People die easily here...

Locals and wazungu (foreigners) fight to help a teenage boy in an orphanage get the heart surgery he desperately needs to save his life. It’s a bureaucratic fight to get him from Moshi to Dar es Salaam, but that’s nothing compared to the bureaucratic nightmare to get him to India for his surgery. It takes months. Finally all is set, and then the boy contracts an infection and must recover before he can be moved. Recovered, he goes to India & has his surgery. All is successful and his future is looking up.

The boy returns to Tanzania – via Dar again, then home to Moshi. Having just arrived home, he falls ill and is taken to hospital. He dies that night, from sepsis!

A man in Kenya gathers his precious life savings and pays for the implantation of a device in his forearm that allows him to have the kidney dialysis that is keeping him alive. Shortly after, he’s attacked by a pack of dogs and the device is ripped from his arm. Friends in Moshi hear of the disaster and “pass the hat around” so the device can be replaced. Having found someone to transport the money to Nairobi, they get online to send an email with the good news. The inbox contains news – the man died ten days after the dog attack, as he couldn’t receive dialysis. The help comes too late.

MVAs (motor vehicle accidents)... are constant. The bus drivers are maniacs, flooring the accelerator at every opportunity, overtaking on hill crests and blind corners, pulling back into their lane with no regard for the vehicle in their blind spot they are pushing off the road, playing games - racing and blocking each other from overtaking. Vehicle maintenance is dubious at best – I’ve lost count of the number of buses and trucks that appear to be travelling down the road at a 30 degree angle, or greater, to their direction of travel.

And as with MVAs everywhere, in the vehicle versus cyclist, or vehicle versus pedestrian collisions, there’s no doubt as to who comes off worse. Cyclists wear no helmets, and have no lights. At night, pedestrians and cyclists are all but invisible.

Even in daylight, the accidents are constant. My friends have seen a motorcyclist being unwrapped from around the wheel of a dala-dala, and carried back and forth across the road by the arms and legs, tossed around like a sack of potatoes as his helpers desperately tried to throw him in a taxi. Meanwhile others were in hot pursuit of the driver who’d run from the scene as fast as he could.

And mob justice rules (or tries to – it depends who gets to the accident first, mob or cops: usually the mob). I’ve been told repeatedly by numerous folks “If you’re involved in an accident, don’t stop. No matter what! If you see an accident, don’t stop. No matter what!”

It’s amazing what you take on board as accepted wisdom, and don’t pause to question it. Until forced to.

Two weeks ago, I was travelling with a friend back from a weekender trip down to the coast. Approaching vehicles began flashing their headlights at us. As we crested a rise, we saw a crowd running down the road ahead of us. This means one thing only... ACCIDENT! They were all running towards a lump in the middle of our lane. We exclaimed “Oh no, I hope that’s not a person.” No, it seemed too small. Perhaps the size of an adult goat? We breathed a sigh of relief.

Short-lived. As we passed by we were simultaneously hit by the realisation that the locals would be unlikely to be running in such a panicked crowd towards a goat, and by the sight of a boy, probably early teens, side-lying on the road, as though sleeping. In total shock, we instinctively fell back on what had been drummed into us; “Don’t stop, no matter what.”

As we crested the next rise, an even more gut-wrenching sight; a bus was limping along, slowing down as a madly waving man leapt from it. The front drivers-side tyre was blown; and jammed up behind the blown wheel – the handlebars of a bicycle were clearly visible. “Oh God!”

Sickened, I prayed “please let that child have died instantly.” Sounds like an obscene prayer. But there was no way that was a survivable accident. Probably not survivable in the best hospitals in the developed world; certainly not here. There are barely any ambulances. No-one knows first aid. No-one knows how to handle a severely injured person. There is a charity organisation that teaches first aid courses in East Africa, and CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation) is not taught... because none of the other steps in the “chain of survival” exist here. To put it succinctly, there is no point doing CPR, because your patient will die anyway.

Back on the road, we drove on, placating ourselves with reassurances that “there was absolutely nothing we could’ve done to help” and it would’ve been dangerous for us to stop.

But would it, would it really? Looking back now, I’m sickened that we didn’t stop. Was it fear; fear of being mobbed by an emotionally volatile crowd (unable to see the bus over the horizon) looking to lash out at the perpetrator, or anyone handy, that kept us driving? Was it not wanting to face death?  Was it resignation?

And what could we have done had we stopped? Probably nothing. But possibly something. I’ll never know. I will go to my grave not knowing. Why did we not reach out?

I’m being faced with lessons in humanity and humility; in the interconnectedness of all humans. The above is a far more dramatic situation, but does it differ really from ignoring a beggar as you walk past them in the street? Endless wazungu, the poorest of whom are rich beyond imagining to most Tanzanians, walk on by whilst locals drop their coins in the beggars’ cups. Not all the locals, mind you, but some do. Maybe some wazungu are dropping coins too, but I just haven’t seen them.

And these wazungu are not selfish folk either. Most are in Moshi volunteering – giving of themselves to others. There’s a tendency to give selectively though – to ration your ability to give. It’s difficult to live in a situation where you’re perceived as a cash-cow. Where the dentist's assistant nephew asks you to pay his college fees.  When even a casual hello to a security guard outside the bank leads to a request for money because, even though he has a job, he says he can’t afford his children’s school fees. He says “Are you a Christian lady? You’re here helping orphans; why can’t you help me?”

And meanwhile, a mother is in the hospital with her baby who is sick enough he needs to be on oxygen to help him survive the night. The doctors want to take the oxygen away to another sick child or baby, because there are no more oxygen cylinders available. The mother argues and fights to keep the oxygen. It gives a whole new depth of meaning to the phrase bandied around in our well-provisioned Western-world children’s hospitals: “advocating for your child”.

What do I make of all this? I don’t know. I feel guilty.  I feel I could be doing more; I must be able to do more.  There are no easy answers. But it makes you think.

People die easily here. I guess they die easily everywhere.