Health in our part of Africa

This Halloween the world’s population reached 7,000,000,000. Our town has definitely contributed its fair share of babies, all you need to do is look towards the women’s section at church to get a visual on population growth here, every female of reproductive age has a baby strapped to her back or breastfeeding, and several more running around the kids section. Things may be changing though, as many of our students claim to want families of only 2 or 3 kids. We’ve taken our youth groups to the health center several times to learn about family planning and all the free contraceptives available that no one seems to be using. This extreme fertility made sense in a world where half your children died before the age of five, but is unsustainable in a town with even limited access to modern life saving vaccines and health care, like ours. So what is health like here for all these new people entering such a poor part of the world? We still have plenty of people dying from totally preventable causes, like dehydration for infants with diarrhea, meningitis due to the lack of diagnosis in the case of two of our students, childbirth for many women with complicated deliveries, and any sort of accident or emergency since we have no rapid response team and our ambulance is chronically out of fuel. Do we have starving skeleton people dying on the streets? No, but we do have plenty of toddlers with distended bellies, brittle orange hair, and bowed legs, signs of different nutritional deficiencies. We see goiters, something iodized salt totally eliminated from the devolved world. Everyone has parasites, including us, but we won’t talk about it since our stories tend to gross people out. It is very rare to see an obese person. Only the richest people here have access to excess calories, so getting called fat is a big compliment that people use generously, even with the not so fat, much to the dismay of many an American volunteer trying to watch his or her waistline. This includes Janet, whose extra few pounds get regularly “complimented.” HIV and AIDS continue to plague our community, with infection rates above 20%. Everyone knows people who have died as part of this epidemic; even we have lost several people close to us during our two years here. Recently a New York Times article highlighted some success our town has had in distributing the life saving anti-retroviral therapies with the help of Doctors Without Borders (Click Here to read the complete article). We were quite surprised that our random African town was featured in one of the world’s most famous newspapers, but people here, most of whom have never seen a newspaper, didn’t seem to appreciate the significance. Of course other diseases, such as malaria, cholera, and tuberculosis also kill lots of people, even though they are all very avoidable with the use of mosquito nets, proper hand cleaning and hygiene, or basic medical treatments. Life expectancy is low, and anyone over 50 is considered really old here, as some of our family visitors have been told! Despite all the scary health issues linked to our tropical environment and general poverty, we’ve remained very healthy. Once we get back to the America we’ll have obesity, cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and all the other developed world diseases to worry about.