#4 - An Alien world

The orientation to an alien world

Yesterday, the plane takes off from Horn Island.  It is small, loud, and somewhat intimate as 5 ladies (vying for a spot on the next ‘Biggest Loser’) cram into the plane.  Window seats are also aisle seats and as the indignity of having to be weighed with my baggage, is processed in m mind, I am thankful that I was perhaps the lightest on the plane.  I am not too sure if that is a blessing or something to fear, as I ponder the physics of getting this bird, with all its inanimate and human cargo, airborne.

None the less, we are up and away with short 10 min flights island hopping, all the way to Saibai. The views are nothing short of spectacular, and I am kicking myself that I had just put my camera away when I see a magnificent pod of 18-19 Dugong basking in some shallow waters. 

We arrive on Saibai Island, some 3-4km from the PNG mainland.  I am picked up by another nurse and the facility manager.  It is a dirt track 300m from the hospital.  The Island resembles Vanuatu, the people, the smell, and the vegetation.

All the homes are up on stilts as when the king tides come 2-3 times/year, the whole island floods.  I met a local bloke known as the fisherman.  He houses a pet salt water crocodile in his back yard.  I immediately think, “today is going to be a day of firsts”.

All the homes have elaborate paintings of a totem animal, crocodiles, fish, dugong, cranes, stingrays.  Each picture represents that this hose houses families from specific clans.  It is a way that relatives can identify one another.  As I learn more about this I will blog it, but for now, these pictures work like numbers on our letterbox.  So and So might live at the Emu house on the Western side of the village…no street names.  The other strange thing is that they bury their dead in the front lawn!!!  Huge tombs and head stones right in the front yard!!

The language is a creole, sort of like the broken aboriginal English, pidgin, and Bislama of Vanuatu all rolled into one.  When hearing it slowly and is actually easy to understand, but seeing it written down, it looks chaotic, and illegible.  The health workers all speak a couple of versions of KKY, Pidgin, and English, and so can translate complex instructions to patients for me.

The PNG nationals that live in southern villages on Papua New Guinea, frequently make their way across the water in tinnies and make shift sailboats to trade and seek health care (a treaty exists).  The photo is sunset tonight, looking west across the water from my accomodation..

At this hour, I have been here two days.  Day 1 allowed me to orientate to the clinic and the island; today allows me to fly solo with some of my own presentations.  It was a day of firsts.  Sitting in my ivory castle desk job in metropolitan Toowoomba, I am so far removed from the third world health concerns in our own territory.

Today I saw, malaria, acute rheumatic fever, Tuberculosis, and leprosy all before lunch.  Ive nursed for 25 years and never seen these conditions for real, as my patients. The day before I arrived, they had a few cases of Cholera aged 7 – 41 years.  We are on watch for new Cholera, Malaria, and TB cases.

My day started with an early  call out to an assault.  Some boys fueled up on a homemade 70% proof Rum, they call wine, and decided to have an argument about a girl.  It required iron bars and star pickets, but the end result was one bloke with a broken wrist, and my guy with a laceration on his back, head and chest.  This was my first sutures for the trip.

At lunch time I was starving, so I bought some fish on sale at the waters edge, filleted them and cooked them up for a feed.  Yummo!!! A bit of chilli, Cous cous, lime and fresh coconut to poach the fillets, and I could have been in some schmik seafood restaurant in Brisbane.

It is now 7:30 on Wednesday.  It has been a massive day, and I am on Call tonight.  So I tend this blog, and trust that reading it is at least half as interesting for you as living it was for me. 

This is truly an alien world.