- Last minute Coronavirus
Sister Angel Bipendu , religious and medical, a woman of science but also of faith, visits patients with the new coronavirus in the Bergamo region, one of the most affected in Italy by the pandemic.
This is not your first epidemic. In 2018, he lived through the Ebola virus , which decimated the northeast of his country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo , but did not affect the central region of Kananga, where he was born 47 years ago.
"I think of my Congo, where the sick will also starve but we will succeed, this epidemic will also go away, " says the nun, who for three weeks has changed her nun's cap for a protective suit, gloves and mask.
Sister Angel visits the sick at home in Zogno , a town of 9,000 inhabitants in the province of Bergamo, where the coronavirus killed some 2,000 of the 17,000 who died throughout Italy. "I am not afraid of being infected, just afraid of not being able to do everything I have to do," she explains. And remember that the hundred members of the medical staff who have died in Italy since the pandemic started "did not retreat an inch risking their lives"
Graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Palermo (Sicily), she obtained the title in 2015, when she was 41 years old and had decided six years before to study medicine "so as not to be just a nun". Two years ago, the nun responded to an announcement by the Bergamo public health agency and began to make guards at a local hospital .
At the end of March, with the arrival of the new coronavirus in Lombardy, he provisionally left his convent of Canosian nuns and became part of the Usca, a health care unit specially responsible for going to the homes of infected or potentially infected patients. .
"They realize that I am not a traditional doctor"
"At first they look at me in surprise, they realize that I'm not a traditional doctor," explains Angel. "I leave them and then explain that I am not only a doctor but also a religious and they usually take it well," he says.
Equipped from head to toe, Angel takes the temperature of her patients, checks the rate of oxygen in the blood and monitors her possible chronic diseases, such as diabetes or hypertension. "Naturally, when we detect a critical condition, we call 112 [the emergency number] and request hospitalization," he explains.
Most of the patients are older, some live alone and are not cared for , "not because there is no one to take care of them but because many general practitioners were infected and are in quarantine."
Their relatives, even if they live nearby, cannot visit them because of the confinement . So the religious support is also psychological, to encourage them and break loneliness. "It is great to have a nun who is also a doctor in our community," explains Giorgio Carobbio, vicar of the neighboring parish of Almè. "She is a religious full of vitality, she advises us, helps young people and their families," she says.
Between 2016 and 2017, Sister Bipendu lived another human drama, that of migrants , aboard a ship of the Italian rescue body of the Order of Malta (Cisom). Remember how you had to practice childbirth, cure hypothermia or severe burns caused by the mixture of gasoline and seawater in the inflatable boats. But he doesn't like to make comparisons because they are "two different tragedies".
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