Operation Smile is a non-profit and therefore relies heavily on private donors and corporate sponsors to make these surgical missions possible. In Kinshasa, there were plentiful sponsors of dinners. These generous sponsors would host a dinner feeding all 150 of us. During our first dinner, I was taken aback by the opulence and grandeur restaurants with the nicest food and environment. I felt more like I was in an expensive LA joint rather than in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country infamous for poverty, sexual violence and war. Another night, a dinner was hosted at a golf resort with a 5 star hotel interior and also at a fancy outdoor Tahiti themed Indian restaurant and a third dinner at a French Club with table settings and room making me mistake our dinner for a wedding reception.
The income gap is so striking. I am surprised at how expensive things are in Kinshasa, in many of the wealthier places, food costs more than what I would pay in LA. The cost of living is tremendously high. My research team and I would spend our days collecting now from the non cleft affected control population meaning we would give the same survey to moms and babies without cleft lip and palate so that we can later compared what difference is it between those with clefts and those without clefts that may contribute to cleft development. We went to Kinshasa General Hospital where there were about 12-20 new mothers and their babies in a dingy dirt-layered room with eroded window screen coverings and lack of fan or air conditioning. It was great to see how different this hospital was compared to Clinique Ngliama, the nicer middle-class and wealthy public hospital where our mission was held. Even our translators described Kinshasa General as “dirty” when we curiously asked us about where we were going next. In between surveying and collecting spit, we same about a dozen dead bodies being carried right before us. The harrowing wails from probable mothers, wives and relatives filled my stomach with empathy and my heart with sorrow.
I was horrified when I learned from my translators why there were some women in the newborn maternity wards with 6 week or 3 month old babies. If a mother gives birth at Kinshasa General and is unable to settle the daily bill of about $30 USD per night, she is kept there with her baby until she can pay. In the meantime, the bill continues to accumulate, trapping her in more and more debt. Our one translator said that they prevent the women from leaving the area for fear that they will abandon their baby and not pay the bill. The debtor’s prison set-up is incredibly shocking. I still wonder what eventually happens to the women who are completely unable to pay. Someone told me that once in awhile a wealthy person will bail them out but I doubt that happens all that often.
Another hospital where we collect controls from is Roi Baudoin (impossible for me to pronounce in French). The drive to this hospital takes us to the heart of the slums of Kinshasa which fairly remind me of a mix of the African clothes and carrying of materials on heads in Tanzania mixed with the hustle and bustle of the markets in Port-au-Prince. We drive momentarily on a large dirt road passing by a makeshift lumber area, goat selling shack and multiple micro-economies under umbrellas before entering the hospital. Pleasantly, the hospital is brand new, much cleaners than Kinshasa General and services the poor. The downside is that the women have to sleep with their newborn babies and another woman and her newborn baby on a tiny twin bed cramped with about 20 other mom/baby pairs in a stuffy hot room. We were able to recruit many more survey participants at this hospital since the numbers were larger, the hospital services were less expensive and more moms wanted to participate.
After the team and I spend the day seeing people with degrading health conditions, newborns stuffed like sausages in rooms and passing by the slums, we return to our $300/night hotel and straight to the fancy dinners that I would not be able to afford otherwise. Most of us remark on the team about the sort of culture shock that happens in the span of a few hours and how if we were not researching the general population, we would pretty much only see the hotel and Clinique Ngliama. You can’t help but think about how the rich are probably getting richer and benefitting at the expense of the poor. Without anti-trust regulations that prevent monopolies of markets, Kinshasa is a hotbed for opportunistic foreigners to launch their businesses. So the few elite live amongst a corrupt government, pollution on the streets, occasional political instability and constant demands from police for money while they are stopped in traffic, all to be able to continue their booming businesses and live a life of extreme luxury.
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