Not all of the private pharmacies obtain their drugs illicitly. Owners of the tiny Lodja pharmacies typically buy medicines from middlemen in Goma, who in turn get their supplies from looters and from legitimate drug companies, local doctors and aid workers say. The pharmacies generally pay 2% of their purchase price to an "airplane agent" to deliver cash to the middlemen and fly the drugs back. The pharmacies then turn around and sell the drugs for Congolese francs and U.S. dollars. Townspeople and rural villagers, who trek in from miles away, can sometimes scrape the purchase price together by pooling family resources or by panning diamonds in the river. They sell the gems to passing soldiers or redeem them for cash at Lodja's numerous so-called diamond shops -- which aside from the open-air market appear to be the only other commercial enterprise in town.
Dr. [Jean-Martin Malaba] operates a similar pharmacy and a tiny private clinic next door to his home. A metal scale for weighing babies hangs out front of the whitewashed clinic. Inside is Dr. Malaba's only other true piece of medical equipment: an old microscope borrowed years ago from a Belgian nurse. Most nights, the yard outside the clinic serves as an informal gathering place, where Dr. Malaba's neighbors, 12 children and two wives come to share stories as chickens peck in the dust.
When Dr. Malaba, along with much of Lodja's population, temporarily fled to the forest last year to escape the invading army, he wound up in an isolated village about 50 miles away that lacked even a single antibiotic. There, a young man came limping in to see him with an infected abscess in his thigh and a fever wracking his body, but Dr. Malaba was at a loss until he remembered villagers telling him about a poultice made from the root of a local plant. He had always shunned herbal remedies, but the poultice worked so well that Dr. Malaba now grows the plant in front of his clinic and prescribes it to patients. He also treats his own chronic toothache with crushed papaya root, another folk remedy he learned in the forest.
Not all of the private pharmacies obtain their drugs illicitly. Owners of the tiny Lodja pharmacies typically buy medicines from middlemen in Goma, who in turn get their supplies from looters and from legitimate drug companies, local doctors and aid workers say. The pharmacies generally pay 2% of their purchase price to an "airplane agent" to deliver cash to the middlemen and fly the drugs back. The pharmacies then turn around and sell the drugs for Congolese francs and U.S. dollars. Townspeople and rural villagers, who trek in from miles away, can sometimes scrape the purchase price together by pooling family resources or by panning diamonds in the river. They sell the gems to passing soldiers or redeem them for cash at Lodja's numerous so-called diamond shops -- which aside from the open-air market appear to be the only other commercial enterprise in town.Dr. [Jean-Martin Malaba] operates a similar pharmacy and a tiny private clinic next door to his home. A metal scale for weighing babies hangs out front of the whitewashed clinic. Inside is Dr. Malaba's only other true piece of medical equipment: an old microscope borrowed years ago from a Belgian nurse. Most nights, the yard outside the clinic serves as an informal gathering place, where Dr. Malaba's neighbors, 12 children and two wives come to share stories as chickens peck in the dust.When Dr. Malaba, along with much of Lodja's population, temporarily fled to the forest last year to escape the invading army, he wound up in an isolated village about 50 miles away that lacked even a single antibiotic. There, a young man came limping in to see him with an infected abscess in his thigh and a fever wracking his body, but Dr. Malaba was at a loss until he remembered villagers telling him about a poultice made from the root of a local plant. He had always shunned herbal remedies, but the poultice worked so well that Dr. Malaba now grows the plant in front of his clinic and prescribes it to patients. He also treats his own chronic toothache with crushed papaya root, another folk remedy he learned in the forest.
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..