by Judy Steel
I examined an old blind woman with very high blood pressure. She had no idea of her age but I figured she was about as old as my mother, and when I finished speaking to her I felt so drawn that I hugged her. Somehow, despite great difficulty, she got off the bed and began dancing; slowly at first and then gently and smoothly, she praised and worshipped God. I held her close and did the same and soon we were both dancing. She was crying and I was not far off. I will remember her until the day I die.
There were several other older women suffering malnutrition. A staple of the Ugandan diet is matoke, which is a meal based on plantains, a green fruit that grows in bunches like dessert bananas. The skin is peeled and then the plantain is steamed in a cooking pot lined with leaves from the plant over a charcoal stove. It is then mashed and served with ground peanut sauce poured over it. Matoke is almost pure carbohydrate and is lovely. The other staple food is posho, which is corn meal and cheaper than matoke.
As I was leaving, I noticed a young girl and asked Recheal to ask her how old she was and if she was pregnant – she explained she was fifteen and her baby was due next week. She had been raped by someone in authority on the council – an ‘old man’ – so there had apparently been no point in calling the police. She was so small and thin that her baby would have only weighed a kilogram. This tiny girl should still have been at school, innocent and with a future. I arranged for her to see Edward, who later referred her to Mulago. I knew the baby would not survive but I prayed she would.
That week I visited Mulago Hospital to see several people I had referred there and was reminded of how sparse the facilities and care was. Stephen was suffering cancer and needed treatment; he had been in hospital for three weeks waiting for radiotherapy with his mother caring for him and sleeping on a mat on the floor under his bed. I paid someone to push him in a wheelchair to radiotherapy when it started because his mother couldn’t. I then found Moses, the little boy who had been found in the pit latrine. He was doing well but no-one had come forward to foster or adopt him, so he stayed in limbo in hospital. At least he had some new clothes to wear courtesy of Australian donors, plus a long cuddle from mzungu Judy.
The lack of pharmaceuticals was chronic in every health facility I visited. There were some drugs available over the counter in Kampala but they were out of the price range of most of those suffering. I seemed to be visiting a chemist almost daily to buy something for someone. The clinics and hospitals had some medicine but I was worried about how these were stored and monitored. Even the most basic drugs we take for granted in Australia are hard to come by in Uganda, and I felt that any impact I was to have in the future must involve bringing medicines in from Australia.
I made an appointment with the Uganda Drug Authority and quickly discovered that bringing pharmaceuticals into this country was not easy. The government had strict guidelines, in part a reaction to other countries dumping their out-of-date medications here which then had to be destroyed. Given the strict controls, in hindsight it would appear to be quite a miracle that I sailed through the airport with my first bundle of medication donated by OPAL. I suggested to the authorities that such heavy restrictions could make it too difficult for me to bring any useful medicines back in the future. The Ugandan Drug Authority told me it would require law changes if I was to import drugs from Australia so I decided instead to purchase what I could in Uganda. Eventually I found where to buy medications in Uganda although they were often poor quality.
That day I returned home to Frank and Michele’s to a familiar pattern. Halfway through a shower the water stopped running and then the power went off. As I ventured into the kitchen wearing a dressing gown, I was surprised by a complete stranger who walked in looking for Frank. We then heard the news that three people living nearby had died of AIDS in the past twenty-four hours, and five more in the village of Nakulabye. Life in Uganda just seemed so cheap and it upset me. It wasn’t that I wanted to hear that it would all be alright because it knew that it wouldn’t: it was awful and hopeless and I wondered if I was making any difference at all.
Chapter Seven
AS MY ROUND OF patients grew, I effectively developed a pastoral routine of stopping off at the clinic or the Mulago Hospital to check on patients I had referred there. I wanted to make sure they had been seen by medical staff, had food to eat and if they wanted me to pray with them I did – I had quickly learned that in Uganda prayer is a major part of life, with prayers held before and after meetings and certainly before every meal no matter how basic.
