Volunteer Report "Reconsidering Life"

Name: Yuiko Ueyama
Specialty: Nurse

I’ve been in Malawi, Africa for 10 months now. After completing a month-long training at Kamuzu Central Hospital in Capital City Lilongwe in last September, I’ve been working as a volunteer nurse at the NCDs outpatient clinic at Salima District Hospital. I would like to report on what I didn’t notice in the first few months in Lilongwe and what I strongly felt when I came to Salima.
Salima, where I live, is around the eighth most populous district in Malawi. It has a bustling trading center with a tourist spot called Senga Bay nearby. While there are many cities where supplies are rarely available unless you go to the capital, Salima is the one where relatively everything is available. Despite being such a district, there are many goats, cows, hen and rooster in the city, and you can see goats, hen and rooster anywhere. Even cows that naturally graze in open fields comes into the hospital. I didn’t see such a scene in the capital, Lilongwe. I love animals and one of the reasons I chose Africa as my assignment was because I can see animals. In fact, of course, wild animals are protected, and you can’t see them anywhere. Still, I initially watched the goats, baby goats, hen, rooster and chicks that I saw in the city on my way to work, thinking they were really cute.

But, of course, all of them are for food.

I love chicken meat. I buy chicken meat at the supermarket every week and eat them. I also had the opportunity to eat goat when I came to Malawi. It’s very delicious. Every day, I eat the animals that I’m thinking they’re cute. This makes my mind really disturbed. Eating meat is an action that doesn’t change even in Japan but still to accept the fact that I’m eating the animals that are in front of me and cute makes my heart disturbed. The sight of goats and pigs being carried on a bicycle like they’re stuck on, and the sight of chickens being carried upside down by their legs, really hurts my heart. But I’m eating that. I don’t think much about receiving life in Japan. You don’t usually see the kind of scenes you see in Malawi in Japan.
And, in the hospital. In Malawi, when someone dies, they don’t go into a private room, but all people in the ward are able to see someone’s family dying in their beds. And when someone is carried to the morgue or when someone goes back to their village or town from there, everyone sees them off. This doesn’t happen in Japanese hospitals. I sometimes think that Japanese was avoiding seeing the end of life.
I don’t know how the people of Malawi think about life, but I feel that it’s very important for Japan today, where everything is overflowing and everything feels natural, to receive life, to feel the beginning and end of life from everyday life, and to know this scene that Japan used to know. I have a little over a year left until the end of my term, but I want to keep my current feelings about life that I felt again after coming here in my heart, and continue to convey them after I return to Japan.