Well, we’re three weeks into our four week stint here in Kowanyama, and I’m still sane (yes, I know that’s relative...). It’s been an interesting time for both of us and we’ve both seen some very interesting things.
Lydia’s work has been extremely diverse (as you’ll see below), from treating Scabies and ‘school sores’ to CPR on the roadside with Police support.
My days are being spent between the house, the clinic and the great outdoors. I’m in charge of the cleaning and cooking (Lydia says my rice is perfect and my sweet potato soup is sublime!), and I’m also working my way through the articles for my dissertation. This morning I’m due to help sort out a ‘Donga’ at the clinic which is a kind of temporary accommodation they have in Australia. They vary from a glorified tool-shed to a full-on portable house. After that I’ll be off into the wilderness to see what I can see with my stick and my Akubra. The hat’s for the sun (obviously!) and the stick is multipurpose. After my first foray when I found a brown snake (poisonous) and scared the local freshwater crocodile (not too dangerous) I decided to carry a walking stick with me when I was out and about. Oh, and there was the small matter of Lydia getting menaced by the local dogs when she went for her morning run too. So I’m well equipped now to either beat them off, create a diversion or drop it and run.
We’ve spent an evening down at the canteen (read: they have beer!) and had a take-away dinner. The grog was good, but the fish and chips weren’t! Otherwise the evenings have been spent at home in front of the box, and I’m finding myself being SO glad that I put Northern Exposure on the iPod as it gives us something to watch. Oh, and I’ve been voted as the best Yam curry maker in the whole of Kowanyama too!
A couple of weeks ago we had the neighbours round for dinner. After chatting with them at the clinic about the lack of chicken in the general store they managed to get some from The Coffee Shoppe (which doesn’t sell coffee...) and we all had chicken and yam green curry! And just for the record chicken is all you CAN get at the moment as they’ve sold out of beef. Ho hum
As I said earlier, this is the downhill run and we fly out of Kowanyama in a week. We’re going to spend a few days exploring Cairns, and fly back to Rocky on the Saturday, and we leave Oz less than two weeks later. Doesn’t time fly!
Hi there everyone! Lydia here. I thought I’d add a couple of stories from the last 3 weeks to show you just how different things are up here in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
I was working over the weekend with one health care worker (indigenous Assistant Nurses) who I regard as a moderately hard worker. I asked her to do a client’s dressing and she couldn’t because he was her poison son-in-law. A few things ran through my mind like “is she trying to avoid working”, “is she pulling my leg? She is 38 and this man in question is 69”. So after I changed his dressings I got her to explain to me what she meant. After a bit of ranting and raving about how white fellas (I think she was meaning me) don’t understand black fella ways I got out of her that should she have a daughter, then by aboriginal law the daughter would be promised to that client. And culturally she and her husband could not have anything to do with that man until he was married to their daughter. Bloody complicated if you ask me but this is apparently how they used to control incest – they would put you into a category depending on your generation and blood line and then sanction your interaction with other categories in the community. My remedy to this continuous source of annoyance came about last night when I met a man at the airport. He has spent some time in Rockhampton (my home town) and we had a few friends in common. And more than that – he supports the same football team my father support. He has now decided that I’m as good as a cousin........which puts me into a his bloodline.......Seeing as he is related to half the town I am hoping that very soon I can be just as selective with my clients as they health care workers are with theirs.
My next story regards a man we had to evacuate over the weekend whose mate called us from outside the clinic asking for some help getting out of the car. He’d been bitten by a brown snake apparently hunting bush pigs in long grass with no shoes on. And he wasn’t indigenous – muppet. He was bitten on the ankle and saw the snake but didn’t think it was a taipan.... Perhaps he had failed to remember that there are about 7 deadly snakes beside the taipan up here. On weekends we have no medical cover so the procedure we go through it to ring or radio the Royal Flying Doctors Service in the closest city, Cairns, over 800kms away. And consult with the doctor over the phone. All we could really do for the chap was reinforce the bandaging he already had on and immobilise his leg with cardboard boxes that I cut up to make a fairly reasonable splint, and keep a close eye on him. Luckily for him he showed no adverse effects – he was transported to Cairns a few hours later on the RFDS plane and we all breathed a sigh of relief as the plane took off from the runway. No later had we changed the sheets on the ambulance stretcher (we drive the ambulance out here as well) than we were called by the police to say that they were bringing in 4 casualties from a car roll over. Bloody Hell! That was a long day.