Afterwards I headed into the slums. Although it was physically tiring and my knee ached, I often found myself feeling humbled by the humanity. One teenage boy was described to me as having been ‘down with the fever’ for eight or so years. He was beautiful but he didn’t speak and had the appearance of cerebral palsy. Cared for in a dark room, mostly by his grandmother, he had sores on both his hips and was lying on the floor with an old shirt as bedding. I dressed his wounds and spent an hour showing his grandmother how to clean his teeth and exercise his fingers, and to take him outside to hear the birds, feel the breeze on his face and be stimulated by his surroundings.
Nearby lived a beautiful twenty-five-year old named Rita. She was tall and thin with tight black curly hair common to Ugandans. She had high cheek bones and beautiful dark eyes that lit up even though she was terminally ill with AIDS. She had been admitted to Mulago but received almost no treatment and so was home again. She had lost an enormous amount of weight in one week and said she knew she was dying, so I began advising her on palliative care. She had a four-year-old daughter Bridget, a gorgeous little girl who was bright and bubbly. I feared she might have AIDS like her mother.
Rita’s sister Robina was taking good care of her and I was told that all other members of their family were either dead from AIDS or far away. I found out later that there was another sister Margaret who lived in a village away from Kampala. Robina had children although I never met them. She did not look anything like her sister. Her skin was lighter in colour which suggested they had different fathers.
As we walked back from Rita’s house I heard a child screaming. A three-year-old girl had all but severed her little toe, but the suturing was beyond me because tendons were involved. I wrapped her foot up and brought the girl to the clinic, wrote a referral and gave her carer, a girl who looked about thirteen, money to get to Mulago Hospital. The mother of the child was herself in hospital. I wondered how well she would be treated, because if the suturing wasn’t done properly she would probably lose the toe.
I had been away from home for nearly three months. As the end of my time in Uganda approached, I thought more and more of home. I missed Allan beyond description and hung out for emails, letters or occasional calls from him. The only chance I had to speak to my children was the twenty-four hours that I had spent at the Sheraton Hotel. Sending letters was difficult and frustrating. There is no mail delivery in Uganda and all mail has to be accessed at the post office. There are thousands of post office boxes and it can take many weeks for a letter to get through and be sorted. There were no internet cafés, so if I wanted to send an email I had to write it out in longhand and then pay an office girl to type it up and send it. Not the best way to tell your family that you miss them. One day I walked a couple of kilometres from the clinic into town to the African Craft Village to buy something special for Allan. I found a beautiful piece, an elephant and her baby carved out of a single piece of ebony. It was quite heavy, so I bought a special bag so I could carry it on the flight home as hand luggage.
Michele agreed to video a day in my life in Kampala, including the clinic and Nakulabye, so those at home could see what it was like. We spent the morning visiting patients and the afternoon in the clinic. Edward was consulting from an old armchair while I dispensed medication, weighed babies and did anything else that came up. When I felt myself starting to run out of energy, Michele found me a can of lemon squash to get a quick shot of sugar and stay upright. We finally ate
lunch at 3.30 pm and then Edward and I visited more patients on a walking clinic. Rita, who I had met a few days before, had a severe chest infection, enlarged spleen, no appetite, nausea, diarrhoea, headache and dizziness. Edward told me she didn’t have to die yet and organised some medication she could afford.
During my final days we returned to the Wall of Fire Church to see the new room built for the two jajas (the Luganda word for older women). I gave Beth a new dress and she looked gorgeous in it. While we were there, we treated heaps of children and their mums for worms. Among them was a small boy known as Smiley, who had the most dreadful rotting feet from chiggers, a harvest mite that attaches to the feet, lays larvae and often brings disease with it. Pastor Matthew from the church had rescued him from a rubbish tip.
