Sunday 29 December 2013



 The last time we went to Malawi we flew from Dar to Mbeye. We hadn't realised there was a bus direct (more or less) from Moshi. This time it's going to be bus all the way but I have been remembering my first glimpse of Mbeye from the air; it looked to be a completely black and white landscape or more accurately black and sepia. From the sky it looked like a landscape drawn with pencil on beige yellow paper, as far as we could see in every direction every field carefully cross hatched with parallel lines. I couldn't puzzle it out from the air at all but when we landed and drove by bus into town I understood that what I was seeing was dry, dry, dry yellow grass and black burnt ground all still in last year's ridges line by line by line.


Our next surprise was arriving in the town late on that quiet afternoon and finding a town on hills dressed beautifully in blue Jacaranda trees. I know now that they are Jacaranda trees that I have been admiring since October. I also know that it will now be raining in Mbeye and Mzimba and hopefully that is going to make a difference to out diet while we are there and we might get to eat fruit and vegetables. The last time we were there everyone was waiting seed in hand for the rain to begin.


As we traveled south there were more and more blue trees in bloom and then, astonishingly when we arrived home two and a half weeks later our very own tree lined road in Shanty Town in Moshi turned out to be blue too.


Everything here has been surprising every day. At the moment it is wedding season with four or five weddings driving past each day. Every wedding has a brass band decked out in shirts the same colour as the bridesmaid dresses and riding on the back of an open truck in the wedding procession playing as they go. In the first few months we were here I thought there was one band with an enormous wardrobe of coloured shirts and endless work but now that they drive by every ten minutes I have to admit there must be many of them. When I get married I want a multi coloured band like pastel sweeties. That's my plan.


I know I keep saying that everything here is so colourful but it is true. I knew within a few days of arriving that I would not be doing any drawing. Drawing is a thing of low, white, northern light where line is a gift of the light and a quality of everything you see. Here it is colour and shape and the gift of this light is pattern. Me and Davy are trying to photograph it a little now that we are on holiday and not always hurrying to clinic or home again – maybe we will come up with something.







 In the week before Christmas 2013 these are the things I learnt from Jeremy;


a, Be thrilled when your patient's CD4 count goes up. This should be a no brainer – many of our AIDS patients are on ARV drugs which help for a time and when the ARV stops working and the CD4 count falls again they can be put on a new ARV which might keep the count up for another year or two but at some stage the ARV's run out, the CD4 count plummets and they are in treatment failure and nothing more can be done for them by conventional medicine. So when their CD4 count rises again after they get a homoeopathic remedy it means that their life has literally turned around – well worth being thrilled about. But I, being a bit of a grinch, tend to be disappointed and self critical when someone does not improve instead of being thrilled when they do. Most people do get better on their remedy and it is quite normal to see CD4 counts going up so being thrilled when they do could bring whole days of delight!

Also it is quite difficult to choose a good remedy for someone, it can require intense concentration, observation and insight so a moment of self congratulation when you do get it right can't be so bad for the soul?

b, Keep taking the case until you know what remedy to give. When I first arrived here it was daunting to know that there was a queue of people waiting outside the door and that I had to prescribe fast. I did realise that managing to give 8 people a good remedy is better than giving 16 people a remedy that is chosen in a hurry and may not help, but the pressure of the people waiting and the translator getting tired and fed up is tough. At first I wanted to emulate Jeremy's speed but soon I realised that I should emulate his method instead. Jeremy can prescribe fast because he knows what remedy to give fast but it is never a question of time it is only a question of what remedy? What remedy? So the answer to how long does it take to take a case? Is; don't do anything until you know what to do! It is so simple, it takes time out of the equation and leaves only the engrossing detective work. And in the end it takes less time when you are fully immersed anyway.

c, The remedy Selenium has sex issues; especially weakness after sex, lack of erection and inability to finish. Typifying this it has; dreams, unsuccessful effforts. It is an AIDS remedy partly because AIDS is linked to low incidence of Selenium in the soil of Africa. So for an AIDS patient, where the case has a sexual element and there is weakness, Selenium may be a good remedy.

d, Paragraph 31 of the Organon is the paragraph about inimical influences. We were driving up to Kibosho on dirt road through banana farms, the sun was bright and the banana trees very green after the December rain. Roger, sitting in the back of the car, had questions for Jeremy on homoeopathic philosophy which Jeremy answered beautifully then threw a quick test my way – “which paragraph of the Organon?” of course I didn't know. I know now but I also learnt again the symmetry and beauty of homoeopathic philosophy on a beautiful green and sparkling morning, our last day's work before Christmas with no hurry and plenty of time for questions. I suppose I also learnt not to mind failing Jeremy's test, I work in a different way and that's ok. We get to the same place in the end.

A random and eclectic week as always!

We are here for three more weeks but Davy and Jane and I go to Malawi to teach again on the 6th of January and only get back to Moshi in time for Davy and me to pack and head home to Ireland so the last few weeks before Christmas saw me visiting many of the outreach clinics for the very last time with lots of sadness and many goodbyes. I would like to stay here forever but I also can't wait to get back home and back to work again.


Thursday 12 December 2013

This one is for Melissa; so many people have helped me to get here to Tanzania and helped with money to run the clinics where I work every week and I have to thank you all. People are also very supportive emotionally and tell me I'm doing great work but actually most people would do something to help if they got the chance and you have all given me this chance.

Melissa is part of a sewing group in Cork who gave me money that they raised. Most of the money has been spent on paying clinic organisers* and cars and remedies and translators and the day to day stuff that gets us to that all important point where we can treat people, but last weekend I bought a sewing machine!

Esta has a long story and, as often happens here, lost everything through her illness including her sewing machine but she is well now, a mighty strong woman who appears to be glowing with health. She is a talented tailor and now she has her own machine.





