Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Sep 2014
One day I was in the rural areas of Turkana County,
walking up and down perfidiously ,
in a style of  the devil when visiting
Job  the son of Amos in the land of Uz,
It was in fact in the Northern region of the County
near a town known as Small Spain,
it is bushy and full of wild animals,
i was  on assignment by a certain NGO,
to give food,*******,drugs and clothes
to the dwellers  of this desert region,
All over a sudden I pumbed into a riff-raff
of  peasants, wearing scrofulously lugubrious faces,
one of them , a young man was on the ground
reeling in pain from the snake-bite,
he had been biten by a deadly desert snake,
A yellow Mamba in fact, it left its fangs in his muscle,
it was pathetic and sorriest, as there was no clinic nearby,
the nearest hospital was one thousand miles away,
and  you know,there is no road,no vehicle nor bicycle,
no horses nor water boats, only Carmel,,donkey and goats,
were there plus few emaciated native cows,
Luckily enough a white man  who stayed nearby,
surfaced from nowhere, he also owns a small aero-plane,
He spoke Italian,Spanish,Swahili and Greek like a native,
so I don't knew which country of Europe he came from,
he picked the snake bite victim to his home,
he asked me to come along
we boarded his plane to Kitale,
where we have a government hospital,
We flew across the hills of Turkana land ,
thousand and thousands of miles,
it was i, the white man  and snake bitten man,
three strangers on one another in the aeroplane,
Bound strongly by human love beyond identity,
Our patient began getting worse and worse
In fact  he had began getting dull and motionless,
we landed in Kitale, the white man bought a taxi,
we rushed to the hospital, all us panting frenetically,
we got at the hospital found nurses having lunch,
they were slow and relaxed, as if death is their dish,
the African nurse who came was all but un-started,
she began asking  for the age and the  tribe,
The tribe of our snake bitten friend,
She also asked for where he works,
And where he often goes to clinic,
worst of  all, she asked where he goes to church
she again demanded for seven hundred shillings,
the white man gave her the money,I was broke as usual,
He gave her a bank note of  one thousand shillings
she declined , she instead  wanted loose money
she ordered us to look for her the  loose money
before  she could begin treating our friend,
before we got the loose money  our friend died
of heavy poisoning of the blood, snake bite
He roared like a bull in the slaughter house,
on his painfully preventable death,
the white man was very disappointed
the white man wept, he went back to his plane.
In a similar stretch with a case of  a referral hospital
in Eldoret, also another town in Kenya, it is big,
it is called Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital,
it has the largest cancer management unit,
in the whole of east and central Africa
from Congo to Seychelles is the only one,
it was build by tax payers money,
but local politics as influenced it otherwise,
workers and Nurses are substantially locals,
in fact from one clan, now they speak strangely,
patients from alien clan are never treated,
they must bribe to be treated,
if not you  go back sick and eat your tribe,
or if you are introduced by a local politician,
you be lucky to be treated your cervical cancer,
they charge medical fees exorbitantly,
but once you pay no doctor will come,
in fact patients who are admitted for in-patient,
rarely come out  alive, if they are one hundred,
eighty of them will die,twenty will go home,
only to come back after a while and then die,
out of this despair another white man from Germany,
has established a modern hospital , just nearby the referral,
it offers absolutely free cancer treatment services
as Africans keep on facilitating death of their own kin,
Blessed be the womb that gave birth to a European.
Alexander K Opicho
Written by
Alexander K Opicho  Kenya
(Kenya)   
851
 
Please log in to view and add comments on poems