Hands in the Pharmacy

Picture from here

My very first job was to count pills in the mission hospital pharmacy. To be sure, it was not my very first paid job, because as a non-Malaysian I couldn't legally work for pay, but if I could have legally been paid for my work, I would have been. That would seem to count as a first job, I would think.

I was bored, fourteen years old, and needed something to do in the summer after 8th grade graduation. I'd grown up prowling the hospital hallways. Everyone who worked there, plus a smattering of the patients, knew me. As I was a generally magnanimous kid, they didn't mind my being underfoot. When I asked if I could work somewhere for the summer, one of my parents put out the word, and the pharmacy took me on.

The place smelled--naturally--"mediciney." The walls in the windowless pharmacy were lined with open shelves stocked with well-organized pill bottles. There wasn't a lot to do in a place where paperwork was minimal and there weren't computers available to make our lives more complicated. We just got the slip with the doctor's prescription and signature, counted out the pills, put a paper on the bottle with the name of the medicine and the instructions, and then we went to the window and called the patient to come get their meds.

Mister Timothy, the chatty Indian pharmacy tech, trained me in and hovered a bit to make sure I understood what I was to do.  He was pleasant enough, and his kids were my peers and friends from church. But the chatter wasn't all that interesting, especially not for a whole summer.

Mister Ranjan, the director of the pharmacy, was a more interesting person, but I didn't know how to hold a conversation with him. He'd at one time had leprosy, and although his face looked fine, his fingers were shortened and disfigured by the disease. This didn't seem to hinder him from doing his work, even in working with the twist-off caps of the bottles, counting pills and writing notes for charts.

It kind of gave me the heebie-jeebies, watching Mister Ranjan work with the pills and bottles. My mom assured me that he was clean of leprosy and there was no threat, but something inside me still flinched and wanted to withdraw when he would work nearby me. It didn't matter that he was the nicest man. He was different, and I was uncomfortable with that.

And so I experienced the parable in my first job, of how disease disfigures, how some things can never be healed or regrown, how we react when someone is different from us, how easy it is to want to distance ourselves from someone that is not beautiful.

These are the lessons left unlearned when one is a thoughtless, thick-headed youth. They come back and take root, to take on second and third meanings only when the heart has grown large enough to accommodate them. That may be far, far down the road,