*Clinic organisers are often AIDS sufferers who contact the other AIDS sufferers in their community and let us use their room or their yard or their porch as a clinic for the day. HHA pays them for this work which means that they and their families can eat.

As part of my homesicknessI have been thinking a lot about the people at home who donated money to this cause.  One man came in off the street in Dun Laoghaire last August and gave me enough money to run the out reach clinics for a week.  When he gave me the money I had a very sketchy picture of what it would mean in reality but as another week is nearly over I have a very clear view now. 

I had a very good day today with every single person coming in and telling me they had done well on their remedy.  Our patients can often be quite despairing when they first come to see us because they find it difficult to get help from anywhere for their problems.  So when they get relief from the homoeopathic remedy and their health visibly improves they feel a huge weight of worry lifted.  If you are sick here you might starve.  If you are well you can work.  A day of smiling faces has left me feeling very happy and reflecting with gratitude on Robert's gift. 
Every week has been different here. I turned up for work this morning at the Mkombozi clinic where we would normally see up to 20 kids between the ages of 10 and 13 to find that school is over and no-one there.

This is usually a tough gig, hard to crack the individual cases as well as emotionally wearing; seeing kids without a parent or grandparent or older brother or sister who knows them means it is difficult to get good information and so it is difficult to prescribe. On top of which they all seem to have the same symptoms and some weeks I could swear someone is standing outside the door and briefing them before they come in “this week it's head and abdomen – tell the mzungu you have a pain in your head and abdomen”. So you end up seeing child after child, all more or less the same size and age in the same uniform and with the same symptoms as the child before and none of them very talkative.

Because they are all HIV it is worth our best shot so we do the best we can to decipher the puzzle of each one. It is very easy to remember that Pendo was one of these kids a year ago. They are all more or less healthy – we just need to keep them that way. For people with HIV everything has to be treated; every cough or cold or grief or shock. Having a weakened immune system leaves you vulnerable to small knocks.

But the day turned into a different day today and we struggled back into town through the slidey mud, carrying the big wooden remedy kit between us, to organise a painter to paint a sign for the new centre. Talking to Roger on the way I heard how he would love to go to Kenya to study homoeopathy in the school there and from having worked with him over these past few months I can see that he would make a great and compassionate homoeopath.

The other thing that has coloured this week differently is that there have been attacks from so called skeptics, nasty stuff on the HHA website and on facebook. It is difficult to know how to react to them because they are so far off the mark it is as though they are saying cats while we are saying oranges.

It is a shame because skepticism and homoeopathy go hand in hand in a way. It is only the reaction of the patient to the remedy that proves whether it is the right remedy or not and as you listen to the patient's report only an open and questioning mind will get you accurate information and prevent you jumping to soft conclusions.

As a skeptic I had an interesting week last week – different again – my job was to go on the round with the doctor in the hospital checking on the homoeopathy patients. It was a real eye opener to see people who had had homoeopathy side by side with people who had not; it was so clear that the homoeopathy patients were consistently doing better and recovering faster. I just wish that they could all have homoeopethy.




Wednesday 4 December 2013

Archibel tech support at last.  Radar back and only two days lost.  But Davy and I are in melt down and want to come home NOW!

Tuesday 3 December 2013

So it is true.  Archibel have let us all down.  Our licenses have expired and we cannot open Radar.  I have to go to work today with no repertory.  A typical day's work here could be between ten and twenty people.  Some of them will have walked for up to three hours to reach the clinic.  A one hour walk would be common.  If I don't prescribe on the spot they will have to walk three hours again to pick up the remedy.  And three hours back again.  There is no postal service here to post the remedy unless you own a PO box which of course our patients do not.


Our patients choose homoeopathy because it works but for some it is their only access to health care.  Hospitals here are good but limited by money - did you know it is possible for a whole country to run out of pain relief drugs?  Think of what that means for people who have been through surgery.  So now they are to be penalised again because the internet here is not wide enough to update our software.

Over the last ten days myself and Jane and Rebecca have tried repeatedly to download the update without success.  We have also been in contact with Archibel over that time over and over again asking to have our licenses extended until we are able to update.  I am stunned that a company claiming to support professional homoeopaths could withdraw an essential tool from us like this. I can't get my head around what they are thinking.  Could it just be a 21st century inability to grasp the concept of a lack of internet?  Making do and stretching resources has become such a way of life for us that I forget there are people living in fat and plenty.

Monday 2 December 2013

For world AIDS day HHA has gone to the Maasai to treat as many people as possible in one day. I have stayed at home in bed. The sheer amount of work has finally got to me and I am exhausted and have a very sensible vertigo which means I can't get up. Davy headed off with the others early this morning to get some more film of the Maasai people and the HHA mobile clinics in operation.


I blame part of my exhaustion on the making of the news letter which has been a huge task. The news letter is a 15 minute film of Jeremy and Camilla telling the latest comings and goings of HHA and is put together with all the film Davy has taken since he got here. It is a bit like a carefully considered patchwork quilt and hopefully it will be on you tube tomorrow. There is also a six minute version which was even more work. I don't think that the short version is as good as the long version because the long version is newsy and has things to chew on and a news letter should be fat and juicy. The long version is more captivating though the short version was made for people with a short attention span. Watch the long version. I will put the link here as soon as it's up.


Since he arrived in Moshi Davy has taught himself editing from scratch and before that filming from scratch and has loyally traipsed around from clinic to clinic collecting film where he can. There was a real film crew here for a week so we know what a real film crew is like and just how many times a shot might have to be repeated to get it right. Davy is at the bottom of the pecking order here and mostly has to stay out of peoples way. He never gets to tell us where to sit for the best light or composition and he never gets to tell us to “do it again”. Everything you see in the news letter is a first take – some of it is rocky but the story gets told. There was over 60 hours of work in the editing alone and it is very much to his credit that he has stuck it out. He is fifteen after all.


