6/15/2014 - The Siberian Medical Train This is only the opening piece of this article. I encourage you to go to the source link and read it in its entirety. The ailing and the injured await the train at every stop. In Khani, a village of 742 people wedged between the snowy peaks of the Stanovoy Mountains, patients emerge from concrete buildings and gather along the tracks. They all seek medical treatment. One man fell down a staircase while drunk and broke both of his ankles. A teacher at the only school in town wants a checkup for her 14-year-old daughter, who came down with appendicitis a month earlier and was, quite luckily, evacuated on a cargo train. She had her appendix removed in Chara, three anguished hours away. These and other patients are waiting now to board the Matvei Mudrov medical train. This is Khani’s main lifeline—a mobile medical clinic with basic equipment, exam rooms, and 12 to 15 doctors. Run by the Russian state railways agency and named for a 19th-century physician who helped establish clinical practice in Russia, the Matvei Mudrov runs from village to village, stopping for a day to see patients, then continuing along the thousands of miles of track that stretch across the Russian Far East. Khani is in many ways typical of communities along the rail line: A yard of rough gravel and stone ringed by five-story, prefabricated apartment blocks forms the center of town, which seems largely deserted. The people have no surgeon of their own, no specialists—just a small clinic with Soviet-era equipment and an all-purpose doctor who was educated as a dentist. For many, the Matvei Mudrov is the only expert attention they get. In the afternoon I take a walk with Khani’s one police officer, Nikolay Kolesnik, who is 29 and has a smooth, boyish complexion and hair so blond it seems almost translucent. He only arrived the previous winter; for the six years before that, the village had no police officer at all. His one pair of boots tore open after a month, and because there are no clothing stores in the village or anywhere nearby, he had to take a train 20 hours back to the regional capital to buy new ones. These are minor annoyances compared with the impact Khani’s remote location has on Kolesnik’s job. The village has no jail, which means he can’t make arrests for serious crimes. He can’t even enforce drunk-driving laws: He doesn’t have a Breathalyzer, let alone a medical technician to do a legally admissible analysis. There is no morgue or even a doctor qualified to sign a death certificate, which means dead bodies wait in an old brick warehouse by the rail tracks for pathologists to come by train and get them. Kolesnik nevertheless insists that he enjoys it here. Life is simpler, the people are nicer, and the job has a calm rhythm to it—he likes the locals, and judging by the friendly nods he gets as he walks around town, they like him. His affection is not widely shared, however. Three days earlier, his girlfriend left town, taking their seven-year-old daughter along with her. “I’m never coming back to this place for the rest of my life,” she told him. The Matvei Mudrov serves dozens of villages like Khani along the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), so called because it stretches from Lake Baikal to the Amur River. The BAM runs for 2,672 miles, parallel to the better known Trans-Siberian line but 400 miles or so to the north. Built in the late 1970s and early ’80s, it was the last great Soviet construction project—meant, like those before it, to showcase man’s conquest of nature, made possible by feats of Soviet engineering and the will of the Soviet people. The grandeur and messianism of the project were as much the point as the railway itself ... The source - ngm.nationalgeographic/2014/06/siberian-train/yaffa-text --
Posted on: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 12:09:12 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015