Medicine

People constantly ask us for medicine here. This occurs partially because we are white people, and white people often come bearing medical supplies, and partially because I work at the health center, and therefore they assume I have easy access to medicine. Now, in reality, the only medicine we have is explicitly for our own use, and even if we had extra, we don't have the necessary medical training to feel confident we were giving out the right medicine. We have explained this countless times, but to no avail. For a long time, I found this incredibly frustrating, not least because Gambians can get basic medicines for almost nothing at the health center a few kilometers away.

However, recently, something finally clicked and it all makes a lot more sense. I now believe there are two main reasons we can't seem to get through to people:

1)I frequently see Gambian health workers going home with bags full of medicine (which they don't pay for, but that's another issue). In this culture, if you have access to something that your family wants or needs, whether it is money, food, or medicine, you are expected to help them out. Gambian health workers probably get as many or more requests for medicine than we do. We are trying to integrate, we want to become part of the culture...and we are getting exactly what we asked for.

2)While medicine is practically free at the health center, going there often involves quite a bit of walking and waiting, often adding up to a whole day's worth of time. Especially for older people with chronic aches and pains from decades of backbreaking work (most of the begging for medicine comes from this group), I absolutely can see why they don't think it's worth it to walk all the way to the health center and wait all day for the 6-8 tylenol they give out at a time. There are pharmacies around where they could get most of the basic medicines we take for granted (tylenol, advil, pepto, vitamins, etc), but they are just as far as the hospital and medicine is often prohibitively expensive for many people.

If every time I had a headache, my only option was to walk a few kilometers, wait all day, and walk a few kilometers home, all for a few lousy pills, I probably would start nagging my friend/sister/uncle/whatever who worked at the hospital to bring medicine home for me too!