Sometimes we think about the school that he is missing with regret for the subjects that he loved but there are always other things to learn. In January we return to Malawi to see our students there and teach them the next step and Davy will be one of the class again. It was an eye opener last time for him to be in a class of adults where the teacher never shouts at the students or gives them detention or lectures them on their bad behaviour. Strange world.


The other thing that is occupying our thoughts this week is the fact that the software that we all use must be updated and the license renewed by the 2nd of December which is today. However we do not have sufficient bandwidth here to do that. It is quite possible that none of us will be able to repertorise as of tomorrow and Archibel, makers of RADAR homoeopathic software, will have successfully shut down our whole project!


Thursday 28 November 2013

When we were in Mzimba we had real difficulty with food. We had no where to cook so we ended up eating chips almost every night in “Home of Chips” across the road from the rest house where we stayed. We became frantic for fruit and veg and, after the first few days as our monosodiumglutimate levels soared, for water as well.  Nsima (the local name for ugali) our other staple was cooked in MSG and was delicious but the price in thirst and headaches was high.

It wasn't until the very end of our stay that we found the market and understood the menu of the last few weeks.  The only foods available were tomatoes, onions, cabbage, meat and fish.  Literally a whole market selling only those things. 

In the evenings when the market was shut a line of traders sat beside the road and sold cassava, sweet potatoes and "Irish" potatoes - hence the chips.



 fish

things

things

tomatoes

meat

tomatoes, onions, cabbage

onions and one papaya

fish

things






Wednesday 27 November 2013

I have slipped into this place and nothing seems strange any more so I have nothing to write about. I feel saturated by colour, the beautiful red brown earth, the magnificent flowering trees which stand in pools of shed blossom, the glorious colour sense of the people which makes every item of clothing vibrant and every washing line beautiful. I am just in it and I have nothing to say.


Things have been very hectic and we are stretched thin, going to more clinics and starting earlier in the mornings and my writing time is used more and more for working on cases. But last Monday afternoon there was a pause. We found ourselves waiting for the local organiser to arrive and bring us to the next home visit. Our host brought us chairs and we sat in the shade and at first my hurry washed over me splashing around in the stillness but we were there long enough for it to ebb completely away.


Our shady place was a yard enclosed on three sides by the house and on the fourth side by a mud and stick and stone walled shed and laced across from eave to eave with washing line. Waiting seems to make the colour more intense as if stillness gives it time to saturate the senses and the red earth brown, which is the colour of the ground and all the buildings, plays host to any other colour which might fall on it or hang from it lending intensity as contrast with the brown. So the washing lines are like abstract paintings and the blossom beneath the trees a blessing. On this day the blue of the sky and the green of the trees seen above the earth brown buildings have such a strong colour it cools just to look at it even while I feel the burn and sting of the sun on my foot which cannot fit with the rest of me in the shade.


Irene, the first Tanzanian homoeopath to qualify from the school in Kenya who is now working with HHA as homoeopath and translator, goes to the nearest fruit and veg stall and buys tiny mangos and we eat while we wait.


I haven't seen Ava for a while and when she arrives she brings me up to date on last month's home visits. Ava has seen a lot of homoeopathy over the years so she is not surprised by results and she can tell me without pause that a man who has been in bed for four years is up and walking around, but I am amazed.


Michael's story is that he took the news of his HIV status so badly four years ago that when he went home and lay down after hearing that he was positive “it was forever”. To make things worse for him he had had to wait four days to hear the results of the test and those four days of waiting and anticipating were nearly as bad for him as the results themselves. Now after a few years of homoeopathic treatment he is well and can speak (he lost his ability to speak on the day he lay down) but he is left with a trembling weakness and inability to stand on his own.


I had given him Gelsemium which is one of the remedies for ailments from anticipation and bad news and is also a great remedy for trembling weakness. Some times a remedy seems to be such a good fit you just know it is going to work so I had high hopes but I am still amazed all over again by what homoeopathy can do when I hear he is up and about.


Our last home visit of the day is to a lady who is lying on her mattress in her yard in great pain. She has not been able to work for a month and is depending on the kindness of her neighbours for food. Tomorrow I will hear how she is getting on with her remedy




.

Sunday 10 November 2013

The 11th of October, the first day of our journey to Mzimba district in northern Malawi, was Jane's birthday. She and Davy and I celebrated with a ten hour bus journey from Moshi to Dar (we actually thought that was long!) and followed it up with two more days of traveling in one plane and then more buses, each one more decrepit than the last and stuffed with more people until we eventually arrived in Mzimba bus station on the third night still in one piece if a little ragged and worried as there was no-one to meet us and we didn't know where we were to be staying.


We found a hotel (the wrong hotel) and the next morning being Monday we turned up for work at the hospital where we were to be teaching Jeremy, Mani, Noam and Naomi's HHA correspondence course hoping to find our hosts, Pastor Lameck and his wife Veronica, or maybe even our students.


With no sign of anyone we sat in plain view on the pavement outside the hospital administration building reckoning that, as we were the only wazungu in Mzimba, our hosts might eventually find us. Jane and I proceeded to teach the course to Davy as our only available student. Start as you mean to go on I say!


It turned out that Lameck had traveled in the opposite direction all the way to Lilongwe to try to speak to the Minister for Health who wanted to know the details of someone turning up to teach homoeopathy in his hospital.


Our sticking out like a sore thumb plan worked, Veronica eventually found us and by the afternoon we had met most of our students and, with the minister for health's go ahead tucked under our belts, we were teaching.


