For reference, our police post doesn’t enjoy the most useful transport facilities. We have a bicycle that I suspect was a gift from Noah. Yes, the same dude who built the Ark and swam out the floods for five months. For the last five years, its rear wheel has been flat, and it’s a local miracle that the front one still seems to function.
I mean, if someone chops off their toes with a jembe, we don’t even have a cooler to sustain the amputated digits for transport to hospital. Or even ferry the bleeding patient for treatment. I kid you not, some denizens have had to take pregnant women to the clinic on a cart. As a story of birth, only a manger rivals being born in a speeding donkey cart.
Most of the residents here are quite aware of our predicament but will still appraise us of their urgent situations and expect us to do something about it. I guess it’s probably like a reflex action. Like blinking, or pretending you were scratching your head after waving to someone who wasn’t waving at you.
One expectant woman who went into labour suddenly expected me to know how to deliver a baby in the middle of a field. Yes, she had been working on her farm until the last day.
“Is it crowning?” she asked me.
“A crown?” I asked in all honesty. “Is your baby royalty or something?”
“Are you kidding me right now? I’m asking if you can see its head.”
Honestly, I was doing my best to look everywhere but where the baby was supposed to arrive at. Mothers must be lucky nature didn’t allow me to become a doctor.
Or the time I was called to a house where a man had a light bulb stuck where the sun doesn’t shine. You know where.
“How does something like this even happen?” I asked.
“I was… I was cleaning while naked,” replied the man, who appeared to be in considerable discomfort. “I fell on it.”
“You fell on it? And rather than breaking it went up your tooshie?”
“Are you going to take me to the hospital or are we staying here playing 20 questions?”
It’s the same thing today as I respond to a call at the edge of the village. The first thing I notice is a severed finger smeared with blood. Immediately, I pick up the amputated limb and call for its owner before he or she bleeds to death. “Whose finger is this?”
A woman pulls me into the house. “That’s not the
emergency.”
“What do you mean it’s not an emergency?” I ask. “Someone is missing a finger!”
She leads me to another older lady lying on her back and the floor. A young man is fanning her.
“It’s my mum,” says the lad. “She fainted.”
“I get that,” I say, “and we’ll get to her in a minute. However, there’s a bigger emergency. A person cut off his finger. Where is he? Or she?”
“It’s me.” The boy shows me his hands. “See? I’m fine.”
“How is that? You had 11 fingers?”
“No, dumbass. I played a prank on my mother and she
fainted. Can you please take her to the hospital?”
What I want most is to lock the boy in jail and toss the keys.
