Namibia - The difficult Years. Helmut Lauschke

certainly related to his traumatic experience as a child. I asked Nestor why small black children started crying and grasped the mothers’ hands when they saw me coming on the square or when I entered the children’s ward. Nestor told that this had to be seen in the historical context what the whites had done to the black people. Children had seen how the whites had shouted at their fathers and mothers, had degraded them by beating and deporting them. Since then a black child did not expect something good from a white man. “Such a child needs time to experience that there were other whites who have a good heart and care for a black child”, Nestor added.

      It was four o’clock in the morning when we left the theatre building and wished another some quiet hours. I went back to the outpatient department where no patient was waiting. The nurses of the night shift, one man and two women, sat in the hall around the table. Their heads were lying on crosswise-topped forearms on the tabletop. I left the waiting hall and rolled up the trouser legs to the knees. With the sandals in my hand and I stalked like a stork through the mud. I tried to keep the feet in the middle of the road and trudged in big puddles and some deep potholes. I reached the checkpoint. The sleepy guard on the chair put up his head and turned it from left to right signalling that I should pass, while another guard was snoring on the second chair with his head bent over the chest. So I continued walking through the mud.

      I reached the flat and pulled off the dirty clothes in the veranda. I went into the shower to clean the body from the mud and to refresh my mind. I did not think of a sleep anymore. I dried the skin and put on a fresh underpants and went to the small kitchen to make an instant coffee with the chicory supplement. I cut two slices from the tasteless mixed-grain bread and spread some margarine on, since the fridge did not offer more. I put the stuff on the veranda table in the small sitting room next to the papers and books. I wrote down the experiences of the weekend and mentioned the terrible lightning that had hit Kristofina fatally. I mentioned also the five-year-old emaciated girl on whom I removed eleven hazelnut-sized stones from the stomach, and the old woman from the Catholic mission hospital in Oshikuku, on whom I removed the badly smelling dead large bowel and connected the living parts by a deep bowel anastomosis.

      It was around six o’clock when I read the two poems of the evening before. I added a second page to the second poem about loneliness and why love is so important in life. I put my life between the details and the smoked cigarettes what is not healthy as other things are not healthy and not human as well in this godforsaken corner of the world. It was Monday morning and humid when sunrise had started. No wind came through the open door. The sun dived the cloud banks into a red-violet ‘fire’ ocean of melancholy. Some rays cut small strips. I left early for the hospital and walked along the road bypassing the puddles and potholes filled with mud water. Several times I had to cross the road from one side to the other. The soggy ground was slippery under the old sandals with the walked-off profile.

      I tried to prevent a landing in the mud by getting hold at a tree stem or stake or post. The two guards at the checkpoint were the same who sat four o’clock with the carbines over their shoulders sleeping and snoring outside of the small control building. These guards greeted and let me pass without asking for the permit. The one guard, who turned in the earlier morning the head signalling that I should pass, was wondering that I obviously did not need a sleep. I reached the hospital where people covered with blankets were waiting in front of the reception. I washed the mud from the feet and sandals and entered the doctors’ dining room for breakfast. I was the first. To the three slices of the tasteless grey bread the warder in the tea kitchen put a boiled egg on the small plate. He brought a tin pot with hot water and put it on the table. A small tin bowl with chicory-added coffee powder and a filled sugar bowl and a milk can and a flat tin container with margarine and two other small tin bowls with chemically refined jam were on the table.

      After a short breakfast with a cup of coffee I went to the wards to look after the patients who were operated in the previous night and day and other patients admitted after bone reduction with immobilizing plaster casts. The five-year-old girl with the eleven stones smiled that she was released from the heavy pains. Her abdomen was soft and the temperature was normal. The intravenous drip ran properly. The old woman after resection of the dead and badly smelling large bowel with a deep anastomosis was in a better condition, though her temperature was still febrile. She was on antibiotics and the intravenous drip was running. The patients with casts after bone reduction were in good condition. Some of them waited for the discharge. I made notes on the observation sheets in the files and filled in the death certificate for Kristofina remembering the eyes in her burnt face telling that she cannot keep up her life that I read her the psalms five and six and the last psalm. I also remembered the dream when Kristofina crossed the last ‘bridge’ and when her soul flew with powerful wings into the universe passing one big star after the other.