FF-2-98A
ANNIE MOORE
b. 1954
Oakland, California
This one nurse who always worked in the burn unit said with a sick smile, “I’m so bored, I wish we’d get in an emergency. I love to take care of an emergency”. I told her I would really rather be bored.
[First two sentences deleted: “My life was what I would call a big bore. My father was a minister and a counselor and my mother a busy-body housewife.”] From childhood up to junior high school, I was what I would call “protected” although my parents were liberals and open to the rights of all, despite their race creed, or color, whether prisoners, homosexuals or mentally ill. It took me until the eighth grade to start really realizing what the world was all about. This was when I began to really think and notice how unhappy much of the world was. I began to question the actions of those adults that I had looked up to. There were different people I knew who had committed suicide and others who were killed in car accidents. I knew there was a war going on in Vietnam and I was involved in war protests and fights with the “cowboys” at school over this. By the ninth grade, I was totally confused, lonely, bored, and I began experimenting with drugs, although my parents never knew about it. I lacked self-confidence so much, and had such a poor self-image that I thought about different ways to commit suicide. I put on an act through most of high school pretending I was crazy, doing outrageous things like making faces at teachers and following different people I disliked acting like a chimpanzee. I did anything to cut the boredom and the only way I could handle it was by making a joke out of life.
At age 16, I worked in a burn unit at Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. for the summer. The children needed someone to play with since their parents worked or didn’t care to come and visit them. ’There was so much pain in their faces from the hell they went through! One 12 yr old, Tyrone, had gasoline poured on him and a match lit to him on July 4th. His arms and hands were burnt – a human firework – and the medicine that was applied caused most children to scream with pain for hours at a time. Tyrone never screamed though and for all the pain and rejection he had gone through in life, he had a sweet disposition. After working there I was never the same. I returned to high school the next year. More than anything, I wanted to do something with my life that would be helping people like Tyrone, but after mixing with the same bunch of friends – some of whom were shooting heroin, and others who were involved in various crimes – I selfishly planned to commit suicide at some time. I had no one to whom I could express what I really felt about anything to and I was upset that the boys at school who liked me were always the creepiest creeps you could find.
Finishing my high school years in a university town, I had grown to hate ”intellectuals” because they were all a lot of hot air and no action. This is why. Whenever I was on a project to care for prisoners’ children while the wives visited their husbands, or when I was tutoring minority children in their school work, the “intellectuals” could always find a reason why they could not help. But they always had plenty of time to talk about the world’s problems and sermonize about what should be done.
So, due to my eccentric hate for intellectuals and school, I refused to go on to college. My mother wanted me to be an artist or musician but I hated them too. I thought they were all so phoney and egotistical. So I had no plans, was totally confused, and poured an entire bottle of codeine pills in my mouth preparing to swallow then. I don’t know why I stopped but I did – and spit them all out into the toilet. Days later, my sister who was in Peoples Temple invited me to visit. I found people who were friendly, mixing all races together, working in a cooperative setting. The people were not phoney and seemed for real. They took no drugs and still seemed to enjoy themselves. So, not having anything else to do with myself, I came. Jim told me that I could be helpful in the group, that I was talented and could teach others or even go to school and make something of myself. He convinced me it was not right to commit suicide and that I could be useful and gain happiness by helping others. It was he and the support of Temple members that helped me though nurses’ training, which I had adamantly refused to attempt at first. I found that even though I hated intellectuals and didn’t like the schools I’d been to, I had nothing against learning.
Now I’ve been an R.N. for three years and my life is fulfilling. I know that I am helping others. The hospital burn unit in which I worked before coming to Guyana taught me a lot. Our entire shift of nurses, I thought, must have been inherently evil. They refused to give pain shots to people, many of whom had their entire bodies burned, stating “You should be able to take the pain,” They ripped off dressing quickly and bragged about how they could finish everyone’s dressings within an hour, when with some patients they should have taken an hour each.
