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02/17/2004: "Kandahar Chronicles #72 - 16/02/2004"

-- Guest Entry from Doctor Hamil --

I am working in Afghanistan for a bit more than 3 month as a medical doctor and to start with a good thing I fell in love with this weird country. It definitely must be a she, when I look at her gorgeous body I feel like drinking it. But unfortunately I don’t have the opportunity very often as we are restricted in our movements to the necessary ones, which means for me to see the hospital, some other NGO
(Non Governmental Organisation) compounds and the way to the airport, not to forget our own nice compound that doesn’t always appears to be that nice especially after staying inside for a couple of weeks.


To work as a doctor here is definitely special. I faced a lot of interesting questions:

- How can you treat female patients if you are not supposed to examine any woman properly?
- And how can you make sure that the IDP’s (Internally Displaced People) in Zhare Dasht have access to a reasonable quality of health care if you are not allowed to go there ?
- And how in the world can you provide proper treatment in an infectious disease ward when the local doctors believe that the more antibiotics you add the better the treatment will be?
- Or what can you say to a community health worker involved in a Tuberculosis program who tells you after 2 hours of explanation how this disease is transmitted that he simply has a different opinion about the transmission?

You definitely have to like the people you treat and those you are working with to find a way to deal with these kind of problems.

If your patients are like the malnourished twins half a year old who came to us in a really severe condition and now are looking so beautiful and even better every couple of days there is no way not to love them. It might sound a bit strange but seeing the patients suffering badly provides me all the energy needed to go on whatever shit happens around me.

Also our national staff made it very easy for me to enjoy working with them. I am impressed how friendly and humble they act to all the different expatriates coming with all their different ideas and personalities to Kandahar. Some of them fought with the Mujahedin over years killing lots of Russians and seeing their friends dying. And now they seem to be very happy to clean up my messy room, to cook for a vegetarian, to do the dishes after one of these weekends where nobody could be bothered with it or to be beaten in a chess game making me feel better in the evening after another of one of these days.
It is good to have warm people with me on this mission.( thanks Dave ) And it is good to have a guitar, writing songs about the joy and frustration over here. Can’t say much about politics, just found it interesting to learn the beautiful Neil Young song “Cortez the Killer “ in Afghanistan, my beloved one or how I wrote in one of the new songs done here: “ You’re the most beautiful bleeding one, the most friendly killing one, the proudest broken one …“

peace
Hamil

Replies: 1 Comment

Thank you for your heartfelt story.

. said @ 02/20/2004 01:24 AM EST