In my final week Frank and Michele decided we should be tourists for a day so we all piled in the Pajero and drove out of Kampala. We took Beth and Gerard out of school which made them very excited. They had ice-cream for the first time on our visit to Jinja on the shores of Lake Victoria, almost one hundred kilometres north-east of Kampala. Best known as being the source of the Nile, it was a beautiful spot. I took a photo for Allan of a statue of Gandhi in a small memorial garden where some of his ashes were scattered; we had visited Gandhi’s house in Mumbai and his life impressed us greatly. The Bujagali Falls near Jinja were more like large rapids, but I spotted a little cottage near the water and again thought of Allan. We had often spoken about renovating a little cottage overlooking the water and I imagined us there. On the drive home, Beth slept with her head in my lap.
It was very difficult saying goodbye to Rita because I knew it would be the last time I would see her, and I felt quite emotional farewelling Tewo too. We had become good friends and I had given her a start in becoming financially independent by helping her start her small business selling second-hand clothes. She was slowly recovering from her grief over William’s death and the business was going well. I gave Jeffrey’s wife, Jennifer, money to pay the school fees for her daughter; she was now yet another widow of the AIDS epidemic and there was so little assistance for these women. A fledgling support group for widows had started meeting in Najjanankumbi to socialise and visit the elderly abandoned women in the village, taking them small gifts such as pieces of soap. They included me in their discussions about how best to take care of these people and I knew I wanted to support them somehow in the future.
Although I had many questions in my head about any commitment to working in Uganda, my time ended with a spiritual exclamation mark. I had brought about 200 t-shirts with me from Australia, donated by friends and members of my church. After a discussion with Alice at the Florence Nightingale Clinic, we decided to stage a children’s party there and distribute the shirts then along with some bags of jelly beans that my daughter, Fiona, had sent. I didn’t quite anticipate what excitement such a basic event would cause.
Michele and I arrived at the clinic an hour early and people were already waiting. By ten o’clock there were more than 250 people outside, including many whom Alice called ‘very important’. I sent out for more biscuits and popcorn and we made cordial. The t-shirts from home were handed out, cameras snapped, speeches made and I was interviewed, prayed for and wept over. I had to make a speech in response and was finding it very emotional and difficult, and then an extraordinary thing happened. I picked up Fred, the baby who had come into the clinic with pneumonia three months ago. As he fell asleep in my arms, I leant back against the wall of the clinic for support, watching all the excitement going on around me and my memory was triggered. I had been so focused on getting to Uganda, and so busy once I arrived, that I had all but forgotten about being marooned in the outback and the picture in my mind of me holding a baby and being surrounded by children. While there had been many times over the last few months when I had held a baby in my arms, this was the first time I felt that everything was exactly as it should be, that the vision had been fulfilled. It is hard to explain, but I truly felt that God was smiling and his spirit was upon me.
As a farewell gift I had bought some new equipment for the Florence Nightingale Clinic, including a sphygmomanometer (an instrument for measuring blood pressure in the arteries), buckets, a paraffin pressure lantern, umbilical cord clamps, scissors and bowls so that two babies could be delivered safely at once. I had also been showered in gifts and prayers myself, but the best present came on my last day in the clinic when a little boy was born. I was asked to name him so I called him Gillies, after our minister at home.
I was told I had planted the seeds here and that they would grow, but I also knew a good gardener returns to do the weeding. My mind was spinning with what the next phase of this would be. What could be done from Australia to help the people of Nakulabye?
Chapter Eight
THUNDER CRASHED AND HEAVY rain fell the morning I left Uganda. I was exhausted and emotional, and my suitcase felt like it weighed a tonne. Michele had invited Edward and Rose for supper on my last night and Rose gave me a beautiful woven basket. As we drove to the airport I feared I might miss the flight because the rain had left the main road submerged forcing us to travel down a series of slippery back roads. I flew first to Lusaka in Zambia and then on to my scheduled stopover in Harare, where I soaked in the hotel bath. When I spoke to Allan my eyes filled with tears. I always knew we loved each other totally and with respect, but the depth of this love was a revelation.
