Poverty

It's hard for us to imagine the life in Mozambique with a shockingly high child mortality rate. It's even harder for me to read the stories haranguing the Swedish doctor Hans Rosling serving an emergency clinic in Mozambique.

Better known for writing another bestselling book Factfulness, Hans Rosling has written a memoir How I Learned to Understand the World. 

I admitted that his stories are indeed opening our eyes to poverty outside our comfort zone. And it is impossible to read without ooh and ahh. 

One late afternoon in the hospital, Hans Rosling met an elderly with a leg fractured, as carried in by her two sons. The ends of the broken bone were protruding through her skin. There were no X-ray machine and he had run out of anaesthetics. Hans Rosling had not much choice; he asked two nurses take hold of the patient under her armpits and the strongest junior nurse to pull the foot in the opposite direction. After much grappling, he managed to line up the fracture surfaces and close the wound, stitch the skin margins and put her entire limb in a plaster cast. 

Next morning, the patient insisted on leaving hospital, when she was not supposed to put any weight on the leg. I could imagine furrowed brows of Hans Rosling, who tried to explain in sign language, in vain. He then discovered that something had gone very wrong: the immobilised foot was pointing sideways instead of forward. He simply forgot to check alignment before putting on a plaster cast. To his chagrin, he could not persuade the patient to let him reset the foot.

"Doctor, my hens might get stolen so I have to leave," the old lady insisted. 

Hans Rosling never saw her again but learned later she had survived. The plaster had cracked and fallen off after a month and her foot was utterly misaligned. That badly shaped foot didn't bother the patient as long as her chickens were all right.

"When you work in a place of extreme poverty, don't try to do things perfectly," said his mentor who had been a mission doctor all her life. "All you will accomplish is wasting time and resources that could be put to better use."

That's a lesson Hans Rosling learned from the old lady too.