“No, this all looks wonderful.” She smiled at them. They were a perfect welcoming committee.
“Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?” one of the sisters asked her.
“No, I’m fine.” She was too tired to be hungry, and too excited to want to waste time on a meal.
She washed her face and hands in the sink in the room after they left, brushed her hair, and went to find Dr. Dennis in the hospital. He was waiting for her in his office, and she could see his cottage from the window.
“It’s simple but it all functions very efficiently. We get donations from organizations all around the world,” he told her. “The nuns and the nurses are wonderful. Is your room all right?”
“It’s perfect.” She smiled at him. “Thank you for inviting me. I didn’t know what to expect.”
“I’ll drive you out to the villages tomorrow and show you around. Would you like a tour of the hospital now?”
“I’d love it.” He looked so proud of the facility, and he seemed more at ease here than he did in his fancy New York office. There was an amazing contrast between the two. It was hard to believe he was comfortable in both, and practiced in two such different environments.
“I live to come out here,” he said to her. “It’s a whole different world, and gives meaning to my life. You can really make a difference here, more so than for most of our patients in New York. When I first came here, the civil war was still on, and the casualties were brutal. That’s how the minefields started.” He took her through the wards then. There were sixteen children in each ward, and two nuns and two nurses to care for them. The wards were designated according to how ill the children were. There was a surgical ward for children who had recently had surgery, with fewer children in it. Their families hovered around their beds, or sat on the floor, or sat on their beds and held them.
“Their families are very much a part of their care. Some come from very far away, others are from nearby villages.” You could see that it was a culture of family as they huddled together.
She observed as she walked through the wards with him that many of the children were missing limbs, and only had stumps. More than half of the land-mine injuries in Angola were children. They collected sticks for firewood in the fields, and the mines exploded. The children all got excited when they saw Dr. Dick, and he stopped to hug several of them and talk to them and their parents in Portuguese or Umbundu. He spoke both, and two other native dialects. It was a whole different experience for Véronique after the military hospital in Belgium, and her recent surgeries in New York. This had a whole other flavor, which combined local traditions and culture with Western medicine.
“I bring in a lot of American medicines they can’t get here. It’s a big help, and we get shipments from Germany and France too, and the United Kingdom. We’re grateful for whatever we can get. We run it on a tight budget. We don’t have a lot of funds, but we make it stretch. Most of the families do their own cooking on the grounds. Although we’re primarily surgical, we give all of them vaccinations they’d never get otherwise.” She could see how much he loved it, and how he thrived on the work he did there, and how much he cared about his patients. All the children waved and called him by name as he walked her through the immaculate hospital.
They went back to his office after the tour, and she had noticed how neat and precise the place was, and the equipment looked surprisingly new and up to date.
“We have a rotation of doctors from the United States, France, and the UK. I stay here longer than the others. Most of them can’t take that much time off from their practices. But Phillip is very good about it. He knows how much I love it here, and letting me do this was one of my conditions of opening the practice with him. If he needs me, and gets too swamped, I can always fly back the way I did in March, but I like to be here as much as possible. I’ll be here now till mid-June. Do you know how long you’re staying?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet. I’d like to be useful while I’m here, as a volunteer in the hospital. It’s the only service I can provide.”
“We can use all the help we can get,” he said warmly. “The nurses and the nuns will let you know how you can help. Sometimes they just need you to sit with a child who’s come out of surgery, if we’re shorthanded. Some of the children get injured by dangerous farm equipment. We have a full house most of the time. The nuns used to run the place themselves with a doctor who came through once a month. We’ve recruited a lot of volunteer medical staff since then. There’s always a doctor on duty here now. We had some Australian docs here last year who were terrific.” The feeling was very international, while respecting the African traditions and how they cared for their sick. The nurses spent a lot of time teaching parents to change dressings, to avoid infection.