i Just want to share this personal story by Doctor
I left Teso district for Mount Elgon at the height of tribal cleansing there. I like watching TV and any good action movie is always fine with me. So, every time I turned on my TV set, as I reposed in the lounge, I always saw harrowing footage from Mount Elgon highlighting the operations of some psychopathic killers. Although the news reporters did everything to sanitize their video clips, rivers of blood still flowed on every slope of the mountain. The reporters could mention that a number of people had been killed when the sun was still up in the sky and at times that married women had been violated and their men castrated. We saw a massive exodus of those with faint hearts leaving the area. No one had the time to enjoy the harvest. Warlords donning military garb were wielding guns and other crude weapons with a determination to go on with the atrocities. They were claiming to be defending their land that had been gluttonly grabbed. That is the time I was supposed to climb that mountain as a medical worker and risk being killed with no extra pay. In fact my house allowance was slashed by half because Mt Elgon is considered as another area, not even a municipality. I thought of resigning from government and go into private practice but some wise man, Haggai Mayaka prevailed upon me. He buoyed me to go up there and assess the situation first then decide.
It was a sunny Friday afternoon the day I reported to the yellow walled Mt Elgon district hospital. The place looked green and fertile, vegetation growing in wanton profusion. The atmosphere was so pure with plenty of fresh air. There was a daunting skeleton of staff members at the hospital. Apart from the place being understaffed, it lacked an enabling environment. Many of the health workers were on the run following threats from the insurgents or due to sheer fear. As later I would learn, the hospital was busiest on market days, Mondays and Thursdays, characteristic of rural communities.
After presenting my letter of deployment, I requested for two weeks to move house. Tactfully I was allowing time for dust to settle at the mountain. At the time the Army under disguise of ‘okoa maisha’ was hot on the heels of the blood-thirsty warlords. It scoured the forest and arrested many who were turned into jailbirds, some took the bullet and yet others sought for refugee in the neighboring Uganda. After the group was successfully dismantled and the guns fell silent, I went back to Mt. Elgon hospital and assumed my duties.
Together with other health care providers, I worked under very difficult conditions. There were limited resources and staff to work with. There was no theater or a functional laboratory. The facility was just a forwarding center because we were not equipped to handle complicated cases there. There were no staff houses in the hospital or nice rental ones in Kapsokwony. As I executed my national duty in Mt Elgon, I used to commute to Kapsokwony from Kimilili abode. I lived in Okatch Nyaholo’s house number one next to the gate and not far from a morgue. The road that led to this place used to be terrible. Whenever we had heavy rains in Kimilili, I used to leave my car at a petrol station and wade through the mud to my house.
Even in Kimilili there was no absolute security especially at night. I used to hear people talking in the dead of the night as they passed through the road near my house. My house was once broken into while I was away and my fridge emptied. My colleague had been robbed thrice while still staying in the neighborhood in the same house. It compelled me to buy an axe with an aim of forcibly driving it into the head of any intruder. Luckily, by the time I was living the area on a new assignment, I had not used the axe.
Transport, too, was a big challenge working in Mt. Elgon. Because Mt. Elgon had seen many years of insufficient government support, it was far away from civilization. Waking up every morning and going to work in Mt Elgon wasn’t enjoyable. The roads there were primitive with rugged slippery slopes. During the dry season, the CDF vehicle could pass you by like a bullet leaving you in a cloud of dust. Motivated by the patients we served sometimes we arrived at work covered in a layer of dust from the dusty roads. I was brought up knowing that rain heralds hope to everyone. But in Mt. Elgon, when it rained, it complicated things for us all. No vehicle went up the mountain forcing us to trek for 9 Km to and from work. Big tracks ferrying logs from Mt Elgon forest sometimes used to slide and straddle the road, completely blocking it. Since we didn’t have high quality facilities and specialists, we used to refer our patients to other hospitals where they could access the services they needed. That too was a nightmare. If the Nissan Ambulance took a patient to Webuye district hospital or Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital and it happened that the heavens opened before it was nowhere near the foot of the mountain, then the driver had to look for parking space in the neighboring Kimilili. If you had another patient whose condition had exceeded the institution’s capacity, then you could only pray for him for God to intervene because you wouldn’t want to venture into the awkward road. Even there were no pathologists to do forensic autopsy when there was a contested death. People who were not qualified enough did the postmortems. They could point at loops of intestines dilated with gas and say, “This is what killed your loved one.” After viewing the decomposing intestines, the bereaved would walk away wondering why the world keeps surprising them.
To be continued,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
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