Ostentatious owners

23/04/12

I am a person who really doesn't like it when people are all up in my space. However, it seems that you cannot survive as a white vet in Karamoja if you stay with this attitude. Today a man came to our doors saying he had sick cattle that we needed to see, all he could tell us was one symptom for each of them. It was our day off, a day to ourselves when we don't treat animals, but this man would not take no for an answer, every time we'd say please come on Monday we can treat them then he would say, ‘ok I come at 4:30 this afternoon?’ Um… No. ‘5 o'clock then? Ok I'll come then’. No!

At 5pm he came and I went out to see that he had brought every cow he owns to us. I waited for them to get a hold of the sick animal (we have no cattle crush here so they just whistle and grab the horns) and then as I started the physical examination and tried to work out what was wrong with the bull, the owner wouldn't stop repeating the one symptom he knew. He could speak English, which is a rare thing, but he wasn't the best at it :) I somehow also suspected, as time went on, that he liked the sound of his own voice. It turned out that the one symptom he was repeating, the cow did not have, changing the diagnosis completely.

In addition to that, imagine trying to listen to lung sounds, the heart rate and rumination noise while you have three to five men talking loudly around you. However, as soon as I told them to be quiet, they were, which was good. I think somehow they knew that you don't want to upset the young, white, animal doctor girl with a rectal thermometer in her hand. Worst was still to come for me though as I told the owner the treatment, saying the bull needed an oral dewormer and then he replied "no you give vaccination for antibiotics".

Firstly, that sentence makes no sense as vaccination and antibiotics are two different things and secondly, the bull needs neither. I struggled to know how to tell him this though. Lesson of the day, how do you keep your cool and stay respectful when you are becoming frustrated to the core of your being?

Then, haha, as I ignored the men all around me trying to tell me what to do I gave it the treatment for intestinal worms, having to tell the boy holding the bull’s head "quap, quap, quap!!!", which means 'down', maybe I had become the one liking the sound of my own voice but I tried to explain to them that you cannot hold the animal's head to the sky when inserting medicine into the mouth as it may go into the lungs. It sounded better in my mind than when I tried to explain it to them. Language can really be a barrier here, as can owners, who do what this man did next.

We looked at the next poor cow that was sick and it had severely laboured breathing and a fever, looking like a form of pneumonia. So, as I am giving the treatment, injecting an antibiotic into the hindlimb muscles, the owner actually tried to take the syringe from me! Seriously! I was so shocked I am surprised I got all the medicine in. For the first time in my life I had to defend my position and tell an elder man to back away and let me do what I came here to. Miriam, who was watching, said she was impressed, she said, you know that's what you got to do around here, you gotta be tough, even when you don't feel like you are.

It was honestly a very stressful half hour to hour long treatment time, and the longer I was out there, the more people came to watch including a group of shepherd boys who unfortunately did not knowing the meaning of personal space, all trying to get a good look at what the thermometer says or 'where will she stick that needle' or 'ooh what is in that hoof there?' So... it turns out I need personal space. Who knew? ;)