Upon receipt of a B. S. degree in biology, an acquaintance of mine — let's call her Linda — decided to spend the summer in Asia working at a small medical clinic that had a staffing shortage. The clinic was near a major river on whose banks were crowded thousands of families living in small, densely-packed hovels whose heaped-together mass stretched as far as the eye could see.
Meanwhile, the shacks, tents and slapdash dwellings did not have access to electricity, indoor plumbing, nor cooking facilities. Consequently, hoards of people spent countless hours every day trekking to locate semi-private spots to undertake their toileting and find materials that could be burned for outdoor pit cooking. They, also, spent an inordinate amount of time trekking to and from the river to collect water for food preparation, cleaning and baths, as well as for any livestock and small gardens that a minority of the households maintained.
In addition, many people would become unwell from drinking the river water, particularly because lots of fecal waste, garbage and trash inevitably wound up in its currents. Especially young children whose immune systems were not fully functional and elders became stricken with intestinal infections, and would, doubled over with cramps, drag themselves to the clinic, a claustrophobic closet-like facility, for any sort of cure.
However, there was such a shortage of medicine that nothing of real value could be offered and, certainly, no one could suggest that avoidance of the river water was a necessity in order to make the illness, whichever type it was, permanently go away. As such, only sympathy could be offered, along with any other needed treatments that actually were available.
These included antiseptic ointment and gauze for wounds, splints made from slender tree branches for broken limbs, several other items and suggestions for bed rest, the latter of which was often an impossibility since one needed to move about to get the river water, fuel (primarily animal dung and small scraps of brush) and food from hawkers that included river fish and eels for meal preparation. On account, many people's health further deteriorated to the point that they prematurely died and, then, another problem arose.
This additional difficulty concerned a way to dispose of the bodies since the majority of the deceased persons' kinfolk did not have sufficient funds to carry out burials or cremations. As such, the waterway served another function, which was corpse recipient, and Linda noted that, nearly every day, bloated water-logged remains could be seen quietly gliding downstream.
A compassionate person, she found the sight disturbing and, while she enjoyed aiding individuals as best as she could at the treatment center, she felt largely helpless during her experience there. On account, she came to realize that, while she was grateful for the small remedies that she could provide in some instances, she really could not change much in the quality of life for the often desperate mobs, who patiently sorted themselves out so as to line up every day in a continual stream seeking help that, more often than not, couldn't be rendered.
Meanwhile, her realizing her limits was simultaneously sad, humbling and vexing. After all, it is demoralizing to have great hopes to help the world improve and learn that certain troubles are so great in magnitude that one will always feel insufficient unless he chooses to focus on the few small successes that he does occasionally manage to pull off. With such a conflicted understanding, she was relieved upon coming back to the USA after her summer job abroad was over.
At the same time, she felt grateful for the medical care, reasonable homes, clean water, indoor plumbing and food stores available in America. In a flash, she came to realize the reason that so many legal and illegal migrants want to come to first world nations even if those countries have job shortages.
It's really quite simple in the end. The alternatives seem dreadful.
Especially they would be so, she surmised, when their rivers and other water sources dry up after the glaciers that feed them disappear on account of climate change factors. She wondered about what they would do then.
Considering that the 18,000-year-old Bolivian Chacaltaya glacier, on which 77 million people rely for water, recently disappeared shocked her. She didn't wish to imagine that the many people who she'd met in Asia would, eventually, face the same plight.
Where would they all move? How would they eek out a living? Who would feed them and provide a new source of water? Where would they find homes and a sufficient number of healthcare clinics? She couldn't imagine any realistic answers to her questions.
