The third full day of the survey, I get led into the "trauma surgery" room to interview one of the staff right next to a "sterile" bed with a man lying on it who was getting his penis re-wrapped. It was open when I first got there, a bright red bloody mess of what was supposed to be the shaft, between a normal head and scrotum. It was kind of a leap of professionalism for me to have been able to sit through an entire interview, and even pay attention, while a 30 year old man was lying in excruciating agony (without uttering a peep) as a pretty 25 year old girl medic wrapped his massively enflamed manhood in a new set of gauze. He left about 5 minutes later, and I had a brief pause of full interest into what I was hearing through my translator, and then ANOTHER man waddles through the curtains and lies down on the bed, exposes his Johnson, and gets the re-wrap. Throughout the course of my 30 minute interview, three people in total had to have their penises rewrapped.
Fortunately, I'd heard about this before as an epidemic phenomenon that nobody's really talked about. Ethnic minority villagers would go get subdermal oil injections into their dicks, so that the oil would spread along the entire shaft to increase girth. Nobody has any idea how many people actually get them, but the hospitals see a new case of a very sloppy (and infected) job every two or three days. The best case scenario is a complete skinning of the shaft, replacing it with a graft from the thigh. There have been several cases of amputation.
They only really see it in the camps, which means that either it's something that has been brought down from the hilltribes that has never been seen in the cities (along with a lot of other strange rituals and habits), or it's an entirely new phenomenon. The latter option suggests a great opportunity for sociological research, as it's very likely that this is the natural response to the demasculization that's occurring in these refugee camps. When it's the man's role to supply and provide structure and stability to his family, he's so utterly demasculinated when his family is forced out of his house at gunpoint and flees to a refugee camp where work is scarce and food is provided free of charge. He should at least be able to please his wife...
Who knows? It's not my work, in any case. There's a long term survey that's being conducted at the clinic to find these things out, so the exiled Karen government could impliment some sort of education about it at least.