05-AUG-B-9
AN UNUSUAL WEEKEND DAY BEGINS WITH SOME
EXTRA ADD-ON SURGICAL CASES, AND “OR DOOR CONSULTS”,
THEN MY FIRST TOURISM DAY WITH A SPECIAL
EXCURSION AS THE REST OF THE TEAMS GO TO THE
COAST WHILE WE MALES (ONLY) MAKE A
PILGRIMAGE,
TO NEFASET AND CLIMB TO DEBRE ESSIM TO
THE
COPTIC MONASTERY
August 13, 2005
Today is a
day for a change of scene for some of the participants of the program since
they are taking an excursion to Karen, a town about sixty kilometers from
here. They are going there, whereas
Nicole Lang is taking Huda Ayas to Masawa, the
So, I wore my hiking boots and the special stuff I had packed, including everything from the hunting camo hat and umbrella to the jacket for a potential change of weather, and, of course, the cameras, film, tape recorder and GPS—so, as all such pre-planned experiences, it should be well-recorded! As I changed into my OR scrubs, I had brought this time a special “camo-colored” US Army scrub labeled “Army health care team”—so the scrub nurses call me “Military Man Doctor.” Everyone here is labeled by their first name “Doctor Glenn” and I found out why—there are no surnames here! I could here the chanting as at the Coptic Church next door a service was going on with the Greek-type orthodox priests were swinging the censors and chanting the prayers in a language neither I nor any o f the nurses I asked could understand. I learned that Dr. Haregu was speaking to the nurses in Amharic with imperfect Eritrean—the same status as Tzion in our recovery Room, which is why they were in a little stand-offish mode with them an very warm with me, since I do not have any “Ethiopian taint” about me, having worked there in both Gondar and Addis where Dr. Haregu had gone to medical school and residency respectively.
They have certainly been very deferential to me and respect American expertise and professionalism. I had seen a series of patients in the “OR Door Consults” and added some to the schedule including an elderly white haired woman with a large rodent ulcer behind her ear with a malignant heaped up and ulcerated tumor. It could represent one kind of tumor called a basal cell, but it rarely metastasizes, and this woman has large firm and non-tender nodes through her neck on that side—so this is squamous cell carcinoma. This fulfills one more prophecy I had made—as on every trip, when I first project for the students the kinds of advanced diseases they can expect to encounter in an African setting, within a matter of hours to days thereafter, a similar lesion will pop up and be recognized by them before the echoes of that first recognition can fade away. Here –big and bold as life—is this trip’s “Marjolin Ulcer.”
We undertook tow major operations
today, a recurrent goiter eight years post thyroidectomy done at
The next case was one that is
familiar to Dr. \Haregu, but the students who had seen it once before and were
not quite sure when it happened before their eyes just earlier this week got a
closer better look this time—a suprapubic trans-vesical prostatectomy. With these two operations done, we could wait
for the bus to pick us up and carry us back to the hotel. We could not see the bus, so we were told the
ambulance would take us back. It turned
out that we popped out of the OR and hopped into a Toyota Land Cruiser when the
driver came along and said “do you remember me?” It was hard to place him, but he identified
himself as one of our hosts on the first dinner of our stay since he was Amoisette’s
brother, and “Do you know whose vehicle this is?” We thought it was the ambulance; “It is
mine.” We were embarrassed by the
familiarity we had exhibited in essentially thinking all Eritreans look alike,
and now even the vehicles were interchangeable.
