Just a Drop

Before we headed off on assignment to Africa, we were given a number of warnings and advice to take heed of. Among the screeds of literature there was a small, red-covered book, The TRAVELWELL Self Assessment and Treatment Guide. It’s still sitting on the shelf here beside me. It’s a comprehensive book and despite the dubious advice for a lion attack recommending to allow the animal to chew on an arm or leg in the hope it will become bored and not become excited by any efforts to fight it off, there is very sound and worthwhile advice. We referred to it many a time!

After five years, back home and back working at the nursery, out of the blue, I began to feel crook. It felt like the onset of malaria, I knew it well enough, I had it three times and it felt like I was in for another dose. I was working at the potting bench by myself, and knew I was in a rapid decline. I called one of my crew to tell him that if I didn’t head home now, I doubted if I would make it!

I lay on the couch until Mags came home, and because it was a Friday evening, she carted me off to the emergency doctor. I told him I suspected malaria and wanted him to take a blood sample. Something I had learned, was that if you take malaria medicine before a blood test, the results will likely show positive anyway. Doesn’t sound logical but myth or not, I wanted an accurate test. I still had a dose mefloquine at home and no matter what the doctor said, I was going to take my dose when I got home. The poor old emergency doctor was no phlebotomist and made a bit of a mess of my arm trying to extract his sample, but he’d never seen a malaria case and I tried to tell him the rules according to me.

The mefloquine didn’t do much, but my ever-hopeful mind was saying the opposite! By Sunday night I was in a fairly bad way and rang our own doctor at his home, he suggested the usual, paracetamol, drink lots of water and see him in the morning. He couldn’t tell what was wrong, so he sent me for a laboratory blood test which came back the next day saying I had far too many white blood cells, but still he couldn’t figure out why. I could hardly stand, so at home I went to bed. During the night one of my lungs collapsed causing my breathing to become shallow and crackly. Another blood test the next day showed more white blood cells than the first time.

Mags rang the Agency’s doctor, an expert on tropical medicine, who couldn’t give any answers without actually seeing me and she was in Wellington – I was hardly going to make it there! Four days down the track and I was just getting worse. My collapsed lung wasn’t treated because it wasn’t the primary cause of my condition. The pain in the muscle at the top of my right shoulder was getting worse too, it was like a red hot knife being turned in there. Every hour or so, Mags had been flicking through the small red book, it suggested that pain in the right shoulder could signal an amoebic abscess on the liver. The swollen liver resting on the diaphragm causes the pain to shoot up to the shoulder. She phoned the doctor and he said to go straight to Dunedin hospital for a scan.

The radiologist, cold gel at the ready, asked me what she was looking for. I told her about the suspected amoebic abscess on my liver. In no time she said she had found it, a hole in my liver four inches across! She didn’t wait for a doctor, she sent me straight down to A & E, where they gave me morphine to ease the pain. It made no difference. I was bunged into an isolation ward, because they weren’t sure it the tropical disease was contagious. They did more tests, took more scans and checked the internet for the appropriate treatment. An amoebic abscess was well outside local experience.

The plan was to put me into the donut scanner-thing so they could see the needle when they jabbed it into my liver to suck the gunk out. ‘The liver has no nerves so it wouldn’t hurt’. I was told. The first needle was too thin or the gunk too thick, so they had to find a fatter one to do the job. They managed to suck out just over four hundred millilitres! The surgeon took a whiff, saying he didn’t want to gross me out but he thought it important to smell it in case he struck the same sort of thing in the future. The internet said the gunk should be the same colour as anchovy sauce, but nobody knew the colour, so someone was sent to the supermarket to secure a sample. It wasn’t a match so they cultured the gunk to see what would grow.

Back in the ward, they gave me five times the normal dose of Flagel, the drug given to treat giardia. It leaves an awful, metallic taste but I wasn’t fit to complain. They told me amoeba divisions could spread into my heart or brain so I was to keep taking the drug until they imported a special drug from USA that would clean any remaining amoeba from my body. Meanwhile, the hospital also housed a medical school, so I was a point of interest for student doctors who checked me out from time to time. I was told later that the only treatment for amoebic abscess available in Africa was Flagel and at the time it had only been available to them for five years, prior to that patients simply died! Sobering.

The doctors had me up and about as soon as possible, but I was weak, I could only walk twenty metres along the ward, which was a square configuration. It was a week before I made it around the whole square. All my waste was taken away to check under a microscope and bombard with chemicals in case it posed a danger. My enduring respect to those young women in the lab! It doesn’t take for reality to kick in, there were three guys in the ward who were far worse off than me. They didn’t survive. One guy had internal bleeding and knew he was doomed, but he was bright and accepting. He was a hymn writer and he wrote me a poem suggesting in the circumstances, I shouldn’t ever return to Africa. I did, but that’s another story.

I’d only been home from Africa a few weeks when I took crook, so wasn’t entitled to any sick leave, however the nursery owners each week sent me a basket of fruit and nuts and they paid me in full for the eight weeks I was off. Even when I went back, I wasn’t quite right, my confidence was shot and I shouldn’t have been driving the tractor or forklift so soon. Anyway, the old liver is an organ that repairs, and the final scan showed that the scarring had gone completely.