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FF-2-98B
With all their extra time, they sat in the nurses lounge, turned off the buzzers, watched T.V. and drank beer and wine. [Deleted sentence: “This is no exaggeration.”] When patients whose hands had been burned and were wrapped up requested the nurses help them to eat, the nurses responded, “I’m sick of you – feed yourself” So many a plate would be returned to the kitchen untouched, or into the nurses lounge for the nurses to eat. The calories that were so badly needed for wound healing most often went to the nurses’ bellies. The two nurses I worked with at night were nice and we prided ourselves in treating patients’ caringly. The patients often told us that they were relieved when 11 p.m. came and they could see us. [Deleted sentence: “With all the humiliation the patients were put through (some of which brought out my fighting instinct from previous experiences). I refrained from killing some nurses on the other shift.”] The only thing that kept me from killing some of these monstrous nurses was that I knew it was right to be non-violent just as Jim had taught me. I was finally O.K. to some degree with this one bunch of sadist nurses after pulling a butcher knife jokingly at the one nurse who kept coming late to work and leaving me with the entire floor of patients by myself. They still did not like me because I was kind to patients, took time with them and tried to be sensitive to their needs. A group of us tried to change these nurses but it was almost impossible. Their activities were reported and they just lied about giving pain shots and treatments. The hospital, being a civil service institution, found it difficult to fire anyone – especially, nurses who were desperately needed in this particular unit. It seemed ironic to me that the most callous, cold, and sadistic people, with few exceptions, worked in a place which needed caring people so badly to deal with the mental and physical pain of being burned.
The medical treatment people receive in Jonestown is totally different from what they were forced to endure in hospitals like the one I worked in. One man, Earl, had had terrible pain for years from a large growth on his back. It was the size of an apricot. Our doctor here removed the growth surgically – something that no US doctor had even suggested. Another child, Rondell, had cut his lip severely from inside to out. Most any Black child in the US would’ve had to sit for 2 to X amount of hours waiting for treatment in a public hospital and they would receive a lousy stitch job that most doctors would give in their usual hurried fashion. Here, Dr. Schacht spent two hours carefully calculating each stitch so as to put the lip back together exactly. The lip was not a life and death situation but would have left a terrible scar on the face and develop a keloid (an enlarged bulging where the scar is) if it had been done sloppily or in a hurry like most “on call” doctors do in a public hospital.
Just the lip being sewn up properly was not the entire point. Preventing the scaring prevented Rondell from going through the ridicule and pain anyone goes through (especially children when they have a physical deformity). Fortunately here in Jonestown, any type of ridicule of a person’s physical abnormalities is not tolerated.
Here in Jonestown I can treat patients kindly without being sneered at or made fun of. My experience in US hospitals seems so backwards. It is illogical to me that someone would scorn compassion shown to the ill, yet many medical people are just this way. I always felt that I had to get back at the mean medical people that I worked with. [Balance of paragraph marked with notation, “leave out”] One homosexual ‘queen’ who was Black was the talk of all the nurses. His hands and nose were burned. He told me I was one of the two others who were nice to him. The entire nursing staff except for us three were nasty to him. They didn’t like Blacks and they didn’t like gays. He told me he was mad at them for treating him meanly, and that they would be sorry because he was going to do voodoo on them… So, the next day when all the smart cracks about faggots came from the bitches (one of whom was obviously a closet lesbian), I told them in a mysterious tone that they should cool it with Ben, that he was going to do voodoo on all of them. I thought it was funny because I don’t believe in voodoo, but it shut the nurses up. I don’t know that they treated him any better but they quit the cracks in front of me.
[Notation on paragraph: “Out”] Medical people take care of the sick but are sometimes grossly sick themselves. One nurse who worked with me rarely, told me while washing and pulling the dead skin off a newly burned patient not to worry, I would get used to the screaming and that it always bothers people at first. She was too rough and caused the patient much extra pain. She wasn’t bothered but I was. The screams always bothered me so I tried to be most careful while performing a painful procedure. This one nurse always said with a sick smile, “I’m so bored, I wish we’d get love to take care of an emergency.” I told, her I would really rather be bored and was contented to sit and read or draw comic strip pictures to cheer up
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the patients.
Nursing here in our Jonestown cooperative is much different from nursing in US hospitals. If there is a problem of any kind it is brought up for discussion. No one could get away with all the hell they did there, but no one attempts it either. The medical staff is excellent; a caring group of people determined to give the best care to those who need it.