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| Sister Aziza |
Last weekend I volunteered with Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) in the West Bank. Early Saturday morning, my friend Julian and I met two Sackler students in Tel Aviv and took a taxi to an Israeli town called Tayibe where we met up with a larger group of about 4-5 doctors, a couple of nurses, a speech therapist and a physical therapist. After introducing ourselves, we all piled into a large van and drove about 45 minutes into the West Bank to a town of about 6000 residents called Qusra. Qusra is in what they call Area C of the West Bank, meaning it is under full Israeli civil and security control. There is no government medical facility in Qusra and when we rolled in at around 9:30am, there were already a few hundred Palestinians gathered in a school parking lot (men on one side, women and children on the other), waiting to receive medical care.
We all gathered in a central room where about 9 official-type men spoke to us in Arabic (a female doctor nicely translated for us) about the violence that defines life for the Palestinians in the region, as the village is surrounded by illegal outposts and has been repeatedly attacked by settlers. They called for an end to the occupation and thanked us for coming.
I spent the day shadowing a doctor named Mitch and hanging out with the amazing Sister Aziza—a Comboni missionary from Eritrea, who has basically had nine lives as far as I can tell. She has been trained as a nurse, a midwife, and a doctor, speaks six languages and served as the only doctor in some region of the Sudan for twelve years. Last year she received the 2012 Hero Acting to End Modern Day Slavery Award from Hilary Clinton regarding her advocacy work aimed at exposing the systematic trafficking, kidnapping and slavery of refugees in the Sinai desert before they enter Israel. On top of it all, she has a wicked sense of humor and an intense empathic warmth that literally bathes anyone she comes into contact with.
Mitch, Sister Aziza, Julian and I probably saw between 30-40 patients that day (PHR in total saw around 270). Most of them were women, and the complaints were varied. The main message that Mitch kept driving home is that a lot of the ailments we observed were pathologies of oppression. Kidney stones because the water is poor and unmonitored, cluster headaches and other nonspecific complaints due to chronic stress and violence, unfilled prescriptions and unmonitored diseases due to lack of health care. One woman came in and looked straight in our eyes and told us her 37 year-old husband and one of her sons had been killed recently in the conflict, and she was at home trying to raise her remaining 5 children on her own. Another broke down on the examining table, and while we were unable to understand exactly why, it had something to do with conflict at home and perhaps the burden of being a woman in a society where you are expected to bear as many children as biologically possible throughout your reproductive life and the stress of having such little control over how your life unfolds. Basically, what we saw that day was evidence of disempowerment, in all arenas, and the toll it takes. It did not escape me that some of the patients seemed to receive some healing, or therapeutic benefit, from just sitting in front of us, and having a modicum of attention paid to their life experience.
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| Kids |
Again and again, Mitch repeated that the medical care he was doling out was not what we would ever consider good care by Western standards. If a woman comes in with kidney pain, and blood in her urine, she needs scans and further work up. In a town with no access to health care, where the closest clinic is many kilometers away, and transportation and life circumstances unpredictable, she isn’t going to get that. It’s unrealistic. There were over a handful of patients who said that they weren’t going to seek out a specialist, or follow up on the visit. And so they walked away with antibiotics and painkillers instead, to tide them over, essentially until PHR comes to town again.
In class this week, we had a lecture by the amazing Seema Biswas, a surgeon who has worked all around the globe in under-resourced areas. She echoed the same sentiment—that there have been many experiences in her life where she has had to do surgery under circumstances that would essentially amount to medical malpractice in the States. She said that for those of us hoping to do global health in the future, there will be many moments where we will find ourselves doing things that we would, in other settings, deem to be “heinously wrong,” but that might be right and appropriate under these new, different, non-Western circumstances. The overall message was that it’s naïve to think you can change the world-- the best you can do is try and change yourself. This is truly a message that can be applied to any area of one’s life. Apparently the message resonated with my whole class, as Jeremy (another classmate) emailed us the following quote by the ever-sage Rumi:
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
-Rumi
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