Where did the amoeba come from? Undoubtedly dodgy water. No, I didn’t drink dirty water, I was always very careful about water. We boiled all our drinking water and if we had salad, we washed everything in boiled water. I never ate salad anywhere else unless I knew for sure how it was washed. I always drank sodas or hot tea out in the villages. Most likely the amoeba was in a droplet of water on a dish, a plate or a cup that had been washed in tap water that hadn’t been boiled. As for fruit, I followed the rule, if you can’t wash it or peel it, don’t eat it.

Small Steps

Studying at The Straven Road Academy for Young Gentlemen, I did alright in my history exams. No, that’s not the real name of the institution, it was just a bit of student humour. In the main, I found history an interesting subject, but I have to admit, I was bored witless by the British Reform Acts. We had to know them because our nation started as a British colony, our roots were British, and so we were taught more of British history than indigenous history. The various Reform Acts were about the progressive changes in legislation regarding British electoral matters. As students we had no understanding of electoral systems, so who had the right to vote didn’t occur to me as important, so I got through by learning it all the Acts by rote without understanding them.

Emancipation is topical this year because it’s one hundred and twenty five years since this little country of ours became the first in the world where women had won the right to vote. Ahem, this compares to the women of Britain who won their right a quarter of a century later in 1918, and with USA trailing along behind by a further two years! Note that I chose the words, ‘Women won the right to vote.’ Rather than, ‘Were granted the right to vote.’ That’s because women did have a real fight on their hands for the privilege and you win or lose fights, don’t you?

Although she was never mentioned in our school lectures, Kate Sheppard was a leader in the New Zealand’s suffrage movement, and these days I wonder how she would feel about the number of women who are too disinterested to exercise their right to vote?  Back then, a key reason Kate and the Suffragettes fought the fight, was to elect respectable men into parliament who would be sympathetic to the temperance cause. Nevertheless for women to wrestle any power away from the circle and arrows was no easy feat! Parliaments along with religions, were the keystones to society and had always wanted power to remain in the circle and arrow’s domain, which kept fifty percent of the population unempowered.

When Germaine Greer burnt her bra agitating for a fairer deal to allow women to determine their own values, I recall many of my peers reacting by saying, ‘Ok, if women want to be our equal, when they get a puncture in their car, they can change the bloody wheel themselves!’ See, the circle and arrows didn’t want to give an inch. In my hopeful world, boys and girls as they grow up they have life experiences that can be vastly different. So in general, girls don’t get to experience nor are they interested in any aspects of changing wheels. That’s not to say there aren’t women who are perfectly comfortable changing a wheel! It would be good to see fairness and respect going both ways.

Anyway, here’s a little story about how, in the smallest of ways, culture presents one of the challenges in unravelling the status quo.

Mbise was a polite and traditional young African man who worked for me as a night guard and nursery worker. Over the years we had many conversations. Deep conversations. I found that he was staunch in his belief that women had their place in life and men had theirs. For instance, he asserted that women always cultivate the fields – he meant hand cultivation. He was right. It was usual, but I saw many men also cultivating the fields. He had a reason for that: the men didn’t have a woman in their life at that time. Another claim was that only men washed vehicles. True enough I never saw women washing or cleaning any vehicle. Next he said that it was a women’s role to milk cows, and while I didn’t see any men milking cows, I’m sure they did, but Mbise would have had his reasons for that too.

We bought a bike for Mbise and during our conversations he was adamant that women didn’t ride bikes - they had no balance, and wore long flappy clothing! Well that’s partly true around our area, I never saw any women or girls riding bikes but in other parts of the country, there were plenty of women riding them. I spent time in Shirati, and women were riding bikes there. Well-balanced while floppily clad.

We had been keeping a weather-eye on a young family, the eldest was sixteen year old Upendo. Young Upendo had it fairly tough after the loss of their mother, she was responsible for her younger siblings as well as trying to keep up with her own studies. A couple of things occurred to me. Mbise kept his bike in our shed for safe keeping during the day while he fulfilled his duties at the secondary school, and we had a spacious yard. The opportunity was there, so why not teach Upendo to ride the bike? I’ve taught many a kid, and it might even give her a smile.

The lessons went well, raising a few laughs along the way, and by the end of the third, she was riding like a semi-expert! But we were clearly visible from the road and passers-by were watching! As in any small village, something new is something to gossip about! Word soon got back to Mbise that the girl was successfully riding his bicycle. He said nothing, showed no sign that he wasn’t happy about it, but the fourth day when Upendo came to practice, the bicycle seat had gone! He never left the bike intact again!

For one girl, the candle of empowerment glowed for a moment but was swiftly snuffed out!  

Rich Foolery

Rich Foolery

Shhh! You’re not allowed to whisper a peep of it to anyone, even the government doesn’t know about it! But funny how people will gossip. D’you want to know? Can you keep a secret? Nah, I don’t think you can… Oh alright then, I’ll tell you, but be sure to keep it to yourself. Promise? Wait until that person walking behind you moves away… Ok, now listen, I will say this only once. There are super-rich Americans who have sent purpose-built bunkers to New Zealand and have had them installed. They want to be sure of their survival in the event of a nuclear Armageddon. They must know something, the rich usually do.