That first day we had about 16 students but by the end of the course there were 29. Poverty in Malawi is even more marked than in Tanzania and even in a family that manages to get a child through secondary school there might not be the money for third level education so you end up with a town full of people with brains to burn but not that much to use them on. Because the internet is beyond most people's pocket there is no access to the greedy, easy source of information we are all so used to. Faced with a classroom full of students so hungry for information our teaching was inspired. We were teaching a subject that we love and find fascinating but our students were drinking our words like they were the stuff of life. Homoeopathy is not an easy subject but they tackled the new concepts willingly. Also English is their second language. I have no end of admiration for them.


By the end of the two weeks we had photocopied the correspondence course book over 30 times and Jane's copy was ragged from being taken to pieces and put together again every time more students turned up.


We had also treated more than ninety patients. On the day before we left for Mzimba Camilla had casually suggested that we should be treating AIDS patients while we were in Malawi (even one dose of the right remedy can change the course of HIV turning the clock back for a year or a month) so our bags, which had been rubbing shoulders with bags of fish and hens and other unlikely bus cargo, were rattling with all of the AIDS epidemic remedies and, again starting as we meant to go on, we treated our first patient that very first day in the bus station.


We finished our first day in Mzimba with a long tour of the hospital which practices kangaroo care and truly deserves its baby friendly status, a meal of Nsima and an exhausted early night.


This is a very short, not finished and not perfect bit about us in Malawi from the HHA news letter made by Davy who has made me swear to tell you it is unfinished;







Friday 8 November 2013

Cars and rain; rain; drenching, glorious, ecstatic, thunderous weight of rain. Wet water and dry earth meeting in an unstoppable orgy of joy and the smell of the ground all pervasive as it is released upward into the wet air. I wish I could have been down town when the rain hit, watching the magnificent drains that I have been admiring since I got here but I am at home this week editing the HHA news letter with Davy (coming your way soon!). But watching the thankful dry earth accepting the rain with open arms and turning into delighted mud was enough.


The temperature plummeted to 22 degrees – definitely chilly – and made me homesick. I have stood in rain like this in Reentrisk wet to the skin and with a bow wave at my ankles as a four inch deep sheet of water slakes down the road. Watching drains is one of my favourite things. In Reentrisk it is as good as watching history and the men and women who read the land and made the drains over the last centuries may as well have been standing with me admiring their work; as pertinent today as when they did their digging.


While Jane and Davy and I were innocently in Mzimba the Suzuki drew its last breath and is gone. Yesterday the land cruiser went “clunk” (a technical term) in the middle of a narrow road and refused to move again causing a serious traffic problem. Though if the road is mud you might as well drive in the field and I have seen new roads spring up easily around obstacles. Meanwhile Rebecca's husband Brett brings home amazing stories every day of his adventures through Tanzanian bureaucracy as he attempts to buy a replacement for the Suzuki.


So this has been a week of cars and rain. The news letter is a film, mostly of Jeremy and Camilla telling the news with Davy's footage of clinics and day to day life here added in.  Davy who was one of our top students in Mzimba and earned himself a HHA certificate with his 99% in the exam (he claims to have cheated by studying homoeopathy since he was born) has been working all day every day this week on the newsletter and hopefully we have only one more day's work before it is finished. Then on Monday it is back to the clinics for me and on Wednesday we return to the Maasai.


I wake and write at 4am. Here in Shanty town the only sounds are the insect song and the dogs' indignation in the distance. In Mzimba at the Gapa Rest House where we stayed for 5 euros a night the day was starting at four with buckets rattling to the rooms that have no hot water and conversation around the fire lit to heat it.


Those early hours of the morning were manic for me; preparing for the day's teaching, working on yesterday's cases, rewriting the exam for people whose English was not up to a double negative, reading essays and untangling the broken English to find unbroken meaning, at six we ate dry bread for breakfast, by seven we might see our first patient of the day, we walked up through the town to the hospital at half eight and I would be teaching at nine while Jane began on the patients who were waiting at the hospital.


In theory I know there are people who don't watch the clock like this and I get a glimpse of the African awareness of time and I wonder if I could ever share it. In Swahili time starts every day at 6am and goes to 6pm, the hours numbered nought to twelve, and then stops. So how do I count the hours of the night? I think I wake at four and write for an hour or two but time might stretch and stretch as I write if it has no calibration and morning may never come; like a nineteen hour bus journey might be surprisingly easy if no-one is counting the hours past dark.


That hour after dark seemed to be a social time for the people in Mzimba with unhurried crowds walking in the town.  And on the bus as the sun went down conversation rose to a pitch even becoming hilarious as full dark fell so that for a while we were traveling in complete darkness surrounded by shouts and laughter, then silence. I don't remember much about the last six hours.

This is a picture of a little Davy in the Irish rain.


  

Sunday 3 November 2013

I am back at my writing post. Two weeks teaching in Malawi which was very intense and involved long hours of work each day and no internet so a long story to tell and I am just going to have to start at the end.


The end of the story was a nineteen hour bus journey from Mbeye in the south west of Tanzania near the border with Malawi back to Moshi at the foot of Kilimanjaro where Jeremy and Camilla are based. We had been told it was a fourteen hour journey and had braced ourselves accordingly and what is another five hours?


By the time we made this journey we were toughened travelers and bought all our provisions from the hawkers who appeared every time the bus stopped, or even slowed down, holding their wares up so that they bobbed at window level enticingly as the trader ran beside the bus; water, apples, oranges, bananas, soda, biscuits, crisps, cashew nuts, skewers of fried meat, cooked bananas and maize. Or, at one stop, shoes which lapped our window ledge like eager puppy dogs. At that stage we were too tired to even look out and see the man at the end of the outstretched arm, but he had spotted our open window and was pinning his hopes to it.


One thing that made the journey easier was that we each had a seat of our own. By this time we had made many journeys by Dala Dala (Hiace van with seats) which never move unless they are “full” (full being at least eighteen people though at one stage we were in one which held twenty six, twenty eight if you include the hens) so we were used to being bruised and squashed and impossibly uncomfortable and one whole seat each was bliss.