Before I left Uganda I had been determined to gather as much information about the community as I could. During meetings with community leaders in Najjanankumbi and Nakulabye I catalogued population, employment, common and prevalent diseases, literacy levels, incidence of malaria and HIV/AIDS, and the numbers of babies receiving immunisation. I wasn’t sure what to do with all this information or how it was possible for me to make any difference, but as Allan often said, ‘Do your best and let God do the rest.’
As I killed time in the airport lounge in Harare a couple of days later, my thoughts turned to my eldest son, David, who flies for Qantas and who I knew was on an overseas flight somewhere. Once on board, I settled in with my book, ready for the long flight to Perth, when David walked up the aisle. After my initial astonishment, he suggested I follow him to the flight deck where I sat behind the captain. The take-off was delayed for a few minutes while antelopes were cleared off the runway. After we were in the air, David sat with me for half an hour at my new seat upstairs in business class; it was such a precious gift after three months away. I found out later that everyone we knew in Australia was in on this wonderful surprise. I slept all the way home after a delicious glass of champagne. Allan was at the airport along with Gillies and Wendy and some other friends. I fell into Allan’s arms. Later I gave him the statue of the elephant and he loved it, gently turning it over in his hands to see how it was crafted. On the drive home he admitted to being lonely while I was away, and so we decided to get a dog. Annie the lovely golden Labrador joined us soon afterwards.
Coming back to Australia was a shock. In Uganda there are no big supermarkets, but back home I would walk into Woolworths or Coles and find so many different products, with dozens of varieties … and ice-cream. On my first visit you rarely found ice-cream in any shops in Uganda, and here in Australia there were so many different varieties. The wealth of Australia almost seemed obscene compared with the poverty of Africa.
This was the first instalment of the price paid for being in Africa: not a financial cost, but an emotional one. Another, of course, was that while I was away, I missed Allan desperately along with our children and grandchildren, my sister, Mum and friends. I was quite sure many people didn’t understand what I was doing or why, but Allan did and his call was to let me go and deal with any consequences at home alone. But probably the greatest price was my complete exhaustion; the emotional drain of coping with injustice, poverty, disease, greed and corruption took some time to overcome. I had several sessions with Gillies to work through my thoughts and emotions. I found h
im a source of both inspiration and common sense. It was refreshing to find someone who didn’t continually tell me how brave I was or what a saint I was.
It was difficult to catch up with our children. Due to their careers they lived a long way from Adelaide, requiring a plane trip or long drive to visit. Fiona was now in the UK so the best we could do was long phone calls. Career opportunities had led her overseas and we accepted that but it didn’t stop us missing her. David was often overseas with Qantas while Peter was often on the move with the army.
I slowly slipped back into my routine of cooking and caravan trips. For the end of the millennium we camped with my cousin Trudy and her husband in the Adelaide Hills. We frequently went on camping trips together. We decorated the trees with banners and balloons, had a gourmet meal and toasted the new century before it got so cold we tucked into bed before midnight arrived.
I stayed in touch with Edward and Michele via email although the connections with Uganda were erratic. Neither of them had their own computer and so relied on friends or internet cafés in the city.
I was welcomed back to church and asked to talk about my experiences. I stood up and spoke for a few moments then, as I finished, suddenly said, ‘And of course I am going back next year.’ I was a bit stunned when this came out of my mouth, because I hadn’t discussed it at all with Allan and had always said there would be only one trip to Africa. I looked across the room at Allan and was surprised to see him smiling back at me. Edward was excited when he heard I was returning. I asked Michele if she could find out about accommodation in the city so I could be closer to the clinic. Her house was an hour’s travel each way. She emailed back suggesting a hostel that was walking distance from the clinic.
The church began fundraising so I could assist the community and clinic at Nakulabye. I wasn’t sure just how but a few ideas started to filter through. For one thing, this time I did not ask for t-shirts but rather some money so that I could employ someone to buy them in the local market, thereby putting money into the community.
