The Eye Wash Station Was the Busiest Tap in My Clinic

Twenty-Three Eyes in One Week

In my second year as the nurse at a small clinic serving an open-pit mine outside Chingola, I started counting eyes.

It was not a scientific decision. It was a tired one. I had run out of saline sachets twice in one month and the stores clerk had accused me of wasting them, so I began writing down every patient who came in with grit in their eyes, just to prove I was not pouring the stuff down the sink. A date, a name, a shift, a tick.

In one week in August, I recorded twenty-three eyes. That is not twenty-three people. Several came in with both eyes streaming, blinking, swearing, holding a damp cloth to their faces. Haul truck drivers, mostly. A few men from the crusher. Two cleaners from the change house, which surprised me, because they did not work anywhere near the pit.

The eye wash station outside my door was the busiest tap on the whole property. Some days there was a queue.

How I Came to Be There

I grew up in Kitwe, the daughter of a man who worked underground for thirty-one years and came home every evening coughing. I became a nurse partly because of that cough. I wanted to understand it. I trained in Lusaka, worked in a district hospital for five years, then took the mine clinic job because it paid better and my mother's medical bills were not getting smaller.

I thought I knew what mine work did to people. I had grown up with it. But there is a difference between watching one man cough at the dinner table and watching two hundred men walk through your door over a dry season.

The Dry Season

On the Copperbelt, the rains end in April and do not come back until November. By July, everything is dust. The roads are dust. The air is dust. You taste it on your teeth when you wake up in the morning. The trucks that carry ore up out of the pit are the size of houses, and every time one passes it throws up a cloud that hangs for minutes, orange and fine as flour.

From my clinic window, I could see the main haul road curving up from the edge of the pit. On the worst days, I could not see the trucks at all. Only their headlights, moving through the cloud like something underwater.

That was when the eyes came. And the coughs. And the headaches, and the nosebleeds, and once, terribly, a driver who had clipped a light vehicle because he simply could not see it in the cloud. Nobody died. But I spent an afternoon stitching a young man's forehead while he shook and kept saying, "I did not see it, sister, I did not see it."

The Logbook

By the end of that first dry season, my little tally of eyes had become a logbook. I had added columns. Coughs. Nosebleeds. Headaches. Skin irritation. Which shift. Which section. What the weather had been that day, which I took from a cheap weather app on my phone.

I am not a statistician. But even I could see the pattern. On dry, windy days, the clinic filled up. On the rare cloudy, still days, it emptied. When the water bowser had broken down for a week in September, the numbers nearly doubled.

I took the logbook to the safety officer, a tired Zimbabwean man named Mr Moyo who had been at the mine for many years. He looked through it carefully. He said it was very interesting. He said the company was aware of the issue. He said he would pass it on.

Nothing happened.

The Year I Got Louder

The following year I did something I am still slightly surprised by. I got louder.

I started bringing the logbook to every monthly health and safety meeting, which I was technically invited to but which nurses traditionally attended in silence. I made a chart, by hand, on a sheet of flipchart paper, with red lines for eye injuries and blue lines for respiratory complaints laid over the rainfall. I stuck it on the wall of the meeting room with Prestik before anyone else arrived.

The general manager at the time was a South African engineer, very busy, very impatient. He looked at my chart for about ten seconds and asked what I expected him to do about the weather.

I said I did not expect him to do anything about the weather. I expected him to do something about the dust.

There was a silence in the room. Mr Moyo looked at his shoes. And then, to my surprise, one of the shift supervisors, a big man named Bwalya who had been driving haul trucks himself fifteen years earlier, said quietly, "She is right. My boys cannot see."

The Things I Learned About Dust

That meeting started something. It did not happen quickly. Mining companies do not do anything quickly. But over the following months, people started asking me for my numbers, and I started asking engineers questions I had never thought to ask.

I learned that spraying water on a haul road works for about twenty minutes in our dry season before the sun bakes it off again, which is why the old bowser could never keep up. I learned that dust suppression on mine roads is its own field, with its own specialists and its own arguments about chemicals and binding agents and how long a treated road surface lasts. I sat in on a meeting where two engineers spent an hour debating road surfaces with the passion of men discussing football.

I understood perhaps a third of it. But I understood the part that mattered to me, which was that people were taking it seriously.

The Dry Season After

I cannot tell you everything that changed, because I was not in all the rooms where decisions were made, and I would not want to claim credit for the engineers' work. What I know is that over the following year the main haul roads were treated with something other than plain water, and a proper dust suppression system was put in at the crusher, where the cleaners from the change house had been breathing everything that drifted over the fence.

I know because I watched it from my clinic window. The cloud that used to hang over the curve of the haul road was thinner. On many days I could see the trucks again, not just their lights.

And I know because of my logbook.

The Numbers in My Own Handwriting

In August of the following dry season, the same week I had counted twenty-three eyes two years before, I counted six.

Six. I sat at my desk and stared at that number for a long time. Then I went outside to the eye wash station and stood beside it, and for the first time since I had started at the clinic, there was nobody waiting.

The coughs did not disappear. Mining is still mining. Men still come in with chests that crackle and I still think of my father every time I put a stethoscope on one of them. But the respiratory complaints on my blue line dropped by nearly half. The nosebleeds almost vanished. Bwalya, the shift supervisor, told me that his drivers had stopped complaining about visibility at the curve.

The young man with the stitched forehead still works there. He has a scar above his left eyebrow. He stops by the clinic sometimes to say hello and to tell me, every time, that he can see the curve now.

What I Tell Younger Nurses

I train nursing students now, sometimes, when they come to the Copperbelt for their community placements. They usually expect occupational health to be boring. Hearing tests and blood pressure and forms.

I show them my logbook. The old one, held together with tape. I tell them that a nurse sees patterns that nobody else in a company sees, because everyone eventually walks through our door. I tell them that dust control was not something I knew anything about when I started, and that I still do not understand the engineering, but that I understood the eyes, and that was enough to start a conversation.

My father died two years ago. He never saw the chart I made. But I think about him every dry season, when the wind comes up and the roads go orange, and I look out of my window and can still see the trucks.