The day before the nineteen hour bus journey we had started the day's traveling on bicycles from our hotel in Karonga to the bus station. We had asked the hotel for a taxi and this is what turned up. One bicycle for each of us and one for our bags and great hilarity for the early morning people of Karonga to see the wazungo on the back of the bikes. Our bicycle riders posted us directly into a shared car to the border where we arrived forty five minutes later for the long hot walk between the Malawi and Tanzania border posts and eventually, after a bit of visa wrangling on the Tanzanian side, a motorbike ride to the next bus; a three hour 'stuff-em-all-in' to Mbeye where we arrived just in time to book the last three seats on the nineteen hour Hood bus to Moshi and Arusha.


That was the second day of the journey. The first day saw us arriving in Karonga after dark worrying that we had risked just once too often, bus stations not being famous for safety in the dark, but the driver told us to stay on the bus and took us on to our hotel and we were fine.


Often we were fine in Malawi. For the first few days after our arrival we were still being careful not to go out after dark as was our custom in Moshi but we soon got caught up in our work and forgot to be home by dark. We were walking everywhere to save money and soon we were just as happy to walk in the dark with hundreds of Mzimba people who had places to go and no other way to get there. Davy especially took to the town, wandering on his own when we were up to our ears or running errands for us and making friends with the towns people. By the second week word had spread and everyone knew who we were and the whole town was buzzing with talk of what we were doing up in the hospital.


The end of the story for me was standing at the rest house where we stayed in Mzimba on the last day shaking the hand of Fulgensio Tembo who was one of our best students and who had translated tirelessly for the two weeks as we took case after case after case and finding that I was still holding his hand minutes later and not wanting to let go. None of us could believe that we were leaving. The students were so excited by what they were learning that they could not believe that we were leaving them and taking our knowledge away.


We left them without a single book between them and in Mzimba, with no affordable internet, books are the magical doorway to knowledge that they must have been a hundred years ago.


As soon as I reached internet I emailed my trusty Dynamis class to search their bookshelves for books they no longer need. I have all the addresses of the students who are spread across Malawi and Zimbabwe and already books are on their way. Some of our students have been trying to learn about homoeopathy for the last few years and have actually been using the few remedies they have with good success but without books they have been working blind.

So maybe my story ends at the beginning, individual books posted from across Europe to people in Africa who are at the very beginning of their homoeopathy journey.  I wish I could have stayed with them for more of the way.












Fulgensio


Wednesday 9 October 2013


On the way to one of our clinics in the suburbs of Moshi we drive through a stone mason's area. People sit outside their houses at the side of the road and break stones. As far as I can see each person has their supply of stones about the size of a football and then piled all around them in neat pyramids are the results of their work; from the finest of sand piled like a sugar loaf to coarser sand then fine gravel and coarse gravel and two inch stones which we, a world away, would use for drainage. Drainage here is a totally different matter with deep, square, open concrete gullies beside every road that describe an incomprehensible volume of water startling in its absence. Building of these gullies is also done by hand with stone and mortar, each stone cut to fit and then plastered.


I have noticed that they do concrete beautifully here. Floors especially have a very fine finish though may not be exactly level. As I stroll the gentle slope between kitchen and bathroom I am happily reminded of home. Charlie and I built a house together and got the floor dead level thinking that that was how a floor should be but every other house I have lived in over the last 35 years has had a sloping floor.


Further out in the country, glimpsed as we hurtle by on our way to one of the village clinics, I've seen small scale concrete block making going on seemingly in people's front yards. Again the blocks are beautiful, made by hand and clean and fine and pristine.


What this adds up to in terms of homoeopathy is back pain. The stone masons are possibly the worst, sitting all day literally mashing their muscle against rock, but everything has to be carried; from the women with a huge weight of bananas on their heads walking, walking all day every day into town to the men in town with heavily loaded barrows. And as we know from the mountainy banana farmers in Kibosho and the coffee workers in Loyamungo farming is back breaking work.


Trying to treat back pain with homoeopathy is a bit like trying to treat hunger; how can back pain ease without respite from work or hunger ease without food. Nevertheless we give the best choice of remedy that we can hoping that there is a possibility that a person strengthened by their remedy will work easier or old injuries will heal and the accumulation of years will be lessened. Ironically Camilla says that she has more success treating AIDS than she does at treating back pain. She sees people's CD4 counts go up steadily once they start homoeopathic treatment and respond to the remedies.


I treated an elderly man a few weeks ago in Mwanga. He cannot afford to retire and must keep working. He is a stone mason and has no pain in his back while he is working but straightening the back at the end of the day is excruciating. I gave him natrum mur because he has pain from walking but cannot stop for a rest because people might fuss over him. I will let you know how he gets on.



Tuesday 8 October 2013

On Friday Davy and Jane and I go to Malawai where Jane and I will teach. Having worked tirelessly to find the epidemic remedies for AIDS and having seen how well they work, Jeremy's vision is to share the knowledge and spread it as far as possibly through Africa. Apart from sponsoring students to go to the homoeopathy school in Kenya he has written a correspondance course which a group in Malawi headed by Pastor Lameck have already completed. When I first arrived here Marina was in the middle of marking their exam papers and when Pastor Lameck came to pick up the papers (a six day return journey) he ate with us so Davy and I have met him.


Our teaching job is to make the course work real for these people. Anyone who passed the exam received a Helios remedy kit for Africa and if we can help to give them the confidence and the knowledge to use it we will be winning. Once you really understand that like cures like, which can be difficult to get your head around, and learn to tune into your observational skills you are on your way to becoming a homoeopath. And for each person who manages to get their head around and their hands on homoeopathy a community will benefit.


