the pharmacy

Yesterday I spent 2 hours in a ARV pharmacy. Little about the notion I had of pharmacy was relevant to this experience. I sat at a rectangualr table with 3-5 other people all Zulu speaking, public health/hospital employees, plus one younger sister of the "pharmacist." She was helping. There was a plastic covering, ripped and wrinkled over the table top. Piles & piles of multi-colored pills laid scattered across the table. Large yellow "horse pills," small white & red pills without a coating, bright, shiny yellow & white stripd pills, and some pills still in the foil. Most of these pills were piled free on the table with uman fingers picking through them, ungloved & unsanitized. When I entered the room to help package pills no one asked me to wash my hands or glove up, no one even asked me what my position was- why was I helping, was I a pharmacist. No- Hi I am a nursing student. They all giggle at my attempt at Zulu introductions. I sat fairly silent for the next 2 hours listening to a comedian yell & hollar jokes with apparently hilarious punch lines over a speaker in the room- all in Zulu. I packaged pills as I was instructed into tiny pastic bags based on a dosage the HIV or AIDS infected patient would be taking. It was not the fact that I did this with my hands repeatedly, as some stapled individual day's doses onto a claendar- a tedious, never ending task for each of the so, so many patients to make it easier to administer. It was the gold-like quality, the significance of the medication, so needed by the people of the community, to fight their disease, the commodity, all around me, with my american-fingertips. Iworried about dropping one on the floor...