The Waiting Room

A rusty taxi speeds down cobbled streets and empties it's contents under a street lamp. Two tourists are bundled through the glass door in painful panic, and white robes usher the newcomers into the waiting room.

A familiar smell of cleanliness and chemicals fills the air, and patients settle down dazed and distant. Friends and relatives tap their feet and exchange worried glances, whilst in the corner, a little girl plays with her favourite toy, oblivious to her sterile surroundings.

Playful posters instruct on everything from tissue disposal to hand washing, and the wall clock ticks another slow second.

Unpronounceable names are called, and a theatrical performance begins, whereby mime translates days of sleepness nights and experiments with backpackers' pills. Kind smiles and patience brings a diagnosis and a drip, and promise for morning health. Bodily fluids are placed in universal plastic pots, and the waiting begins once more.

Dawn brings anxious butterflies to the hospital, until another white coat brings a piece of white paper. Ushered back to the consultation room, the doctor translates a foreign medical langauge into a second foreign language. Grappling for understanding, it soon transpires that the words they waited for were the same.

Clutching scribbles of advice and a handful of prescriptions, they head to the pharmacy, for orange potions and white powders to cure the indefineable illness. And soon stepping back out of the medical world, they head back to Bolivia.