Category: Village Life

What Happens If You Need To Go To Hospital?

2/8/2014

We are very fortunate in New Zealand. If we get really sick and need to go to hospital, we can usually drive for a very short time and one will be there for us. If we need to, we can even call an ambulance! We do not need to pay anything to be treated in our hospitals and the hospitals in New Zealand have plenty of excellent doctors and nurses to look after us. We also have lots of different medicines and machines the doctors can use to help us get the right treatment.

If you need to go to the hospital in the Congo, things are a lot more difficult. For starters there are not very many hospitals around so you may need to travel a very long way to find one. The government hospitals are not very good, so the best thing to do is to find one that is run by a church group. It is not so easy to travel on the roads here because most people do not have a car or even a motorbike. If people have anything at all to travel on, it will most likely be a bicycle.

There are no bikes for children in the Congo.
Everyone must learn to ride on large adult bikes!

If you manage to find a hospital, it will not be a big one with lots of doctors and nurses like we have in New Zealand. Hospitals in the Congo usually only have 2 or maybe three doctors, and only about the same number of nurses. These few people can be looking after a hundred people at the same time, so they are very busy.

In most cases, people who are brought to the hospital are looked after and fed by their family. Their family will camp out near the hospital or sometimes sleep on the floor in a large room with other families in the hospital. There they cook food on charcoal and go visit their sick family members whenever they can.

The families of patients sleep and cook at the hospital

If the doctors need to operate they do not have enough medicines to make you go to sleep during the operation. You do not feel any pain though, because they give you an injection that takes the pain away. The doctors here in the church hospitals do a very good job, even though they do not have good equipment like X-Ray machines or ultrasounds.

Operating rooms are very simple and use solar lights

Rooms in the hospital are very dark and not very comfortable compared to our hospital rooms in New Zealand. The beds are not so good either, but at least patients can have somewhere to sleep that is better than sleeping on the ground.

Some beds are not very nice but it is better than sleeping on the floor!

So if you ever need to go to hospital, be very thankful that you live in a country like New Zealand where there are such good ones!

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Life In A Village

20/6/2014

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From Kabyasha we travelled to a fairly big village called Luanza, founded in the late 1890’s by 23 year old Scottish missionary, Dan Crawford. From 2002 through to 2010 there was a lot of fighting in the area and over half the village was either killed or had to run away. Rebel soldiers finally agreed to leave in 2010 and the village is now returning to normal.

The village people in the countryside live in small homes made out of mud bricks. Many people make the bricks themselves and then build their own house. The roof is made from layers of long grass that are stacked thickly to keep the rain out. Only very wealthy people have corrugated iron on their roof. There is usually only one door for the house and many have no windows, so it is very dark inside. Many houses have only 1-2 rooms but some houses are bigger. Cooking is done outside in case the house catches fire! No houses have electricity, so if they can afford it they buy candles to help them see at night.

Each family is big to start with, though almost half the children who are born in the villages die before they are 5 years old. There are lots of diseases and not always enough food, especially if the parents get sick. Despite this sickness and poverty, the children seem very happy and friendly. Many children only have one pair of clothes each—two at most—and no shoes. They like to play soccer a lot and make soccer balls out of plastic bags rolled up tightly and held together with string. The children also make their own toys out of pieces of wood and branches, old bicycle parts, leaves and pretty much anything else they can scavenge. No children in the villages have toys from a shop unless maybe they are children of the chief.

What do children in the village eat? Most families eat twice a day—lunch time and tea time when the sun goes down. Some poorer families only eat once a day. The main thing people eat here is a floury mash made out of either manioc or maize. This floury mash is called fufu. It is sort of like a paste and is eaten with your fingers. It tastes like our mashed potatoes but without the salt and butter, and it is also quite gritty.

A lady in the manioc field with some manioc on her head

A field of maize

For vegetables most people eat boiled manioc leaves, some beans, or something like cabbage or lettuce. If they have chickens they sometimes eat them, and also eggs from the chickens. They also eat dried fish (which smell very badly!). On very special occasions they will eat goat meat. Most people will only eat meat once or twice a month. For sweet food there are bananas and sugar cane, and some villages have paw-paw.

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Visit To The Village Of Kabyasha

13/6/2014

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I am sitting here in the village of Kabyasha in the shade of an old tree, surrounded by children who have the clothes on their back and little else. This rag tag group of kids range from infants to children of around 12, with the older taking care of the younger. Though they have nothing they play, laugh and fool around as if they don't have a care in the world. Some have little toys they have made out of bamboo, others have a bicycle tyre they push around with a stick, and still others dress up in banana leaves as they act out some story. They seem so full of life compared to our children! Maybe it's just the novelty of the new guys in town. They don't see many white folk out this way so perhaps we are something like the circus coming to town!

Most of the older children are still in High School, just across the compound. They get out of class and make their way over to us in an orderly fashion to say, "Bonjour!" The teaching here is done in French, though many of the adults struggle with French and instead use their own tongue. This might be Swahili, Lingala, Bemba or any one of "who-knows-how-many" local Bantu-based dialects, depending on the location of the village. English speakers in these villages are very rare indeed.

Classrooms a very basic. Almost all have a good roof on them and some windows (no glass), but as far as furniture goes there is none apart from some form of seating for students. Primary school children usually sit on a wooden or clay brick "form"—sometimes there is not even that. Secondary students seem to do better and sit together on a combined chair/desk (usually metal). The classrooms all have a large blackboard at one end for teachers to use. There is no lighting at all, so I'm not sure what they do in the wet season when the clouds are over! And what if you want to go to the loo in the village? If they have one it will be a long drop — a VERY LONG DROP! This one was 4-5m deep and you must be able to squat well as there is no seat (or toilet paper unless you take your own).

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What Happens If You Need To Go To Hospital?

Life In A Village

Visit To The Village Of Kabyasha

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