The past 2 weeks on the malnutrition ward have been really hard. During this time, seven of the children that I’ve worked with have died. To put things into perspective, this is about the same number who died throughout my entire 3 years of residency in New York. In all those cases, we knew why the children died. What makes it so much more frustrating here is that in most cases, we do not know what really happened to the children.
Because of poor infrastructure, severe lack of resources, shoddy monitoring and the fact that most children show up to the hospital very late in their disease, we typically have 1-2 children dying a day at Bugando. The doctors have tried to push for autopsies, but many families refuse because they want to bring their child back to the village for burial, the result being that medical teams aren’t able to understand what went wrong and avoid more deaths in the future.
For the past 2 weeks, I’ve come home exhausted and bewildered by these cases. It’s still difficult to accept that in this part of the world, death is something people deal with on a regular basis.
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