Giant_and_Dwarf-FIN

Giant and Dwarfwe had to learn both professionally and the language, but it’s the terrible hopelessness andemptiness a person feels when they come face to face with people, mothers, children whosimply don’t have anything to eat, who suffer from diseases that could be easily avoided, allbecause they simply didn’t have the money to buy drugs to even lower a fever. You keep goingback and forth to work, brooding about how to change it. You don’t eat or drink because yourstomach is up in your throat...How do you manage it? You have to have a lot of guardian angels above you and greatpeople around you. I was one of the lucky ones. An experienced doctor was working at the clinicwas organizing a new mission to South Sudan. We worked together while all of the organizingwork was going on. We treated 50 to 100 patients a day, fighting often with logistics andsecuring the construction of new buildings, procuring supplies of drinking water, even thoughthere were shortages across the country, and continuously dealt with power cuts. I learnedsome basics of local Swahili, which helped me communicate with the locals and later on aswell. In the end I stayed for 9 months. Today I know for certain that the experience gave meeverything. Both in terms of professional medicine and human aspects. Doctors and teachersrotated at 3 to 6 month intervals. In addition to medical care to the most impoverished, wealso opened bachelor and later master’s level public health studies. It was a detached worksitefor Trnava University which educated Kenyan students from the slums and was one of theonly options for a lot of them as education, just like treatment and medical care, was notcheap in Kenya. More and more projects were added over time: preventing the transmissionof HIV from mother to child, an orphanage for street children, worksites in other suburbs ofNairobi and other cities.Anyone who ever goes to the African continent will surely want to return. It grows close toyour heart. It changes your life. At least that’s how it was for me. Two years later I returned foranother 6 months, and hopefully it was not for the last time.Kenya as a country has a lot of problems. Financial aid frequently ends up in the most corrupthands and that’s why I consider the best aid to be the kind that is delivered directly to themost impoverished because you can immediately see the results. There is a lot that a personsimply cannot influence. That’s why we only try and do what we can.”222