Plight of the Bodas (part 2, up close and personal)
on Random Uganda (Uganda), 06/Apr/2010 10:47, 34 days ago
The boda boda crackdown (see previous post, plight of the bodas) has eased up. Unlicensed, unhelmeted bodas have returned as the majority. Still, even without the police harassment, the life of a boda driver, despite the cachet of riding a motorbike for a living, is a hard one. Fuel prices in Kampala have shot up six or seven hundred shillings a liter in the last few weeks, eating into narrow profit margins. (most of the drivers rent their Indian made Bajaj Boxer 5 bikes for about 40000 shillings a day, making it twenty 2000 shilling trips just to pay the owner of the bike) And one slight misjudgment at one of the many universally disregarded traffic lights can land them on one of the cushionless blood stained gurneys in Mulago’s casualty ward.One of my fellow VSO volunteers has fallen for her boda driver. Michael is an affable young man with a tight leather jacket and a winning smile. It is good to see them together. I’m jealous, among other things, that, after only a few months, she’s conversant in Lugandan, while I’m still stuck in the basic phrases and counting to 9 that I sort of learned my first few days in Uganda.Last Saturday night we had an eviction party. (Dorothy had told us we’d be kicked out last Friday, but, as of this writing, the sheriff has yet to come beating on the door, and alternative housing has yet to fully materialize, so I guess, at the moment, we are squatting) A good number of my fellow volunteers got stranded by a rainstorm at the Wine Garage on theirway to the party (fortunately, they did not suffer overly much), but a small and enthusiastic crowd made it and kept the loud music going for the neighbors until the wee hours.And shortly after getting to bed, my phone rang. Michael had been found in a ditch by one of his fellow boda drivers, unconscious and bleeding from facial wounds. His friend Issac was called and took him to Mulago where they were unable to locate a doctor or a nurse. From Mulago they traveled to a clinic on the other end of town in Kireka where some unusually crude suturing (even by Ugandan standards) was perpetrated on his face.I had to apologize that my alcohol level was probably not within a level you’d want your doctor’s to be. But I put her in contact with the IHK ambulance driver and, a bit later, caught a boda over to meet them at the hospital just as the sun was peeking up over the Kampala hills. Michael reclined on one of the gurneys. His head enlarged to half again its usual size.His left eye was swollen shut. Moses, our night doctor had already seen him and ordered a CT scan and neck x-rays as well as requesting consultations from a plastic surgeon and a neurosurgeon. Fearing the worst, I leaned in and called Michael’s name.Slowly his good eye opened and focused with a hint of recognition.He was going to be okay. But given that I wasn’t his doctor, and I was operating on a sliver of sleep and an incipient hangover, I figured it best that he go through with the CT scan. Which, not surprisingly, meant that he had to get back into the ambulance and go to a hospital with a functional CT scanner. The radiologist’s report from Kampala Hospital pointed out the obvious extracranial soft tissue swelling and some ‘mild cerebral edema,’ a finding that might be concerning in a setting other than Kampala where nearly every CT comes back with a reading of cerebral edema. To my eyes, the brain looked normal, but I have to admit that I’m out of practice reading the CT scan in multiple little 3 inch squares of film, since CT scans on film (now we read them on a monitor) disappeared from my practice 15 years ago…So, given that Michael’s injuries were proving mostly cosmetic, the plastic surgeon swooped in for the kill. He wanted to take Michael to the operating theatre to reopen his facial wound and close it nicely. Estimated cost: another million shillings ($500, on top of the million and a half for the hospitalization andambulance and CT). A bargain by American standards, but when you consider that VSO only gives us 500,000 shillings a month as a living allowance (and some volunteers aren’t fortunate enough to have a loving wife back home to support them in their folly, and so actually have to live within their allowance), it seems a daunting amount. And, of course, completely and utterly out of the question for a boda driver or your average Ugandan.So stop and think about it for a couple of minutes. What would you do? Your loved one has a facial wound. There’s going to be a scar. The plastic surgeon seems very concerned (concerned enough to charge for 3, count’em 3, consultations for a 1 inch wound) and wants to make the wound look better. But it’s going to cost you another 2 months salary, on top of the 3 months you already owe. Think about it. Then pray that you never ever have to make this call.We tried to get Michael onto the Hope Ward (IHK’s charity ward), but it was getting late in the day and Jemimah, the ward’s gatekeeper doesn’t like to work with this particular plastic surgeon due to his excessive billing issues.At the end of the day, she took him home with the Frankensteinian sutures still in place.I saw them on Wednesday. Michael was on his feet and looked one hundred percent better. His left eye was open and his smile was back. I wish I knew exactly how the scar is going to look a year from now. I can only hope it won’t be too bad.