South African Starfish

      Have you heard the story of the boy and the starfish? Even if you have I’m going to tell it =) One day a little boy was walking along a beach; he came to a section where hundreds of thousands of starfish had washed up on shore. He began the long task of throwing them back into the sea one at a time. A man who was also walking along the beach saw the young boy and called out to him, “What are you doing? You can’t possibly make that much of a difference for all these starfish!” Grabbing a starfish the boy answered, “You may be right, but it will make a difference to this one!” And with that he threw it into the sea.  

      There is such a big world of “starfishes” and I think it is so important to have the perspective of the little boy—if you focus on the enormity of a problem you can’t see past it to make any kind of difference. We met a man (we’ll call him Bhuti) living in a tarp house in Joburg, South Africa. Over a year ago he was mugged and his leg was badly broken, bad enough to need an external fixation device (metal pins screwed into his bone) attached to his leg for a few months. The problem was Bhuti couldn’t afford to return to the hospital to have the device taken off, so he walked around with this thing on for over a year!! Long story short, his leg became infected and he needed proper medical care and antibiotics to investigate/solve the problem. My team leader and fellow nurse Grace, our friend Joseph, and myself took Bhuti to a government hospital an hour away to see if we could get him admitted for some help. To someone who is used to a smoothly run hospital (shout out to the Mayo Clinic) this place was a train wreck. At first they refused to even let him past the front desk because it wasn’t an orthopedic day. They told us to leave him in the waiting room overnight and they could see him the next day. We weren’t keen on leaving him alone for 12+ hours in an uncomfortable hallway and we didn’t want to make too much of a fuss but we did look for some sort of authority figure to help us out. The admission nurse finally examined his leg after seeing us talking to a social worker. After a quick exam she sent us to the family medicine department so a physician could examine it as well. From there on out it was a waiting game- Bhuti was placed in a LONG line to wait for a doc to see him. Imagine three white marshmallows in a cup of black coffee and that is what we looked like in this hospital. The hospital workers looked at us like we were some pompous Americans just using our color to speed up the process for our friend. We waited in this area four or so hours and then were sent to radiology so Bhuti could get an x-ray. After another hour and a half of waiting the x-ray was taken and we were sent to the ER (a hallway filled with shabby beds, people yelling, and overwhelmed nurses and doctors—like I said, a nightmare).  Another 3 hours of waiting and the doctor flat out refused to see Bhuti; we had come this far and he wouldn’t even lift up Bhuti’s pant leg for a quick peek. What’s even more frustrating is it was the very same doctor who had put the device on his leg over a year ago! The only thing we could do besides yelling in frustration was to pray and pray hard. The Lord came through like He always does and Bhuti was admitted to spend the night in a warm hospital to be seen by an orthopedic doctor the next day.

      There are so many in South Africa with their own kind of need and people may say, “you’ll never make a difference in all their lives”, and they may be right but at least we made a difference in one.

    

**Check out Team Africa’s blog as well at: anytimetoast.blogspot.com