Posted By Staff Reporter
Photo courtesy of The ChronicleHerald TIME seems to stand still. And people don’t know their own age. They’ve never seen TVs or telephones or cars or stairs. And they’d never seen a doctor either, until Norm Pinsky crossed “raging rivers” and “flimsy log bridges” and steep jungle mountains to get to their “very remote” window of the world. “It was an amazing privilege,” the former Halifax physician says about his chance of a lifetime — a medical mission to an extremely isolated village in Papua New Guinea that helped save lives. Residents of tiny Painkoni, high in the mountains of the Melanesian country, have no electricity or roads or stores. Or even enough education about the outside world to know that Pinsky couldn’t make the paralyzed walk or the blind see. But many suffered from grave conditions that could have killed them, if the 61-year-old father of five hadn’t flown to an outlying community and then trekked two days through “difficult and dangerous” terrain to get there.
The prelude to his adventure begins around 2004, when he vacationed in Australia and “fell in love with the place.” He moved there with his wife and two youngest children about four years ago. One day, at his practice in Secret Harbour, he spotted a small medical newsletter notice seeking doctors for a mission to the cloistered mountains of Papua New Guinea — east of Indonesia, north of Australia. “I thought about it for half a second and jumped at it,” the Dalhousie Medical School graduate recalls during a telephone interview. So in October 2011, Pinsky visited his first primitive mountain village, albeit more modernized than Painkoni because of nearby religious missionary work. When he returned, his 15-year-old son Will wanted to go back with him. So Pinsky decided to journey even further into the jungle, to a place where time rewinds and people live much like their ancestors did thousands of years ago. A place where only two white men (a priest and a linguist, in the 1990s) had ever been. Where no medical doctors had ever visited. Where people live in wooden, leaf-roofed huts and live off potatoes and insects and frogs and small animals like possum, which they hunt with bow and arrow. And where the only mementos of modernity are the knives or scarce cooking utensils or pieces of clothing sent by missionaries. A local priest warned him not to take such a potentially perilous journey, says the doctor — no stranger to adventure, having raced cars, skydived and volunteered in hurricane-ravaged Honduras. But he thought about that warning many times on his way to Painkoni in April, after sending medical supplies, and word that he was coming, ahead of time. Father and son, with five local guides carrying their gear, then trudged “up and down the steepest mountains I've ever seen in my life,” Pinsky recalls. “And it was so unbelievably difficult and dangerous. I was thinking I was crazy not to listen to that priest. “I’ve always been a hiker (but) this was treacherous.” Even modern footwear didn’t help in such dense high bush or through such narrow walking tracks or across such raging rivers and flimsy log bridges along the way. “It was muddy because it’s a rainforest, lots of roots and just steep inclines,” says Pinsky, who worked in several family medical clinics and as a doctor at the Halifax Correctional Centre during his three decades in Halifax, where he expects to return in about a year. “We had hiking shoes, which proved actually to be a big disadvantage because they would get muddy and slippery and everybody else there is barefoot and they were just so much more sure-footed. “When we would cross those bridges with our muddy boots, I’d have to have somebody holding my hands on either side so that I wouldn’t fall. They had 15 kilos on their back and barefoot, and I’ve got these hiking shoes on, but they’re holding me up.” When they arrived in Painkoni, villagers and people from neighbouring communities flooded toward them like a welcoming party of the afflicted. They came with malaria and meningitis and tuberculosis and severe malnutrition and burns and unhealed broken bones and blindness. And unrealistic expectations about what a doctor can do. “The funniest thing was this fellow who came to get glasses because he heard that glasses could help you read. (He thought) when he put glasses on he would miraculously be able to read English,” Pinsky says. “The biggest thing that they didn’t know was our limitations for treating them. They didn’t know that I couldn’t cure blindness of 20 years or someone who hasn’t been able to walk since birth. They would sometimes carry people for days to see me in the hope that I could fix them. “At first, it was very difficult because I felt very inadequate, but then you just got used to the fact that you did what you could and you explained as much as you could and you educated as much as you could and, you know, what we did was we saved some lives and we made better many others.” He saved some lives by administering simple antibiotics. And he made others better courtesy of peanut butter. That is, after initial grimaces and regurgitation by the swollen-bellied children suffering from severe protein deficiencies. “Most of the children have that. It’s why we brought peanut butter. We thought they were going to love it because we all love peanut butter, but some of them just spat it out immediately.” But the balls and balloons and comic books and other toys they packed helped break the ice between medical treatments and attempts, via an interpreter, to educate. “I would tell people ‘Your child needs more protein; feed your child more insects and frogs.’” Pinsky and party stayed for about a week with the villagers, some wary and fearful of their presence, others friendly, even hugging their visitors. As primitive and dangerous as their existence is, with disease and ignorance and even warring among rival villages, Pinksy found himself a little wistful about their environment. About the simplicity of their secluded lives. And about the common strands of humanity that link us all. “Once you get to know them, they’re just people like you and me,” he says, recalling clusters of children laughing and groups of adults chatting in one of the country’s hundreds of tribal languages. “And yet they don’t have all the things that we have like stairs and running water and shoes and a million different kinds of salad dressing in the store. “They have a very peaceful, quiet, natural existence. They never rush; rushing is a modern invention. They have lots of opportunity to spend time together and talk, and here we’re just so busy, so schedulized. We think we have everything, but I think we miss a lot.” Source: http://thechronicleherald.ca/artslife/125977-a-doctor-s-amazing-privilege Comments are closed.
|