It’s happening so secretly that even local councils haven’t a clue, or maybe they’re taking back-handers? Oh, not bribes, our officials wouldn’t dream of it! Nobody in our ports has seen anything arrive that could possibly be construed as a bunker, and stevedores are talkative people. Perhaps those massive US Globemasters could buzz over our national parks and drop them in secret spots by parachute. They’d have to drop excavators too because the bunkers would need to be buried very deeply. Maybe they’d have to use special drills, because all the disturbed earth would surely alert any nosey-parkers. It’s rocky in national parks so it won’t be easy digging! Hang on, could those blurred bits on Google Earth be hiding something? Just the same, you’d think the secret would be well and truly out when the manufacturer of the bunkers told news reporters that they’ve sent thirty five of them out here already! Thirty five!

Logistics must be tricky though. There would have to be a team of workers to do the burying and setting up of the bunkers. Now there’s the first conundrum! The workers would have to be experts and very competent. But what would the rich bugger do with them after the bunker’s been installed? Come Armageddon, or Doomsday, the workers, or at least one of them could easily spill the beans or even worse, try to usurp the rich bugger! The obvious answer is of course to shoot the lot of them once they’ve done the job. But no, that won’t work. What’s then to be done with the hitman or men? Hitmen are dangerous buggers! Cyanide? No, come to think, the ultimate would have to be robots, all the work could be done by robots! But then, how do they get rid of the people who design and programme the robots? Oh there’ll be a way right enough, a secret way, the rich can do anything! Money talks!

Provisioning and fuelling the bunker is also a tricky business. You have to know how long it takes for nuclear fallout to dissipate. Maybe a year, or two, or as many as five. And then, how many people are there be preserved? Our rich bugger will want to take his immediate family of course, and we have to think of inbreeding, so if the rich bugger wants to start a brand new population, he’d have to take a genepool along. He’d probably want to have a look at Noah’s diary because he did alright in the repopulation game. Canned and dried food would be ok for three or four years, but they’d need a lot of storage space! And then there’s water. Perhaps the space programme would have all the answers for that. Power, could be a problem too. Kiwiland is nuclear-free, so no matter what, it can’t be nuclear! Solar panels might work, but how long will the sun disappear behind a nuclear dust cloud? The panels could also alert the Mad Max types who might have somehow survived, so that rules out solar panels! If they use it, they’d need an awful lot of diesel and delivery would be difficult because of its bulk! Power just might be the hamstring, but wait, when Armageddon happens, with nobody checking their entry, they’ll like bring nuclear with them anyway! Rich sods have no respect for our culture or the environment.   

So how would it all play out for a rich bugger when the second big bang actually happens? Well, it’s a given the rich are in cahoots of the president, so he’d be able to give a heads up when he’s going to push the button. He’ll have his own action plan well and truly sorted too, because he’s got a few bob salted away too! So, anyway, the rich bugger gathers his family and his concubines, sorry a slip of the tongue, that should be, ‘genepool’, and they board the jet he’s had on standby for as long he’s hatched the plan. He’s going to be the pilot, unless the pilot’s part of the genepool, which is possible. The bomb goes off, or several of them, all orange and mushoomy, but the rich bugger’s jet can outrun the billowing toxic, destructive cloud of nuclear fission! Of course Kiwiland isn’t going to experience the fallout until sometime after the explosions – which is why the ‘safe place’ was chosen in the first place! There’s no airstrip, so the jet soft-crash-lands and is able to unload its cargo of new-humanity’s nucleus in safety and secrecy. They hurry to secure the bunker, fire up the power plant and close themselves in their safe, comfortable cocoon while just about everyone else perishes . Everything works a treat.

The rich bugger knows very well that there’s a strong possibility that radiation-impaired Mad Max type baddies will want to attack and rob everything the bunker has. So that’s why the rich bugger has armed the bunker to the teeth! As time goes on, one of the genepool people rebels at the harem-style life and conditions imposed by the rich bugger. She selects a weapon and blasts everyone! Sadly, mad with loneliness a short time later, she walks out into the fallout and new-humanity fizzles out.

On the other hand, if that doesn’t happen, once well settled in his bunker, the rich bugger relaxes, feeling safe, feet up on the table reading a newspaper. Oops no newspapers, reading a book or the bunker manual. Suddenly the bunker begins to shake! After all they’re in the Shaky Isles! The bunker site, you see, sits upon a fault line, a section of the Ring of Fire! The nuclear explosions caused a massive shift in the Earth’s crust and in the resulting violent plate-movement, the bunker with its cargo of new-humanity slips gracefully beneath the Earth’s crust and into the magma below.

It would be far better for the rich buggers stay where they are and leave their fancy trappings in their own country! Don’t you reckon?  Now remember, don’t tell a soul about this, it’s all top secret! We don’t want to alarm anyone, do we?