African villagers have no problem waiting.
“I am amazed at how patient they all are,” Samantha Przybylek said of the nomadic villagers she helped while on a medical aid trip to the Sakila Village in Tanzania, Africa. “They wake up at three or four in the morning, walk for miles and miles to come see us and wait in line for hours to be seen. I don’t know a single person on this planet that is as patient as they are. I know I am not!”
The former Miss Kitsap (2008) and current Miss Moses Lake said her trip was “amazing and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” She spent two weeks working in a clinic in Sakila doing lab work, mostly testing hgb levels and looking for signs of AIDS.
“The hardest part for me was to tell people that they were positive for HIV,” she said. “Since I was in the lab most of the time, I did the testing. The look that takes over their faces and embeds in their eyes is haunting. I can’t see anything else but their faces when I lay down to go to sleep.”
Przybylek also got to travel around in an eight-person team to provide health care to villagers who lived too far from Sakila. She was surprised at how many problems these people had which are no longer problems in the western world.
Ailments like goiters and AIDS are still issues in these remote villages of Africa. Also, simple tasks like keeping wounds clean are difficult, causing big problems with infection.
And although most of the villagers do not practice oral hygiene the way people in the cities do, according to Przybylek, many of them seem to have better teeth.
“I don’t know why,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”
Przybylek is still excited from her trip and said she is ready to do it again. In fact, she said she would like to lead a team back to Africa in a couple of years, when she is done with nursing school.
Until then, she will be doing some volunteer work with the Kitsap County Housing Authority, competing in the Miss Washington pageant July 9, 10 and 11 and hopefully attending Olympic College’s nursing program in the fall.
“I was not ready to come home,” she said. “But I love this community.”