On Friday (which is Jane's birthday) we take a six hour bus journey to Dar Es Salaam where we stay overnight flying to Mbeye on Saturday. Pastor Lameck says we must stay in Mbeye on Saturday night because we arrive too late to get across the border in daylight so on Sunday we take three more busses, one to the border, one from the border to Mzuzu and from there to Mzimba which is where we will be teaching.


When Pastor Lameck made this journey in September he didn't use a plane but did the whole three day slog by bus and arrived hungry and without any money in Moshi. It was one of our first night time tasks to go down town and meet him and bring him home to eat with us. It would make you appreciate street lighting! A pool of light falls in front of each house but that seems only to emphasize the darkness and make a difficult silhouette of all the activity in the street.

So three more days of clinics this week and then we head off.




Two small pink reasons why we are working.

Sunday 6 October 2013



Domesticity. Davy owns the only sharp knife but luckily he will lend it to the cook. For breakfast, which is on the table now, we eat fruit salad of papaya, banana, watermelon and orange (which is green) with yogurt and oats. For all our other meals we eat tomatoes, green peppers, aubergines, onions, garlic, ginger, potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, lentils, spinach, rice, avocado, pasta, bread and eggs in various combinations. All of these things are piled high in the market where I yet again failed to bargain yesterday, but still came home with a weeks worth of veg for three people for ten euro.


We had one amazing beef stew made with meat bought from a road side butcher shop which I had parked beside when doing a home visit. Being a meat eater I had been eyeing up these shops which are just a tiny open room with a counter to the street and maybe only one animal carcass hanging up in the open heat but I had never been brave enough to make a purchase. This time when I come back to the car with Roger, the butcher asked Roger if I wanted to buy some meat and I took the plunge. For seven thousand Tanzanian shillings (about €3.00) he sold me a kilo of meat which he cut in a way that seemed completely random from his hanging side of meat. Stewed for six hours with tomatoes it was sublime. We can get mince in the supermarket and Talipea fish but my hankering for stew is going to force me to brave the road side meat again.


Standing at the tank in the garden and ladling cool warm water into various plastic basins and with large amounts of suds Phylis washes our clothes. She hangs them on the line where they will be dry by night time. We must iron everything to kill the eggs of the mango fly which mistakes wet clothes for mangoes (duh!) and leaves its eggs to turn to grubs and burrow into human skin if that is all that's available. Phylis also washes the kitchen and all the floors in the house three days a week and makes our beds with clean bed clothes on Friday and Monday which seemed excessive at first but bed can be a battlefield of tossing and turning and sweat and itching and fighting the net which encroaches all night long and leaves our toes and elbows vulnerable to bites, so it is very nice to have fresh sheets.


The sound of the neighbourhood is part of our domestic life; the cock crowing at 4 am and all day long, the Mosque in the distance at 5am and Joseph sweeping the yard wordlessly before daylight so although it's still dark you know it is morning dark and not night time dark. The dogs bark in the darkness or howl and answering howls come multiplied over all the gardens.  Subdued conversation comes from the road or from over the hedge and over the hedge again; more intimate in the close dark. And once a month our neighbour (I don't know which one) shouts at the moon. With the daylight the children's voices come, on the way to school and later back again – always in a group and always chatting.  Birds and birds and birds and insects too all have their time of day and in the evenings, weddings which drive around the roads with a brass band on the back of a lorry playing mightily as they go.  Then dark and time to fight the net again.


We have visitors; Davy has just been in to tell me about a tiny fluffy tailed creature, which I hope was a squirrel and not a rat, disappearing through the ventilation block in the sitting room and there are always lizards of every colour and size demonstrating the heat of the walls and many insects which I would prefer not to mention and yesterday morning at daybreak four large immigration men who were perfectly polite if a little worrying but didn't stay too long in the end. None of us are tea drinkers here so we couldn't make them tea but we gave them chairs to sit on while they mildly bullied us. In the end we all drove in convoy down town where we photocopied our passports and documents for them feeling glad we still had them. Difficult to know quite what was going on but all of us knowing that a stranger would fare no better in our country.


And another week is done.

Tuesday 1 October 2013



This is honestly a blue tree.  On the road to the Majengo clinic.  I had the great idea that Davy would film us driving on the way to our clinic trundling under the blue tree but Patience, who had had enough of the day by then; we were actually on our way home, had seen our 18 patients and were flattened with exhaustion, vetoed the idea of getting out of the car.  She said that this was not the neighbourhood to be walking around with your €1,000 worth of camera, so this is a shot from the car.

I drove under the tree one last time catching a momentary glimpse of the fallen blue flowers on the red earth vivid like a blessing.

Saturday 28 September 2013

Early mornings are tricky here for me because I seem to still have the loveliest blood in Africa and I must hide under my mosquito net until the sun is well up. But I have the problem sorted now. I hung a second net over a chair and small table in my room and with a certain amount of running to dodge the very few mosquitoes I can get out from under one net, make myself a cup of hot water and back under the other net and ready to write without much ado. I noticed this morning that my swift, imaginary mosquito dodging was actually creating a cool breeze and I realised how warm it is. The last few mornings have been like this and I'm told the hot weather is beginning.


Every week has had a different flavour here as circumstances change and people come and go. Before Rebecca and Brett went off to teach in Kenya last weekend we had a lovely week of delicious evening meals with interesting discussions and poker games every night. This week Jane and Davy and I have rattled around more loosely and there has been a certain amount of vomiting and diarrhoea involved but you don't want to hear about that.


Jane and I have been mostly working together this week and we have more or less hit our stride. I am seeing people now for a second time so instead of endless strangers every day there are people I have met before who smile in greeting. I am also seeing the before and after. There was one little HIV positive girl who came last month with pneumonia. She has been on my mind and I was delighted to meet her again at last on Thursday looking like a completely different child, smiling and well.


