Life at Seronga Clinic

I sit perched upon a broken stool as I stare out through the square space that comprises the dispensary window, and watch all the people on the other side. They wait patiently for their medications, drugs that will relieve some of their suffering, that will be their salvation, and that I sit amongst, unable to dispense. I again feel useless in a questionable mission. They chat amongst themselves, speaking of what I am unsure, as somewhere between my ears and my mind the rhyme and reason of this language is lost. I absorb but do not comprehend this musical speaking. They stare back at me, a fish in a fishbowl, and animal in a cage, a creature more exotic (and possibly more dangerous, based on the look in their eyes) than any animal that stalks their village at night.

At the other end of the benches where they sit babies dangle from a scale one by one, their weight measurement noted in their ragged charts by a disinterested nursing assistant. Some are used to dangling from this hook (which disturbingly appears to be the same sort of scale that is used to measure the weight of meat for sale at the butchery…) half naked in what looks like a large grocery bag with holes for their legs, and hang like sacks of potatoes. The younger ones seem surprised by their unexpected defiance of gravity, and startled by the lack of ground under their feet extend all of their limbs like little stars. Their look of complete surprise is priceless.

The nurse arrives, the words to effectively communicate with these patients spilling off his tongue like the rain shower we all so desperately crave. He distributes the small bags of medicines like Halloween candies to the hands of the waiting patients. In the next room bodiless voices in the same mysterious language float in, some urgent, others joking, all bathed in the static of the roger roger radio.

It goes on like this, day in and day out, each day like the one before and yet with an infinite significance to the ever changing cast of characters. Life will go on in the same way in Seronga, and I doubt I will find, despite my desperate searching, the switch to flip to change any of it. I wonder if I would want to, what difference it would make, if I would have the sensitivity to understand if it were for the better or worse.