Our African Adventure: blue canary in the outlet by the light switch who watches over you

The first few days after we got back from Cape Town there was terrible weather, heavy rains, crazy storms on the Eastern Cape (the picture to the right not meant to illustrate the bad weather). Because of this weather and because the penguins on Bird Island are breeding later in the season than usual, so the chicks are younger and weaker than they normally would be, over 600 chicks on Bird Island died because of the storms. That’s from just under 800 breeding pairs. Tragic… especially since the African penguin has just recently been moved from the “vulnerable” list to “endangered.” Through this mayhem, the lighthouse rehab received 7 chicks and 3 injured adult penguins. So Michaelle and I have been busying ourselves with these cuties, as well as with a number of necropsies since we also received some cadavers of chicks from both Bird Island and St. Croix Island. It’s a very sad situation and not looking good for these guys.

Michaelle and I with two of the penguin chicks

Thursday I went with Lynne to Port Elizabeth because she needed to have a mammogram done and wanted a friend to accompany her (and Gordon couldn’t go because one of them needed to be at work, running the bar). So I got to experience Livingston, the government-funded hospital where all the people go who cannot afford to go to the private hospitals. The idea of the government using tax money to provide affordable health care for the people is a great one. However, the hospital actually sees very little of the money that is designated for this purpose. It gets lost somewhere up at the top and falls into some private pockets. As a result, the people receive very poor health care. Livingston is a pretty horrendous place. It very much resembles a prison. But I’m glad that I got to experience it. I think the main thing that blew my mind was that even though 90% of the patients are dying from complications due to AIDS, there is no separation of the immune-compromised people from others who carry diseases that aren’t necessarily life-threatening to someone with a fully functioning immune system, but can be deadly to an AIDS patient. Apparently the number one disease that patients with AIDS die from at the hospital is tuberculosis. The second is pneumonia. The sanitary conditions at Livingston are pretty terrible as well. Lynne advised me to avoid the bathrooms there as they are rarely cleaned properly and they do not have toilet paper. Last year she was in the hospital with a brain aneurysm and was without a bed and without food for three days. I remember from a conversation I had with Trudi a while back that South African doctors receive some of the best training in the world but they all go off to practice medicine in other countries because they do not have the resources here to practice proper medicine. So most of the doctors that come to practice here are from other African countries that maybe do not receive as good training. Anyway, such was my very limited experience with the South African healthcare system.

In other news, Michaelle and I spent all day Saturday at Addo wildlife reserve which is a little east of P.E. One of the volunteers at the lighthouse, Carla, and her boyfriend, Gareth, very kindly drove us there and gave us a great tour of the reserve. I will let Michaelle tell about that experience in more detail, but I will share a few of the many many pictures that I took.