Work is becoming easier as I understand a little about people's lives. It is as though I begin to see more in three dimensions. It is less difficult to see what the different remedies look like when I am able to differentiate the person from their surroundings. Homoeopathy is all about individualisation but in my first panic of being here everybody seemed the same. In fact they often have the same symptoms; swollen knees, waist pain, vertigo, weakness but each person needs their own remedy and it is up to me to find it so learning how to see is vital.


The landscape is also changing around me as I relax and I realise that I was too shocked to actually see at all when I first came here. The implacable sky which is hiding Kili again all this week has withdrawn from the foothills and I can feel, now that I can see the the hills, how we are enclosed in the folds of the land. Roads that I perceived as flat and straight when I first came now undulate and gently turn. Everything is softer; the people and the place and I wonder at the change in me that I am able to see the softness.


Saturday today and we must brave the market again and see if we can get ourselves some food at less than the mzungu price. Tomorrow we are driving to the waterfall which will be our first tourist trip. And back to work on Monday.

Wednesday 18 September 2013

Very sad news today; Pendo died yesterday afternoon.  She was actually a little better so I hope this means that she was comfortable when she died.  She has been hanging on for a long time and with every little improvement we had great hopes for her making it but it was not to be.

Davy and I actually spent yesterday afternoon filming two other little kids who have done really well.  They have even been to hospital and tested negative but apart from that they are strong and healthy and no longer have any of the problems that plagued them a year ago; chronic discharging ear infections, terrible weakness, tiredness, ringworm.  They are still small for their ages which is typical of HIV kids but they have grown well in the last year.  So we were in good spirits as we drove back to the road through the glistening, white thorned scrub and then back to Moshi over the rim of the world where the baobob trees grow to the sad news of Pendo.



Sunday afternoon was spent in Jeremy and Camilla's garden filming Camilla telling all the news of the project. I went along as roadie. It was an interesting afternoon's work; trying to encapsulate what HHA is all about and it got me thinking.

One of the things that Camilla spoke about was our trips to the Maasai. It seems like a big palaver getting there; gathering all the boxes of remedies and the alcohol and water to make up the remedy for each patient and the labels, the record books and pink cards one for each patient and repertories and materia medica for when the computers run out of battery and the computer itself and the extra battery and the bags of empty bottles – one fore each patient. All of this is loaded into the cars and the homoeopaths and the translators all pile in and then the long drive up dusty, impossible roads, wallowing and grinding along in low gear.

BUT when we arrive that's it. We are a dusty miracle in a jeep. We have everything we need and although it costs a lot to get this far this is the end of the expense. We do not need all the things our patients could not afford and are too far away to avail of anyway; tests, hospital stays, x-rays, scans, we don't have to send them on the long walk to town to fill a prescription which they wouldn't anyway have the money for. It's just us and our remedies., each patient gets a remedy on the day and that's it.

I have been here a month and I haven't seen the results of my own work yet but I have seen the results of the work of the people who came before me (that is you Marina and Naomi and Lorraine!). I have worked in clinics with long queues of people outside and person after person comes in and tells the same story “better since the remedy”, “doing good”, “pain gone”, “numbness gone”, “bad dreams gone”, “appetite better”, “weakness gone”, “able to work again”. Many of these people have long term illnesses, may have little food and must work hard so they can relapse in the weeks or months after the remedy runs out and they need a repeat prescription but their lives are incredibly improved.

The contrast is in the new patients who are really suffering, sometimes with appalling illnesses and no access to conventional medicine; men and women and children who are in pain.

For me this is the moment that all of you are raising the money for, when all the rigmarole and palaver of getting there is over, we settle into our spot in someone's front room or their shed or under a tree and the first patient steps in. It is expensive to get that far, especially to the Maasai; that kind of driving uses a lot of petrol and invariably there is some sort of damage to the cars. But once we are there and working everything makes sense.

A deeply heart felt thank you, every one of you, for continuing to get us there week after week.

Asante sana.

Saturday 14 September 2013

Sitting at the cross roads.

I have found it hard to be patient while waiting for the piece of paper that says my visa application is in which is probably as close as I will get to a visa. For me the wait has meant going to meet the lawyer in Union Coffee in the middle of town every second or third evening for the last two weeks. Sometimes he shows, sometimes he doesn't show, sometimes he shows eventually after two hours.


While we wait we sit at one of the tables on the verandah and trawl the dregs of the menu; coke or ginger ale is 50 cent, tea is a euro. This would be an ideal opportunity if we were coffee drinkers but we are not which is a great shame as Tanzanian coffee is among the very best.


We play cards. We bought a pack of cards with us but only know one game which was taught to us when we were with the Maasai by three Maasai gentlemen. We were waiting for Camilla to finish up with her last patient of the day. That day we knealt in a circle on the dry ground and there was great laughter and pantomiming of the different rules and I lost every time.


In Union Coffee I have perfected my skills and manage to beat Davy as often as he beats me. We wait.


The cafe is at a cross roads and I grow used to it. People are continuously passing on foot and last night, for the first time, I began to realise that many are the same people I have been watching every night and I loose the feeling of sitting still as the world passes by and begin to comprehend that THIS is the center of the world. The picture of the neighbourhood builds into four dimensions with layer on layer of passing footprints as people go about their lives and return, direction and intent marking invisible lines that weave a whole.


The waiting had seemed interminable to me and while I sat there I could not remember a time when I did not wait or imagine a time when I will no longer wait. I railed against my circumstances “Why am I forced to sit here witnessing a random cross roads for two weeks?” But that very question releases me and it is then that I suddenly perceive the stillness that all the movement is contained within and I feel the privilege of getting to sit on the bank of the stream of all these lives.


Of course the moment I fall into stillness my own life can move on, David the lawyer comes with my piece of paper and we drive home in the pitch black dark.


