This is the third entry to the Global GOLD series written by Jon Maravelias (BS10). Jon is the Office Manager for a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) called NaDeet based in Namibia, Africa. In this post, Jon shares one of his adventures – including emergency medical care! Read below and for more information about Global GOLD scroll to the bottom of this post.
Jon writes:
“Man’s need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him.” – Walter Benjamin
I found myself sitting in a strange room in a strange chair with strange stains. This room was that of a doctor’s, but it looked like the office of mad-man. A short old man had been pacing outside the door for a few minutes and then entered the room clearly in a hurry. He grabbed my hand and put it on the cold, metal table in front of me. He squeezed my thumb and quickly left. Four days ago, I had jammed my thumb while karate punching and kicking our unrecyclable rubbish into an incinerator in the middle of the desert. Some blood had pooled under my nail and then it got infected. I didn’t sleep for three nights because the pressure was agonizing, but since I thought I had just broken my thumb, I kept it in a sling and assumed it would get better on its own. When I showed Andreas, the Technical Director at NaDEET, he agreed to take me to a doctor in Mariental, a small town about three hours out of the Namib Desert.
The doctor comes back in. He says something to me in Afrikaans, then pulls out a drill bit. He begins drilling into my nail, and then he hrabbed this instrument that looked like scissors with hooks on the end of each blade, but the opened out instead of in. Without even warning me; without even saying “Hello” for f-sake he put the hooks under my nail and ripped it off! I winced, but compared to the pain before, this felt good. He then left again and put my other hand on top of the gauze to collect the blood and pus leaking out. He came back with antiseptic, pointed to it, then pointed to my thumb, then help up two fingers and said “a day…”. He showed me out while laughing and patting me on the back. This sick deranged man, I thought.
This twisted event ended up costing N$400, or about $55 U.S.D. Just think, if I had gone to a doctor in the States, this would have cost $200-300 and taken five hours.
On the way back, we had to pick up a man’s wife in Mariental and drop her off in the next village, Maltahohe. Delirious from pain killers and traumatized from freak back-alley doctors who have a good sense of time management, I wasn’t prepared for the neighborhood we were about to enter. Imagine an acre of land, crammed with over 100 houses the size of one-car garages made out of tin. This is called “Shantytown” and it is a consolidated housing project built during the apartheid by South Africa for black Namibians to be “with their own kind.” This was basically the inspiration for District 9, which I find somewhat of a very sad movie now because in all sociological aspects, it’s spot on. Now if only I could have an armored robot that magnetizes bullets and shoots awesome guns and can catch a rocket…mmmm. Anyway, as we drove through, a group of about 25 kids chased our truck, slapping it, climbing on it, spitting on it, and throwing rocks. As you could imagine, my head was swimming in a pool of nonsensical fantasy and I couldn’t interpret whether or not this was hostility or just a strangely good time for the kids. I looked at Andreas and he was simply driving with his arm out the window, laughing like a mad man and saying “Hello” to everyone we passed. We dropped the girl off, which seemed to ease the tension a little bit on the locals’ part, but we didn’t necessarily want to stay for tea and coffee.
We passed an igloo shaped building, about the size of a two-car garage, dawned with multicolored tin siding and barbed wire. Andreas pointed to it and said “There’s the town bar.”
“Can we go?” I asked, seeing the ultimate opportunity for unchallenged anthropological instigation, as well as the experience of buying a drink in a true “dive” bar that never stand a change of being polluted by hipsters.
“No, we’ll get stabbed,” Andreas replied.
“Is it because we’re white?”
“Well, not really. They stab each other as well. It’s more about the fact that you may have money. I suppose as long as you’re buying the drinks for everyone in town, they might not stab you right away.”
Since I had to pay the doctor in cash, I couldn’t test this prediction of his.
What are Global GOLD stories? Raw, adventurous, and timely. They are related to the ways our alumni (and students connected to the Alumni Association) make an impact related to global social, cultural, political and environmental causes and concerns. The views presented are representative of the author only and not the Office for Alumni Relations.
Leave a Reply