Despite criticism, Cuban doctors work in places where South African doctors refuse to go, reports Dawn Blalock
THE child on his mother’s lap is breathing in short quick breaths. The mother describes his symptoms in Setswana.
“How many days with the fever?” the doctor asks in English. Although neither English nor Setswana is his native language, he recognises key words.
After examining the drooping child, he turns to his assistant: “Order an ambulance.”
The mother, although she doesn’t speak English, visibly tenses at the word “ambulance”. Tears stream down her face.
“Mama, don’t worry,” says Dr Nilmido Sosa Daz, patting her hand. “Tell her it is better for her and her baby to go to the hospital. Tell her it may not be tuberculosis. And it’s not going to cost anything,” he says to his assistant and translator.
Daz (32) is the first doctor at the Nelson Mandela Clinic in Bekkersdal on the West Rand since it opened three years ago. He has been there for eight months.
He sets a relentless pace, seeing a patient every 10 minutes from 8.30am until 4pm, emptying the unlit hallway lined on both sides with sick people from the squatter camp across the road.
His cases are typical maladies of squatter camp existence: tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases, high blood pressure, and accidents such as the woman who had paraffin thrown into her eye during a fight. Going there this week the clinic resembled a school as it teemed with small children coming for vaccinations in a “beat polio” campaign.
Patients usually leave with a packet of free medicine, a detailed explanation and often a generous handful of condoms with Daz’s encouragement to use them.
Daz is one of nearly 300 Cuban doctors working in South Africa under Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma’s programme to shore up inadequate health resources. The programme has come under fire amid allegations that the doctors lack both skills and language – even the Interim Medical and Dental Council, formerly a staunch ally, has recommended it be put on hold for a year.
Daz, however, has little time for the controversy. He divides his weekdays between two clinics in Bekkersdal. On alternate weekends he works in the emergency room at Leratong Hospital in Kagiso. In whatever is left of the afternoons he ventures into the community to visit patients at their homes.
He doesn’t mind the 40-patient-a-day workload. “I came here for work,” he says, leaving his wife, also a doctor, and as yet unseen four-month old daughter in Cuba.
He earns about R7 000 a month, with 30% earmarked for his government. The Health Department says his salary compares with a South African doctor with the same experience.
“Most Cubans don’t think about work in terms of money,” he says. “I won’t leave my country. I cannot change life by money,” he says.
Zuma’s representative, Vincent Hlongwane, says the programme has been a “resounding success”. He brushes off the medical council’s concerns. “We need more doctors from Cuba and from other countries,” he adds.
But those at the receiving end of the criticisms feel bruised and baffled. Cuban doctors, they note, are deployed all over the world: South Africa is one of 43 recipients.
“They are out there working where South African doctors refuse to go,” says Elio Savon, political counsellor at the Cuban Embassy. “In other countries the gratitude is much more than the criticism. But in South Africa it is the opposite.”
Back at the clinic, Daz’s assistant barges into his consulting room. The ambulance is here but the mother and child cannot be found. Someone saw them disappearing into the squatter camp.
“That really hurts me,” Daz says. In Cuba, he would have arranged for the child to be treated at home. He knows he’ll never find her in the camp. Now he is trying to make home treatment the practice in Bekkersdal.
But he says with a shrug, “I’m only one.”