In the year 2000, Ulan was seven years old. He remembers that his sister, two years his senior, had a horrible stomach ache that year. They lived in a small village in rural Kyrgyzstan several hundred kilometers from the capital. Concerned, Ulan’s parents left their other children at home and took their daughter to the regional hospital in another village, about 20 minutes away by car. Like most hospitals, the building was a large concrete box of a building and looks the same today as it did then. In they went.
They saw the doctor, and he gave them his diagnosis. Ulan’s sister needed her appendix out. Like that day. Things began as expected. Ulan’s parents paid the hospital fee, an anesthesiologist put the girl under, and the doctor went to work.
At some point during the surgery, the doctor called Ulan’s parents into the operating room. Their little girl was lying on the table with an open incision in her abdomen. The doctor told Ulan’s parents that his finishing the surgery correctly was conditional. He’d need something from them. Money, livestock, something. And he’d need it today. Otherwise he couldn’t guarantee the surgery would be a success.
I can only imagine what went through the minds of the parents of that little girl. With no other recourse, in a place where such things are sadly the rule and not the exception—even 19 years later—Ulan’s dad drove home, loaded a sheep from his herd into the car, and returned to the village where the hospital was. Home delivery was part of the deal, so after he dropped the sheep off at the doctor’s house, Ulan’s dad returned to the hospital. Satisfied with his payment, the doctor finished the surgery. Successfully. The little girl made a complete recovery and is doing well all these years later.
The sheep was no doubt reduced to stew and wool socks long ago, or whatever it was so that the doctor got his profit. Admittedly, it was a small price to pay in the large scheme of things.
And somehow that doesn’t quite cool the rage.