn VyVy Tran at September 14, 2009 11:08 PM
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