Harrowing

I feel like very occasionally on blip I’ve documented a harrowing day, and this was one of them.

Towards the end of day I was on a call and I received a message that there had been an emergency involving my team. One of our project vehicles had had a serious accident on the journey between Dar es Salaam and southern Tanzania. Two colleagues had been badly hurt and the driver’s wife who was travelling with them, had sadly not made it.

My colleagues in Dar es Salaam rallied around to coordinate between the authorities in the village where the accident had happened, the insurance company and medical support in Dar es Salaam, who dispatched a car to start the four hour journey to the crash site. It was notable to me how much the organisation, with the relatively flexible resources of a large NGO, was doing to coordinate the rescue and response. It was a very human approach in a place where local government authorities lack the resources to carry out their own response. I was very perturbed to contemplate their long road journey before they could be properly assessed or given pain relief for a host of suspected head injuries and bone breaks.

Some of us prepared to be at the hospital for their arrival. I was due to have dinner with a colleague from our France office whose trip I’d helped to organise, which I still went ahead with as it was hours until our colleagues would arrive at the hospital.

At some point in the middle of the night the car arrived with our colleagues bloodied and weak in the back. I’ve got a track record of my imagination causing me to faint when contemplating a gruesome scene. So why break the habit of a lifetime. As they were being moved onto stretchers the groans of pain made me feel dizzy. I went around the corner and the next thing was waking up face down in the grass with a split nose. How utterly ridiculous.

I found a tap designed for watering the garden and cleaned my face and then somehow rejoined the group without having been seen topple over. Thank goodness, because with the serious injuries being tended to fifty metres away, the last thing anyone needed was a squeamish Brit stealing the attention.

Later we visited the morgue as one of our other vehicles was the only thing available to transport the body of the driver’s wife. It was a sobering moment seeing her being wheeled inside.