A biopsy in Mozambique

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The Maputo Medical Offices are in an old building from the colonial era on the avenue 24 July. There is a chipped fence, an ancient metal door and crooked stairs under a roof. Everything is worn and clean there. The shine of the water when scrubbing the parquet shows even better the work that time and termites have done. While I wait I watch a woman sweep and remove the door mat and when she does so she discovers that it is split in two..

The walls are robust, how it was built in the past, and the doors have golden metal handles. There is little light and an almost unforgivable silence between its narrow corridors. The nurses, almost all of them older, They move slowly carrying the envelopes with the medical records.. Everything is on paper, all, to the lungs of patients.

Everything is on paper, all, to the lungs of patients

At the reception there is a nurse who slowly handles a notebook, one of those visitor diaries, in which you write down all the quotes. There is no space left and he writes down names and telephone numbers between small spaces, writing obliquely and with increasingly smaller handwriting. Your notebook is illegible. I submitted two weeks before the consultation and she had forgotten to tell me that day did not come Dr.. Since then we have made a certain friendship that was forged with a smile. "I guess tomorrow will arrive alive", I told him to settle his confusion.

This morning I came here to remove an uncomfortable lump that seems harmless and that appeared a few weeks ago.. A doctor who is a friend of Francesca's told me that Dr. Rui Bastos is a great dermatologist and I have preferred to come for treatment here than to one of the very expensive private clinics in Maputo.. In Maputo Medical Offices payment 500 MZN (12 EUR) by consultation and 5000 (120 EUR) for removing the cyst and doing the biopsy in a laboratory. On one occasion just for a malaria blood test at the Sommershield clinic I paid 1200 MZN, exactly 1150 more than the one I had done two days before in a public hospital in Alto Molocue, the north. I suppose that due to surgery the figure must be excessively high and my accounts have suffered somewhat in recent weeks.

I guess a squeamish person would have started to suffer something from the scene.

I enter the consultation. The friendly doctor, descendant of Portuguese, He asks me to lie down on the stretcher. It's the third time we've seen each other. I do, backward, while they turn down the air conditioning a little. An older nurse enters, Mozambican, who until now has always been sparing in words. The doctor gives him instructions. “No, "The other one is better.". “You have to first remove all the hairs it has”. “Better use the Gillette razor”. “There is no left… Yes, yes, is here". “You have to disinfect before”. “First we will anesthetize”. The feeling is that the veteran woman is somewhat lost. I guess a squeamish person would have started to suffer something from the scene..

But then the doctor asks for a shorter needle:

-"This is so big"

-It's the one there is doctor

-Not, there must be the others

(I hear that they have to look in a box because of the noises)

-Not, this one is just as long, even older nurse.

-Doctor, they haven't sent us any news from the hospital.. We have ordered them a long time ago but they have not arrived.

-You have to ask for them again.

-Of course, like other things we don't have and we have asked for too..

There I suppose that a squeamish person would have gone either to the clinic where they have everything or to remove the lump in their country. I'm not squeamish, lucky if you live here and don't have health insurance. Furthermore, I had complete confidence in the doctor and some experiences I had already had in these nearly five years to know that I was not at any risk.. I remember in a Marsabit clinic, a lost village in northern Kenya, that they cured an infection in my mouth with medications that seemed expired in a hut without light or air.

The small surgery begins. First they anesthetize my back and then they tell me that they are going to remove the lump. After a few minutes the cheerful doctor says “we have already removed the steak” to which I reply “at this time I was eating it with mushrooms”. Then that nurse with the smile of an angel tells us, while the doctor continues with the cures in which she helps, that “in the years of famine, 1982 a 1984, during the Civil War, human meat was sold in the markets. An albino disappeared, They chopped it up and sold it as meat to the people.. So there was no meat and there was a lot of hunger. Then the people who bought it with excitement saw the state of the meat and knew that they had been deceived.", she said with absolute naturalness between laughs.

An albino disappeared, They chopped it up and sold it as meat to the people.

The doctor then asks his assistant: “Doesn't the lady know that albinos are very persecuted in some countries?? Not here in Mozambique, But in Tanzania they kill them because they believe they bring calamities.”. "I did not know anything", she replies. “Yes, it is something very common.. Also in Malawi there is superstition with albinos, but it is Tanzania where they kill them the most. I did a report on that and the worst thing is when they remove a member to use it in witchcraft.”, I intervened, still lying face down while they began to give me the stitches..

And then the doctor commented on something again and she repeated again that she didn't know anything about it., but his grandfather was regular (tribal chief) and that she spoke sangana. Because just before, I don't really know how, We began to talk about the origin of the doctor, who was a Mozambican son of Portuguese who had been born in the north of the country.. And she asked him if he spoke Macua and I told them if their local languages ​​were similar and all that nice African farce was going on., while they performed a biopsy on me in that strange building where bodies and souls are cured.

All that nice African farce was happening

And I don't really know the reason for it, but I started to feel something that I hadn't felt in a while.. I have been living and traveling in Africa for more than four and a half years and I had forgotten what a privilege it is to sometimes live in this complicated place.. lying there, In the middle of a small operation in which some things were missing and others were left over, there was talk of sorcery and cannibalism while they finished closing a wound on me.. And I smiled for a moment and I took that smile home because in all of this is the answer., in living with things that surprise me, to see you one morning lying on a stretcher talking about albinos, hunger and witches while they perform a biopsy on you. Understand the symbolism of everything, of feeling more alive than ever in the middle of that operation.

PD. Don't worry, the doctor believes that there was no need to remove the lump urgently., that it is some fat, but until my imminent move to another country I had nothing better to do than go see those cheerful nurses. If I thought it was something serious, this post would not be written..

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Comments (1)

  • Sara

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    What a nice and accurate chronicle! Is 100% imaginable, from the nurse to the dumpy place in the 24 September. I was in Maputo in the summer with friends from Mozambique who live there and I agree with the symbolism of the moment and the opportunity of living in Africa. I'm also a journalist, in Spain. Where do you move them?? some editor position is open? thanks.

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