Providing Dignity to the Dying

I only wanted to accompany Gibson to his voluntary service. And so, by chance, I met Hari and have gotten an idea of what humane means ever since.

We met at UNZA, the University of Zambia, and I followed him across the extensive grounds of the beautifully landscaped campus to the adjacent Kalingalinga neighbourhood in the east of Lusaka. The vicinity is called a “high density area” and after only a few steps I realized that this was just a euphemism for slum. We encountered people wearing old clothes from Europe. Worn shirts bore the names of European football clubs or landmarks like the Colosseum, and on one shirt I spotted the faded inscription “25 Jahre Reisebüro Müller”. I would have liked to take a photo of the latter, but Gibsons warned me to respect the people and leave the camera in my pocket. Besides, as a white person, it is very dangerous to walk through the unpaved streets. We were immediately approached by young men staggering in the middle of the day and Gibson managed to avoid them inconspicuously. Maybe they were drinking or sniffing chemicals, – he couldn’t explain that to me either. But narcotics were not the big problem. The biggest challenge is the so-called “flying toilets”, as they are known in slums all over the world. When I asked him about it, he explained that there was no sewage system at all and that people therefore used plastic bags to dispose of their urine and deposited them as far as possible from their homes. We came to a hospital run by the Sisters of Charity, which was not yet our destination, however, and where a long queue of emaciated figures was waiting for treatment and medication. As we passed, I looked at a woman’s makeshift pus wounds and for a moment our eyes met.

After these impressions, I was all the more surprised when we came to “Our Lady’s Hospice” and thus to a complex that resembled a wellness facility compared to the dirty mud-brick huts with corrugated iron roofs! Small cottages were lined up around a well-kept green area, each accommodating five rooms with two patients. Haripriya came to meet us and I immediately liked her. The petite young woman was full of energy and greeted me with alert brown eyes, “You can call me Hari!” The people in the beds are preparing to die, she explained, it is supposed to be a dignified and quiet place. “We want to be humane to the people of Kalingalinga,” she emphasized as firmly as lovingly.

Only later did I learn that Hari was actually a management consultant from Chennai and took over the management during a sabbatical, according to the motto: “Providing Dignity to the Dying”.