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The Shining Chariot takes a trip
 My doctor’s truck continues to be a great
source of adventure. This week, the truck took me on a trip to Mambwe,
the headquarters of this health district and the site of our closest
referral hospital, Kamoto Mission Hospital. I was supposed to go
last week, but during a pre-trip checkup, Patrick, the truck doctor, found a
crack through the front of the chassis. I wondered why it was driving
so rough! Patrick and his men set about banging and welding and patched it
all up in a day.
Before I headed off I needed “petrol”.
The only gas station in town was out of fuel because of a national fuel
shortage, but some guys there said they could get me some and ran off up the
road. They came back carrying 3 jerry cans full of diesel fuel and
proceeded to fill up the tank. They didn’t even charge me more than
the usual $6/gallon (We in the States have nothing to complain about!)
So off I went newly welded chassis and all
towards Kamoto on the “tarmac” road that extends the 15 miles or so from the
park gate to the airport.  Along the road I passed barefoot schoolchildren in their
blue uniforms carrying book bags and munching on green mangos they’d picked
from the trees along the way. School here is free through the seventh
grade, but parents must pay for uniforms and supplies. Most people get
around on those tall old-fashioned English cruiser bikes because cars and
petrol are unaffordable. People were carrying wives, friends, babies,
wicker baskets of vegetables, two by six-foot boards, ten-foot lengths of
tin, chickens, sacks of meal, almost anything you can imagine, on their
bikes. I saw little kids too small to fit over the top tube riding
standing on the pedals with their leg through the middle part of the bike.  Women
walked along the road carrying babies strapped to their backs. To accomplish
this baby strapping, the Mom bends at the waist, tosses the baby on her
back, wraps a length of cotton cloth around the baby’s back and under its
bottom, and stands up…instant baby backpack and for a fraction of the cost
of the ones at REI. With their babies on their back, the
women can then carry a load on their heads. I've seen them carry
everything from twenty-liter buckets of water to bundles of six-foot logs
for firewood. All of this people dodging was fascinating but meant the
driving was a bit slow going.
After turning off the tarmac, I reached
the “real” road, which is 40 miles of excitement alternating between roller
coaster, steer around those potholes if you dare pardner, redneck offroaders
dream and absolute bone rattling washboards from hell. Sometimes the
washboards would get a bit smaller, and I’d summon the nerve to speed up or
look around at the thatch roofed villages and miombo wood forest then BAM a
big pothole would show up very unexpectedly bringing me back to the task at
hand. I instantly felt a whole new appreciation for what it means to
send very ill or injured patients over that very same road to the hospital.
One big hill rises just before Mambwe.
Coming down the hill suddenly there was a loud bang, and the truck started
driving even more oddly. I learned that one nice perk of giving rides to the
local people (the head of the school board, two teenagers going back to
school, a little girl with a broken leg and her mother) is that I had my own
work crew built in. Once I found the jack, Mr. Zulu and the boys insisted on
changing the blown out tire. Twenty minutes later we were bumping
along the potholes again.
 Dr. Tshibumbu, the doctor at Kamoto who is a refugee from
the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was surprisingly young but
world-weary. He is the only doctor at the mission-sponsored hospital
of sixty-two beds that includes pediatrics, adult medicine, OB/GYN and
surgery. He often has administrative duties that take him away from the
hospital for days at a time leaving only clinical officers (like our PAs but
often less well trained) in charge. I was heartened to see the little
burned girl who I had sent there the week before being well cared for and
improving. Kamoto Hospital has an x-ray machine, a small lab, and a donated
ultrasound machine that looks wonderful but broke down shortly after its
arrival from Germany. Unfortunately no one in Kamoto knows how to fix
it. Overall though, I was very impressed with the place, and I was
encouraged by Dr. Tshibumbu’s assurance that HIV testing kits and
anti-retroviral drugs would be available in Mfuwe within the next six months
which will be absolutely wonderful.
Taking patients back from Kamoto to Mfuwe
is expected, so when I came out, an eager crowd had gathered around the
truck. In the end, I had 5 adults and one child in the back, 3 adults
and one child in the back seat, and the clinic director and myself in the
front. Obviously safety is a very secondary consideration when
transportation is such a precious resource. So we all bumped and banged
along back to Mfuwe through a lovely shower that washed the monkey paw
prints off the windshield but didn’t get the folks in the back too wet.
 Safely back in Mfuwe, the truck’s good deeds
were not done. On the drive in to Flatdogs three of our night watchmen
were stopped on their bikes anxiously eyeing a herd of elephants just ahead.
Elephants especially hate bicycles. I could only fit one bike in the
back of the truck, so the chariot became a biker protection vehicle. I
drove very slowly as they rode on the side away from the elephants while I
kept an eye on the big gray beasts. Not your every day mundane
commute!
 Finally home, the truck was happily parked in the shade of
a sausage tree, and I headed for a swim to escape the 106!!!! degree heat of
the day. Fortunately, the hippo had chosen the owner’s private pool to use
the night before instead of the Flatdogs pool. Hippos unfortunately
don’t just go for a swim; they do other things that hippos do -- like poo
(not a word known to Word’s spellchecker, I’ll have you know) in the pool.
Even chlorine is not strong enough to neutralize hippo poo apparently, so
the pool had to be drained and scrubbed. I blissfully ended my day
washing away the dust in the hippo-free pool as the sun set over the banks
of the Luangwa. Just another day in Africa!
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