Yet, only a few blocks away, raw sewage flows through a gully by a soccer field. The town's main hospital, meanwhile, is little more than a tattered salve across the health-care wounds of the region. Flies and mosquitoes come and go as if they are part of the staff. Every building needs a paint job. Every floor seems to need a scrubbing.
Barbed wire rings the hospital isolation ward.
In the psychiatric building, patients scream out to visitors. In a small room down the hall, the body of another burn victim who has just died lies on a gurney. But on her first morning in the post-surgical ward, she found herself sitting on beds hugging children who had just come from the operating room and letting them look at their repaired facial scars with mirrors she brought from America. I still find myself anxious. When you take care of kids, you have to be so focused.