One Life at a Time by Daniel Baxter

Author:Daniel Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510735774
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2018-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

Some of my extracurricular activities didn’t involve direct patient care—“one life at a time”—and instead dealt with the grand scheme of things in the National Programme, although early on, to be brutally honest, it sometimes wasn’t very grand.

Four months into my stay, Dr. Ndwapi suggested I attend the ARV team meetings at the ministry. “They need to get off their asses and roll out treatment to other clinics. Marina’s on meltdown, we can’t keep up. Maybe you can help.” Since I regarded him as one of my de facto bosses, I gladly complied.

Only a few months after its opening, the HIV clinic at Marina Hospital already had a six-month waiting list of sick patients urgently needing ARV therapy. Without treatment, most of these patients didn’t have six months. Already, the fastest-growing businesses in Botswana were the funeral parlors, some of which peddled costly, uneconomical funeral insurance to the fearful. Before AIDS, funeral services were reserved for weekends, but by the time I arrived, they were held daily, the slowly moving hearses clogging up traffic even more. With Marina besieged by all the patients clamoring there every day—many from distant villages—the only solution was to open up more HIV clinics throughout the country. You would think that a sense of urgency would crackle through the various governmental meetings I attended to work on ARV rollout. After a few ARV team meetings, I soon learned otherwise.

Six months after Ndwapi had asked me to sit in on them, I attended my third ARV team meeting at the Ministry of Health. The ministry’s modest three-story edifice had been built thirty years earlier, in the much sleepier pre-AIDS era, and a new and much larger building was still several years away. By luck, one of the two elevators in the lobby was working. Taped onto the elevator doors was an announcement: “All staff are welcome to attend a prayer and Bible sharing group daily from 7:15–7:30 a.m. in room 3C.”

The small conference room was empty, even though I was ten minutes late. Large cushioned armchairs with heavy wooden frames were crammed around the long conference table, leaving barely enough room for navigation. The mauve venetian blinds on the windows were torn and frayed, the drawing cords long ago ripped out of their moorings. On a wall was the official, albeit ten-year-old, photograph of President Mogae, youthful and smiling. A wall clock, another government staple, had on its face “Now Is the Time to Stop AIDS.” The hands had stopped at 4:15, where it had been the two other times I was there. On another wall were several colorful AIDS posters, common fare for government clinics and hospitals. One showed an attractive, smiling Motswana woman surrounded by beaming friends, who looked on approvingly as she was taking her ARVs. The caption announced: “I take my ARVs 100% of the time, do you?” Also taped onto the walls were several Government of Botswana calendars, all from previous years.

The ARV team was supposed to meet to push the national Treatment Programme out to the country’s clinics.

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