The team reflected on the crushing in of so many people and how best to handle security of sorts in the next village. The amount of time needed to push people away from the medical team was time wasted in treating them. This concept, however, was lost on the villagers. A big part of the disconnect for them came, we guessed, from the fact that we were not treating the men first.
As a suggested solution we asked about identifying those with the most pressing medical needs, a difficult task given that not all medical needs are externally evident. The village had no medicine man, no nurses, no medicines other than herbs, and apparently no concept of any degree of illness. Sick means sick.
Another problem with identifying those with the most urgent medical needs is that the person making the identification would put their family first regardless of the true medical need. Among all the suggestions we considered, none was even close to adequate given that the culture here was so far away from anything American and familiar to the team – who goes first, who is most sick, wait your turn, women and children first. I wonder what impression these people were left with when we were done.
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