Making a Difference

12 Kwanza Sul

KwanzaSul When the nine men were killed I was so angry and horrified I decided to leave the centre the next day and move to our main centreinKwanzaSul.Iwasnotgoingtobepartofthisegomania.Nothing happened to the man responsible since the deaths were regarded as normal war casualties. I didn’t make an issue of it either because I wasn’t sure what was going on. During the struggle one couldn’t always ask questions. One needed to protect oneself during those dark days. From nowhere rumours had started about spies sent by the enemy to infiltrate the SWAPO movement. At one point it got so serious I started fearing my own shadow. So I just packed my jeep and left the centre. Monika came to join me shortly afterwards. After many years I met this same camp commander in Windhoek and he tried to be very nice to me, but deep down I knew what he did during the struggle. There are such people walking around with blood on their hands. Anybody who is in a revolution knows there are ups and downs, particularly when you are fighting against a powerful enemy. We didn’t escape that, and we had two episodes of internal conflict; fortunately they were both contained and we continued with our struggle for independence. Morenga Village AfterleavingMavuluCentreIwenttoworkatourmaincentreinKwanza Sul near Kalulo. The camp commander was very happy to receive me and I built myself a cosy little house and a school to train nurses because there were many deaths amongst the children. A Finnish NGO provided us with five big prefabricated classrooms and we build pit latrines for the students, in what I called Morenga Village, after Jacob Morenga, one of our Namibian heroes from the war of genocide. He died in 1907 in the Nama resistance against German colonial forces. 109 Kwanza Sul It was maybe a blessing in disguise that there was a hospital in the main centre, which I took over, and where we also treated Angolan patients. Shortly after I arrived there I would hear gun shots almost every day. On inquiring who was shooting whom, I was told that it was funerals, mainly of children. One morning I went to the hospital and found lots of ‘nurses’ in white uniforms. I was informed that these nurses were perhaps not fully qualified which accounted for the high mortality amongst children under the age of five. That gave me the idea of opening a training school for our nurses. I had learnt early on that, before embarking on the road to any change, it’s very important to prepare the final destination, meaning that Plan B must be in place before executing Plan A. Having that in mind, I decided to establish the facility for training first before dealing with those unqualified ‘nurses’. I can’t stop repeating this philosophy of always having alternatives before acting on an issue that might disadvantage people. I observed quietly what was wrong and soon discovered why so many children were dying: it was from an overdose of drugs. They were being given chloroquine injections up to 5cc for malaria and, as soon as the needle was withdrawn, they died. In conditions of war there are many rumours and sometimes you need to cover your back by establishing irrefutable facts before you act, otherwise you may be accused of all sorts of things. The steps I was going to take would be drastic and I needed to be careful and do things properly. After I finished the building of the training school, I found a teacher and with the help of some friends, I prepared the curriculum for training enrolled nurses. Once everything was prepared, I was ready for the battle. I turned my attention to these white-uniformed people, who were about 90 in number. I set them an examination asking very simple questions, such as the range of normal blood pressure, how you treat malaria, what is an antibiotic and what do you use it for, etc. The results I got were such that I dismissed 69 of them who had no clue about the answers. The rest of them, who were trainable, went to start at the nursing school at Morenga Village. The ones I had dismissed went on the warpath, accusing me of colonialism and even of supporting the notorious South African apartheid President, P. W. Botha, who was responsible for our misery. One even said that I was Botha! I realized [3.142.98.108] Project...