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On being AWOL!

21 June 2006, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By Mohammad A Zaman, On e-mail
21 June 2006, 18:00 PM
In the early 80's, I had a posting as medical officer in rural Sylhet. It was very difficult to leave the comfort of intern hostel and the comfort of friendship that I was blessed with over a span of six long years. Yet the time came and I parted. I joined there at the remote Thana Health Complex. No, none was waiting there to greet a new doc just off from the school. The senior medical officer (administrator of the complex) was nowhere to be found. There was no place to sleep and no desk to sit on and work. It was made abundantly clear that the senior doctor shall not mind at all at if I were AWOL (absent without leave). I collected a few personal letters from the non-existent office and then left the post of my first employment (!) without even seeing my immediate superior. I was young. My heart was yearning to go back to the city. I did not feel that bad at my dereliction. In fact I was happy!

Now 20 years later as I remember those days, my heart wells up with shame and sadness. Sometimes I try to understand and explain. I just, however, cannot explain without being even more shamelessly defensive! And for that I seek pardon in advance.

Except for a few bright & honest outliers, most of the garden-variety types are none but the product of our own milieu. Absenteeism in rural medical centres is rampant in South Asia. It is in the range of about thirty to forty percent. Even in the centres of learning (I mean, the Medical Colleges), absenteeism by the professors is rampant. During my third year in medical school, I had three-month clinical (clerkship) rotation under a famous professor. He never relocated from Dhaka to Sylhet. Once in a blue moon he used to fly to Sylhet to show up. In a period of three months we did not get more than five or six hours clinical teaching from him. True - that was an extreme case, but I never saw a professor giving us clinical teaching more than 2-3 times a week. They all were in town tending their own "Chambers" or some other obscure non-teaching profundity! That's how it was in the late 70's and early 80's. And I was a product of that culture where the concept of AWOL was not unholy.

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Well, does this exonerate me of my failure?

I was a thoughtful 24-year-old college graduate at that time. I knew the difference between right and wrong.

No, these justifications definitely do not exonerate my guilt.