Alister and I visited my first Ukrainian Hospital on Sunday.
Like most things in the outskirts of Kiev, the building looked tired. When you look at the cement block and mortar buildings, you wonder if there was a time when it was ever new, and bright, and glistening like the hospital buildings you see in America. We walked past a garbage heap piled against the front entrance and a skinny girl sitting back on her heals smoking a cigarette.
Inside, the corridor was dimly lit and bleak. We climbed up six floors along a stairway lightly littered with garbage and faded back lighted pictures from Soviet glory years. We saw no staff, there was no reception, and it was only after several calls to one of our friends that we finally found the room we were looking for.
The room had four beds in it. This, I discovered later was unusual, there should have been six, but two of the patients had requested to be moved to the corridor because one of the other occupants shouted out all night in her sleep and it was impossible for anyone to rest. (We were informed of the shouting immediately as we entered the room by a talkative babushka peeling mandarins and sitting on the bed in the corner. She also informed us that she had fallen on the street. Though she herself was a patient in the hospital, she was also selling a miracle drug that would cure anything, but was purported to be especially effective against impotency - basically we had to talk past her in order to talk to the Babushka we were visiting.)
By each bed was a small bedside table. Every patient had their own food and eating utensils heaped upon it. An old fridge sat at the center of the back wall, and it was for them to use for food as well. Beyond providing their own food, each patient had to provide their own bedding as well as provide for it to be washed and changed. The nurses, employed by the state, are paid very little and so if you don't have family and friends who can come to the hospital and take care of you, you have to haggle with the nurses to get them to do anything for you - to put a bed pan under you and take it away - to bring you food and water - to bathe you. I'm not sure, but you might even need to pay them to administer medicines - which by-the-way - you also buy yourself. The doctor comes into the room says the patient needs x, y, and Z, and then you (a family member or friend) head off to the pharmacy located on the second floor and buy whatever was prescribed.
The room had no televisions, no curtains, no radio, no dividers between beds. The patients, for good or ill, become the friends, watchdogs, and entertainment for each other. A daughter came in to take care of her mother while we were there - and the other two patients immediately chimed in to give her a report that she had broken her bowl and needed a new one and how she was doing such and such, and how this and that had happened.
It made me think of how spoiled we are - when we send people flowers and teddy bears and mugs with get well soon plastered across them. Here are sick people to whom a get well gift isn't a pretty token that will become a piece of junk as soon as they leave the hospital - but it is a needed item for their next meal. Even flowers, though there was no place to put them, would have brightened up the room, become its focal point and even life breath for a day or two, rather than merely accented it as would a bouquet at home.
The other tangent running through my Mind is that the Tymoshenko government has announced that to each person who lost money in the collapse of the banks that resulted with the collapse of the soviet government - would be given $200. Earlier under Kuchma - a sum was also given - $5 - to each person who had lost money. Though $200 is a big improvement to $5 - a figure that was beyond insulting when you consider that these were peoples life savings that were lost amounting to thousands of dollars. When the payment was announced - Ukrainians flocked to the banks to be paid - anxious that if the offer be retracted - that they would already have the money in hand - while insulting - $200 is better than nothing and if you don't live in the city - it can even be stretched to pay for quite a bit.
And I wonder - could the government have done more with the money to benefit the people than what they could do themselves? While individually - $200 isn't alot - for 100 people it is already $20,000 - surely something could be done for 20 thousand? to improve hospitals, or schools, or prisons, which are reportedly nothing less than pits of disease and despair. Or would a public project of $20000 merely dwindle away through corrupt channels - amounting to even less than the $200 per person that is now being offered?
Its a catch 22 - If you haven't money for food, for shelter, for life, you want the government to take care of you - but if you don't trust the government to do these things then you are left to find ways to work around the system, to do what will most benefit you, to extract from the government anything it is willing to give, and hope that that will be enough to get by.
Like most things in the outskirts of Kiev, the building looked tired. When you look at the cement block and mortar buildings, you wonder if there was a time when it was ever new, and bright, and glistening like the hospital buildings you see in America. We walked past a garbage heap piled against the front entrance and a skinny girl sitting back on her heals smoking a cigarette.
Inside, the corridor was dimly lit and bleak. We climbed up six floors along a stairway lightly littered with garbage and faded back lighted pictures from Soviet glory years. We saw no staff, there was no reception, and it was only after several calls to one of our friends that we finally found the room we were looking for.
The room had four beds in it. This, I discovered later was unusual, there should have been six, but two of the patients had requested to be moved to the corridor because one of the other occupants shouted out all night in her sleep and it was impossible for anyone to rest. (We were informed of the shouting immediately as we entered the room by a talkative babushka peeling mandarins and sitting on the bed in the corner. She also informed us that she had fallen on the street. Though she herself was a patient in the hospital, she was also selling a miracle drug that would cure anything, but was purported to be especially effective against impotency - basically we had to talk past her in order to talk to the Babushka we were visiting.)
By each bed was a small bedside table. Every patient had their own food and eating utensils heaped upon it. An old fridge sat at the center of the back wall, and it was for them to use for food as well. Beyond providing their own food, each patient had to provide their own bedding as well as provide for it to be washed and changed. The nurses, employed by the state, are paid very little and so if you don't have family and friends who can come to the hospital and take care of you, you have to haggle with the nurses to get them to do anything for you - to put a bed pan under you and take it away - to bring you food and water - to bathe you. I'm not sure, but you might even need to pay them to administer medicines - which by-the-way - you also buy yourself. The doctor comes into the room says the patient needs x, y, and Z, and then you (a family member or friend) head off to the pharmacy located on the second floor and buy whatever was prescribed.
The room had no televisions, no curtains, no radio, no dividers between beds. The patients, for good or ill, become the friends, watchdogs, and entertainment for each other. A daughter came in to take care of her mother while we were there - and the other two patients immediately chimed in to give her a report that she had broken her bowl and needed a new one and how she was doing such and such, and how this and that had happened.
It made me think of how spoiled we are - when we send people flowers and teddy bears and mugs with get well soon plastered across them. Here are sick people to whom a get well gift isn't a pretty token that will become a piece of junk as soon as they leave the hospital - but it is a needed item for their next meal. Even flowers, though there was no place to put them, would have brightened up the room, become its focal point and even life breath for a day or two, rather than merely accented it as would a bouquet at home.
The other tangent running through my Mind is that the Tymoshenko government has announced that to each person who lost money in the collapse of the banks that resulted with the collapse of the soviet government - would be given $200. Earlier under Kuchma - a sum was also given - $5 - to each person who had lost money. Though $200 is a big improvement to $5 - a figure that was beyond insulting when you consider that these were peoples life savings that were lost amounting to thousands of dollars. When the payment was announced - Ukrainians flocked to the banks to be paid - anxious that if the offer be retracted - that they would already have the money in hand - while insulting - $200 is better than nothing and if you don't live in the city - it can even be stretched to pay for quite a bit.
And I wonder - could the government have done more with the money to benefit the people than what they could do themselves? While individually - $200 isn't alot - for 100 people it is already $20,000 - surely something could be done for 20 thousand? to improve hospitals, or schools, or prisons, which are reportedly nothing less than pits of disease and despair. Or would a public project of $20000 merely dwindle away through corrupt channels - amounting to even less than the $200 per person that is now being offered?
Its a catch 22 - If you haven't money for food, for shelter, for life, you want the government to take care of you - but if you don't trust the government to do these things then you are left to find ways to work around the system, to do what will most benefit you, to extract from the government anything it is willing to give, and hope that that will be enough to get by.
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