During the clinic meeting, a nurse had an announcement to make.
“There’s a python in my house.”
It had been there for weeks, apparently, seen occasionally by her family members before it disappeared again. She hypothesized that it was living in the walls, and it was making her sick with worry.
Everyone’s reaction was telling. The newest team members could not contain their excitement. The British medical trainees, who had spent nearly a year at the hospital, looked mildly interested but mostly unfazed. And the veteran doctors began to laugh.
“Pythons are the least bothersome,” a doctor said. There were much, much worse things to have in your house: Mozambique spitting cobras and black mambas, for a start. He told us of how once, late at night, he got a call from a home where several nurses lived. They had a cobra in the drainpipes, and were absolutely terrified. No one wanted to approach, for fear of getting the venom in their eyes—this sort of snake was famous for its accuracy. The doctor and another man put on goggles, poured boiling water down the drainpipes, and stoned the snake to death as it emerged.
Another time, on a community visit to a nearby town, a schoolteacher told him a story of a boy dying from a snakebite within four hours. The only snake around capable of killing that quickly is a black mamba, but all the guidebooks say that black mambas do not live anywhere near this area of KwaZulu Natal. He told the teacher she must have made a mistake.
“You’re wrong,” the schoolteacher insisted. “There are black mambas here.”
The next day, when the doctor stepped outside, he nearly stumbled over a crate at his front door. When he opened it up, there lay a dead black mamba at his feet.
I asked him after the meeting if he was ever frightened in any of these scenarios.
“I’m not a fan of snakes, but that’s the way things go,” he replied.
That’s the way things go: it’s a fitting motto for Tugela Ferry. When you’re faced with limited resources, extreme health burdens, and a pressure cooker of poverty and crime, your surroundings can get a little crazy. I’ve found that the only response is to brush things off and keep going.
After being here over a month and experiencing some of my own unbelievable stories, I’m discovering that everything is “no big deal.” Taking cold showers in the dark when your power is shut off for days? No big deal. Watching a goat wander through intensive care, in between bleeding patients waiting for a doctor? No big deal. That crazy man in the wards who is convinced he needs to kill said goat? No big deal. Seeing a snake, mistaking it for a cobra, asking two military men to help kill it only to have them pull out assault rifles and miss from close range? It happened, and it was hilariously no big deal. A gardener stepped on the snake’s head before informing the men it was harmless.
I never thought I’d live in a place crazy enough to make me laugh at a python in some poor woman’s house. But here I am, and that’s the way things go.
YSPH 2015 Summer Internships 