Missionary Position

U.S. doctor to Ab, circa 2005. “Sounds like that prolapsed mitral valve has a good bit of back-flow. Just keep taking antibiotics before you have any dental work. And be thankful—heh, heh—that the heart murmur kept you out of Vietnam.”

Ab (silently). “He can tell me about medicine, but there is nothing in this world he can tell me about life.”

Present Days

I am acquainted with a lot of highly intelligent people (especially the readers of this blog), but my mother may be the smartest person I know. Weeks before I left the States, my mother suggested that I see a dentist and pick up some amoxicillin in case I needed emergency dental care in Zimbabwe. Of course my mother was smart enough to know that I’d pay her no attention on this detail, so she acquired the antibiotic herself and stuck it into my luggage. And I’ve started taking it.

On the morning of 4 October, while eating cold rice for breakfast, I chomped down upon a small stone and broke off the rear-lingual quadrant of right-upper M2. Now please note that I am not complaining about the rice! If it had not been a bit stony (& broken into small pieces), my rice would be in South Africa right now, feeding some engineer who’s designing a soccer stadium for World Cup 2010. No, over the past month I’ve developed enough Zimbabwe-smarts to value a big bag of rice more than 25% of a second molar. But I did want to get the tooth fixed: it attracted my tongue too much, and associated discomfort was interfering with my daydreams of sugary desserts.

So I decided to take off a bit of Friday and see a dentist in Mutare. Now I do not like visiting dentists. (A partial exception is Kathy Nicholson. Hearing her gossip about George Shiflet can be worth a week’s pay and a bit of dental pain.) But the Missionary Position on illness & injury is, “If it’s broke in the field, try to get it fixed in the field.” So, I walked into our Faculty secretary’s office and asked her where I might get my tooth repaired. The super-efficient Mrs. Ruwo dialed a phone number, spoke a few words in Shona, and then drew me a map to the office of Dr. E. Kuzomunhu.

Dr. Kuzomunhu’s office is in a multi-purpose building on Robert Mugabe Street. On one side is the Sanhanga Walk-In Surgery Clinic. (I assume that some folks also walk out, but this is not explicitly guaranteed.) On the other side is a street-front church that was holding choir-practice. Diagonally opposite the church is a shop selling used adventure novels, many with covers that feature scantily-clad white women. A former colleague of Vivian Fisher once wrote exactly such books, and in better humor I might have scanned the shelves for a vintage Lon Bean, but on Friday I had other things on my mind.

When I entered Dr. Kuzomunhu’s waiting room, I immediately noted a bright florescent light—which proved that Mutare’s electrical power was on for the afternoon and thereby relieved my anxiety about foot-pedal drills. Dr. K’s smiling receptionist gave me a hand-written medical-history form, and I made myself sound as healthy as possible. Then, well trained in the ways of health-care professionals, she asked, “Are you on National Health Insurance?” Well, I should be on NHI, but I still do not have a work permit. (Don’t breathe a word about that to Uncle Bobby!) So I had to admit that I was one of the uninsured. She frowned and said, “Then this will be a little bit expensive.” I swallowed hard but agreed to pay whatever.

The inner sanctum of Dr. Kuzomunhu’s office was separated from Reception by a head-high partition. The equipment available did not transmit me back to the ‘Fifties, but we didn’t quite make it to the ‘Eighties either. On the plus side, Dr. K had a super-cute assistant, but she didn’t assist very much, and I ended up holding some of the equipment. “Do you want an injection?” the doctor asked. “It will make the procedure even more expensive.” An injection? You bet! I am a total dental coward, and I didn’t care one whit what substance Dr. K would inject or which bank I’d rob in order to pay him.

I suppose that Dr. Kuzomunhu worked for about 45 minutes, lecturing me about how I should brush more and about how I should return to him soon for cleaning and routine maintenance. Nothing hurt; the rubber gloves tasted brand-new, and the choir next door was practicing “Immortal, Invisible God Only Wise.” What more could one ask from a visit to the dentist (uh, except Shiflet gossip)? The receptionist took a gosh-awful long time working up my bill, and then she said, “That will be five million three hundred thousand dollars.” It was a shocking total, perhaps approaching, at current exchange levels, eleven U.S. dollars.

Thus it seems that the Missionary Position about semi-routine dental care is correct. Indeed, if I get some free time later this semester, I’ll revisit Dr. K to have my teeth cleaned, and Friday’s dental experience—from reception to discharge—seems quite humorous to me. But, after all, it was just a tooth, and our U.Meth missionaries sometimes have real problems. “We try to make friends with an Ex-Pat doctor,” they say. And then they tell me about hard drives on moonless nights with blood all over the backseat of a third-hand Peugeot sedan. “Still,” they continue, “we’re so much luckier than the real people here in Zimbabwe.” That luck is very dear to anyone raised in the USA.

In January of ’08, I’ll help advise a Wofford Interim group that will make a very brief visit to southern Africa. Appropriately, a major Interim objective will be “to experience African culture.” Therefore the students will probably want to hear some music, see a dance, maybe catch a glimpse of family life on the world’s most child-friendly continent. And yet our students will not (I pray) experience a salient, defining characteristic of Africa’s current culture. In an African village, when you break a tooth, you live with it—because, even if you could find transport, “$5,000,000” sounds the same way in a Zimbabwean mud hut that it sounds in a South Carolina brick bungalow. Here or there, five million bucks sure as hell ain’t dentist-money. In Zimbabwe’s Communal Areas, if you are old and sick, perhaps you’ll see a missionary doctor, or perhaps somebody will take you, once, to a government clinic in a distant town. But in the night, when those coronary arteries fail, when the unbearable pain radiates like electricity down your left arm, well, the best you can hope for is that some old woman will wipe your forehead with cool water and sing “Immortal, invisible, God only wise….”

In high school I hated Greek mythology. I mean, I absolutely hated it. It seemed to me that the gods were always pussy-footing around the edge of life. They’d slide down from Mount Olympus to drink a little wine and indulge in a gluttonous feast or two. If the moon was right, perhaps they’d seduce some gullible Homo sap—or, if they were especially bored, the gods might stir up a small war & observe a bit of human evisceration for their divine amusement. The kicker, of course, was that the Greek gods were immune to death, and therefore they could not be real heroes. Sure, being gods, they knew a whole lot of neat stuff—uh, like if they’d been more generous, they could have taught us how to make fire. But what could they teach us about life, those worthless gods who could not die?

OK, folks, that’s as close to a confession of the Christian faith as you’re likely to get out of me. And having a tooth fixed locally is probably about as close to the Missionary Position as I’ll ever, dare I say, stand. In other words, there’s no way, no way that I want to experience the full reality of current African culture! But still, I work for the U.Meths, not the worthless-ass Zeus. And so, sometimes, I wonder what I am supposed to do. I really, really wonder.