It's not exactly the Triangle Trade, but the motivation is the same: cheap labor for the jobs the Citizens of the Empire generally find beneath them in pay, status or both. The impact on Africa of losing these professionals at the current rate is devastating…spend any amount of time in a hospital and you'll know how vital nurses are. But instead of paying them properly and/or keeping the working conditions sane, it's much less expensive to import folks.
This is about England's happy practice of recruiting in Africa to cover their own nursing shortage, but the USofA participates in the harvest as well.
An Exodus of African Nurses Puts Infants and the Ill in Peril
By CELIA W. DUGGER
ILONGWE, Malawi — Six women suddenly went into the final, agonized minutes of childbirth. Hlalapi Kunkeyani was the only nurse. There were no doctors.
Panicky cries rent the fetid air of the ward, a cavernous space jammed with 20 women laboring in beds, on benches, even on the concrete floor. Mrs. Kunkeyani worked with intense concentration, her face glowing with sweat, but she was overwhelmed.
Four of the babies arrived in a rush without her to ease their passage into the world. She found one trapped between his mother's legs with the umbilical cord wrapped around his chest. The face of another was smeared with his mother's feces. Yet a third lay still on his mother's breast, desperate to breathe. The nurse swiftly suctioned his tiny mouth until at last he gulped a breath.
Mrs. Kunkeyani, 36, is the stalwart nurse in charge of this capital city's main labor ward, where 10 overworked nurse midwives deliver more than 10,000 babies a year. But soon, she will vanish from this impoverished nation, joining thousands of African nurses streaming away from their AIDS-haunted continent for rich countries, primarily Britain.
"My friends are telling me there's work there, there's money there," said Mrs. Kunkeyani, who will soon make in a day's overtime in Britain what she earns in a month in Malawi. "They're telling me I'm wasting my time here."
The nursing staffs of public health systems across the poor countries of Africa — grossly insufficient to begin with — are being battered by numerous factors that include attrition and AIDS. But none are creating greater anxiety in Africa than the growing flight of nurses discouraged by low pay and grueling conditions.
The result of the nursing crisis — the neglect of the sick — is starkly apparent here on the dilapidated wards of Lilongwe Central Hospital, where a single nurse often looks after 50 or more desperately ill people. What is equally visible is the boon to Britain, where Lilongwe Central's former nurses minister to the elderly in the carpeted lounges of nursing homes and to patients in hushed private hospital rooms.
Posted by P6 at July 12, 2004 08:23 AM
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Comments
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This is all well and good, but how about looking at it from the nurses point of view as well? Can you imagine what it's like to spend your life slaving away for a pittance in some country where "government" is nothing more than an excuse to rob the people blind, and the only medicine available in the hospitals is Paracetamol? I can, because that's what I lived under for many years.
Those nurses who get to escape to the UK or the USA aren't just bettering their own lot - in most cases they're the ones who make a difference between teetering on the edge of starvation and having a decent existence for entire families they've left behind. It's easy to imagine that these nurses are somehow being recruited at the expense of the people of their native lands, but the fact is that there's just not much a nurse can do with his or her skills when the X-ray machines don't work, there's no electricity for 20 hours in a day, the only "bandages" available are rags, booze is the sole anesthetic, and the only treatment available even for cancer is a tablet of Aspirin - and if one is unlucky, even that might be fake Aspirin.
This is one situation where talk of "neocolonialism" simply has nothing to do with what's really going on. I can cite any number of relations of mine who went through the ordeal of getting a decent medical education abroad only to end up doing nothing with their skills once they got back home. At least this way these nurses get to actually utilize what they've learnt while making a decent living for themselves.
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I have no issues with the nurses. But in this post I'm not looking at things on a human level any more than those who set the policies do.
Posted by P6 at July 12, 2004 11:59 AM