We only later learned that he was in this setting, while we had met him
in a social setting, because his 11-year-old son had been admitted here at
We made it back to the Central Hotel
for a somewhat late start on the part of the women who all expressed severe
envy for those of us who were going to be climbing the mountain to visit the
monastery, while they piled into the bus to later ride passing by camels
carrying fire-wood and visiting Miriam pilgrimage site a five hundred year old
Baobab Tree which is hollowed out to be a shrine site where pilgrims come to
chant their prayers and make offerings. The
group went shopping in a smaller village setting and got a few souvenirs,
whereas I worked my way into a chartered taxi whom we engaged for the next two
half days. It is not a small deal to take
a long drive in
THE COPTIC MONASTERY AT EBRE ISSEM
AND THE CHURCH FROM THE HAILE SELASSIE
ERA,
WITH ANCIENT “GEISS” AFRICAN SCRIPT—
FOILED BY AUTOFOCUS IN THE AGE OF
“FULLY AUTOMATED PHTOGRAPHY”
As soon as we
had arrived and been waved through at the monastery gate by the camera-shy
monk, we were brought to a guest house and sat down to wait. For what were we waiting? Outside, I saw an interesting parade of
livestock entering the same narrow gate we had passed through. I could not run out to follow it, since we
had taken off our shoes, and in my case, the hiking/climbing boots. A colorful scene followed in which a group
of camels wandered in. I had taken the
last of the color prints on the
We sat
under portraits of the various clerics and early leaders of the monastery which
were purported to be 14th century, although the new church, built of
solid stone on the precipitous cliffs came form the Haile Selassie era. I looked out on the “ship of the desert”
emblem of
I went out after re-gaining my hiking boots, and walked the cliff edge to see the soaring birds below us, and the steep façade of the monastery walls falling off into deep gulches filled with cactus on the steeply upthrust sedimentary rock layers. We had pause don the way up to see the boys with us harvest the “bellas”—the cactus fruit called “tuna” in South America as in Chile, or the fermented parts of this cactus fruit called Tequilla in Mexico. The South African Afrikanse term is “Turk’s Pei” or “Turkish Pear.” We watched as the boys who were setting out to harvest lots of them had gauntleted gloves, and a tin can on a long stick to avoid contact with the filamentous spines, which sting like sea nettles. In the case of our own “guides” they gingerly picked the fruit that appeared to be ripening by the appearance of a reddish golden tint, and then got ordinary vegetation and leaves to be swirled around the fruit to get rid of the “stinging hairs.” It was then possible to make two vertical cuts in the tough outer skin, and to pop the pulp cylinder out to the waiting guest who could eat the sweet pulp, and swallow or spit out the myriad seeds within the juicy center.
The “bellas” were as welcome as the tea at the monastery, since we were all a bit short of water. It is odd that this very juicy fruit is parked there within reach on the steep slopes loaded with the sugary water we might need in this arid and barren vertical land—a miracle to contemplate while sitting alone in the monastery. One should surely not be distracted by female companionship, and all animals seen on these slopes and surely within the gates were male—or used to be. The large Zebu cattle are castrated bulls, and the camels are all neutered males—that may also include those of us in the monastery after the long hot climb.
We shot a few photos and saw a few young boys curiously peering at us trying to see us but stay out of camera range. WE walked over to the other church—much newere than the rest of the monastery, with a Coptic cross on it and a script on the side which is in what they claim to be the first African language ever written down called “Geiss.” It would take a monk to read it since it seems that it is a dead language no one knows except by studying it, and there was no “Rosetta stone” for interpretation.
I had my tape recorder out for what I had hoped to hear after the gong struck several times indicating the hour of prayer around six o’clock PM. I saw a few monks file slowly toward the prayer hall, and waited, and heard finally a few brief chanted mantras, but did not hear the eerie call of the long Buddhist prayer ceremony. It was now about to start getting dark, and we thought it a better idea to start our way down and off the mountain. This seemed familiar to me, since sliding off steep scree slopes loaded with lubricating bearings is what I had done in too much already last week. Now I would be repeating it in the dark.
I stumbled
down the slopes, with Steve having a somewhat more difficult time in keeping
up. He was wearing “boat shoes” and I
also heard later that he had some form of aortic valvular heart disease. This might be IHSS, and I asked if he had
heard those initials or been diagnosed with that problem, since that can give a
serous cardiac arrest We had a chance to
talk about this and many other things later since when we had finally returned
to the town of Nefaset (“Place of Winds”) where we bought could drink and got
back with our retained taxi driver Nicosia
I had marked the NEFA 15* 19.42 N, 039* 04.01 E which makes it 6,864
miles from HOME at bearing 314* just west of the north pole on the Great
Circle. The town of 300+ is lower than
the capital
As we got
in the taxi with a great deal of stuff about “stiff and sore knees and hips”
from those half my age, I smiled and watched as we crawled up the switchbacks
to return to
I had the fish dinner at the Central Hotel with Steve in the dining room. He had ordered the beef. “There is no beef.” came the reply. “What do you recommend?” “The lamb is very good.” OK, “I will try that.” “There is no lamb.” So, I resolved the dilemma by saying, “If we are to be eating here tonight, just what is it that we would be having?” “The grilled fish.” “OK, send us two of those.” I am getting used to the six-page menus of African restaurants, and know how to take the maitre-di’s “suggestions” to mean that—“If you have any intention of eating here, you will have what we have and not get too demanding about what it is that you would like instead.”
I had hoped to get up early and make a run in the town at about the time all the people would be gathering at the Coptic and Catholic churches, and would be making a run passed an inner city filed I had heard about that contains the vestiges of a long and constant series of events in the Eritrean recent history. Come on along and we will discover it together.