It’s becoming almost impossible to bear. Another poor Sierra Leonean woman with cataracts disease in both eyes. These people, their eye sights are blocked by a blurry white cover which harmlessly rests behind the iris and the pupil of the eye, yet causes extreme limitations in their lives and their families. It’s like a lifeless parasite. It gradually and passively sucks the life out of people as they begin to struggle to live without sight. Blindness. As I prepared and set up the surgery, the helicopter’s roaring engines have inactivated, which brought a sense of peace and silence into the small eye clinic.
I slip on a pair of white, cold vinyl surgery gloves for the thousandth time today. I walk up to the poor woman almost blind by the ghost-white cloud, and I touch her ash-black shoulder. She cannot speak my language, nor can I speak hers, however I know that she understands the non-verbal language of trust. With anticipation, I pick up my phacoemulsification probe with my left hand and turn it on. I wear my surgery mask. I pick up my steel medical chopper with my right hand…
* * *
It’s now dusk. It’s raining hard, but we are in the shelter of the Toyota Hilux. The windscreen wipers slapping at the falling rain and the thick, brown mud splashing up from the endless ditches on the rocky road. As I look up, the dark and grey clouds in the sky frighten me, and gives me an unusual sense of fright and anxiety. I glance at the wide scenery of this beautiful land of Sierra Leone.…(description of landscape etc etc etc).
When I see people suffering from poverty, where they hesitantly endure courageously, it is impossible not to reflect on the nature of pain and evil, which has the power to engulf people and their dignity like a large black hole.
I remember when I saw the strength of the black hole in action, chipping away my emotional barrier that I had set up specially, against its potential power.
* * *
It was the last day of my Humanitarian Mission Duty where I was providing medical assistance to leprosy patients in Ethiopia. The heat grew stronger, as the dry fiery heat warmed the surrounding atmosphere and was trapped like the hot air in a balloon. The heat moved along the hundred cripples necks and faces like a lifeless spirit. Their thirst was burning. The heat made it feel like an unfair power play between the ancient sun and the poor people, as aggression and impatience grew from within them.
My next patient came up to me, and it was as if I had received a blow to the chin from God himself. “Can you help him? Please?” cried the blind, poor and old man, with a croaky yet knife-sharp voice that wounded my heart to the point where I was left with nothing but despair and insecurity. To my astonishment the old man had laboriously pushed a rusty, brown wheelbarrow with a flat tire, carrying his son who was close to death. The crouched black body had deep, red oozing sores all over it, as if a flow of red lava would erupt from them with unleashing power like a sealed ancient volcano where the hot acid would burn the skin until it had reached his innocent, red heart. Green fungus was growing under his arms and on the insides of his legs like a spontaneous disease ready to swallow up this crippled body. He smelled of death. His eyes were dried up from the scorching heat of the sun, and he was undoubtedly sightless. Suddenly, with a surge of force I shouted from the top of my lungs, “Oh God! Why must it be like this?”
* * *
“Ok Lloyd. We’re here”, announced Clara. As I glanced ahead, I saw about one hundred poverty-stricken Sierra Leoneans people in need crouching, standing, and leaning on each other. It was just what I had expected, knowing clearly that I was about to benefit one hundred peoples’ lives and their families.
Everyday I compared the lives of these people who have suffered through the periods of rebellious wars raging in neighbouring Liberia, which spilled over the border into Sierra Leone. I realised that this war was not about politics or tribalism, but about greed. Young men quickly recognising the power of a weapon, as they kill, rape, and plunder their own people at will, even within their own villages.
This is why I have chosen to give my heart to the blind, the poor and the crippled, who often have no chance to flee with their family and friends. A high level of satisfaction is gained from my decision, and that makes me smile.
With a smile, I opened the door of the Hilux, about to accept and take on board another challenge for the day. In the back of the vehicle, wrapped in blue tarpaulin, is a load of medicines for our eye clinic in the refugee camp at Sierra Leone. Yet, despite the physical difficulties Clara and I have faced today, it is even more difficult not to smile.