Other things are moving on too; myself and Patience saw 54 people this week in four different clinics. Davy and I met Pastor Lameck who is leading a group of people in Malawi who are studying the correspondence course that Jeremy has written. As I write Pastor Lameck, who came to Moshi to pick up his group's exam papers, is still three hours from home having left here 48 hours ago traveling by bus. And Jane, the new volunteer, arrived in the middle of the night last night from Ireland with, among other things, 50 remedy bottles donated by Jean Blake of Homeopathy Supplies Ireland so now we can divide up the remedies and fill in the blanks in the three remedy kits that head off with us every day to all the different clinics.


There have been a lot of changes in the volunteer house where we are staying and it has been pretty unsettled but Jane's arrival marks the beginning of what will be home to us for the next four months. Rebecca arrives with her husband in the middle of the night tonight and that will be our family complete. On Sunday the whole HHA team; Camilla, Jeremy, Roger, Patience, Michelle, Jane, Rebecca, Mr Rebecca, Davy and I will eat together and on Monday it all begins again.


Pendo is still doing ok and we are all very hopeful that she will pull through.


 Friday Morning Meeting; a chance to iron out the wrinkles, plan the coming weeks clinics and maybe discuss a difficult case

Friday 6 September 2013

The Maasai. I will start with the roads. Most of the Tanzania that I had seen up to last Wednesday was fairly flat. With the exception of mountains in the distance and the peak of Kilimanjaro appearing every now and then in the sky, my experience of Tanzania was certainly not hilly, The gradual climb up to Kiboshi hospital or the even more gradual slope down into town had lulled me.


Even Wednesday, though it seemed extreme, could not have prepared me for Thursday.


On Wednesday we drove from Moshie to Arusha. I actually slept on the way which was surprising because Marina's New York style driving is truely terrifying, but when we got to the Medical Missionaries of Mary Sisters in Arusha I woke up and after much organisation and disscussion we set of and I got my first experience of the dust.


The dust. Imagine the worst road you know; the road from Allihies to Urhan over the mountain is good compared to what I have in mind so picture the very worst road you can, double it, add serious potholes and craters and then add a ten inch deep covereing of the finest, fluffiest mud dried into dust. Spread this evenly across the road from ditch to ditch hiding every washed away chasm and boulder and break. Also add, at regular intervals, two foot high earth baricades which may be an attempt to moderate wash away during the rains or may be an attempt to slow wild drivers. (All the roads here have speed bumps which bring you to a complete halt if you want to cross them without having your wheels torn from underneath you).


Driving on these roads is like being at sea, the car lumbers and wallows throwing up great washes of dust when it falls into an invisable pot hole then lurching and clambering up the other side only to tip down into the next one with the dust splashing up against the side of the car as high as the roof.


I was lucky I was introduced to this in stages, that first day we didn't go very far. But the second day it was my turn to drive.


I grew up in Co Dublin where we would go “in” to town so when I moved to Allihies it took me a while to get used to going “out” to the village but “in” to Reentrisk where I lived. In the west of Ireland we also go “in” to an island which I would have thought was “out” in the sea. But having driven two hours “in” to the Maasai lands I finally get it. In is intimate, hidden and hard to get to, in is private, in is why we are outsiders who will catch our glimpse and leave again, washing off the dust and forgetting.


In is also a valley. After driving for a while on fairly level ground following Camilla's tracks and dust cloud ahead of me the road took a dip down a dry, mud walled gorge. Going downhill in the dust was not so much driving as floundering softly in a downward direction but when we emerged from the end of the gorge we were looking from a height down into an incredibly beautiful valley. Now, for the first time, I understand how high we are that we can fit this valley below us and how far down I would have to go to reach the sea.



We continue following Camilla's dust cloud, sometimes we have long stops to let the dust settle because we can't go forward over this ground unless we can see; sometimes the road has a sheer drop on one side and we must snake to the other side of the road to cross over a narrow dust bridge.


By this time I have worked out that the best bit of road to drive on is the part that is covered by a strange dappled patina of lighter marks. I have been following these marks for a while before I realise they are footprints and they show the places where the dust is at its shallowest. Many, many footprints, many people, many cows. Thursday is market day and people are on the move. Every footstep followed by dust.
The journey is greuling but we get to our destination at last where a very gracious man shows us into his spotless front room. I've been told that the Maasai people suffer from eye problems because of the dust and this is what we see, eye and chest, but even though we are seeing people in a lot of pain a calm spreads when we settle into work. I have learnt to work a bit more slowly now and hold my nerve and all of us are working because our host must translate for his family into swaheli and each patient describes their symptoms as best they can and the hum of Africa rises from the ground around our little group and envelopes us in a cocoon of friendship and ease.


I try to remember this gathering over the following week as we wade through a treacle of bureaucracy trying to sort out the official stuff of our stay here and encounter many of what Jeremy calls Africa obstacles but I think might be white person obstacles as Africa seems to bring out the worst in us.


Marina left today but before she went she told me to hang on until I see the results of my work, that that is why I am here and that my muzungu troubles will pale when I see that I can help people who might otherwise have absolutely no health care.


Pendo is still alive though she is very, very fragile. Jeremy and Camilla bought her two nights in a hospital so that she could go on a drip to help her dehydration and she is on a new remedy which has helped her with the diarrhoea and vomiting again.


I learnt one word of Maasai, I don't know how to spell it but it sound like a-shane-a-lay and it means thank you.













Tuesday 27 August 2013

Mkombozi today. I saw 18 patients, 17 children eleven years old and under. Nearly all new patients. A greulling day. I can't say that I did good work choosing remedies for them all and I am very glad that I will be here next month so I get a second chance if the first choice isn't good enough. Every time we looked up there were more waiting and in the end we had to turn the others away and when we said 5 more and sent the others home every time we got to the end of our five another few had snuk in. How can you stop another child slipping on to the end of the queue?


The last one didn't take long. An eleven year old girl with pain in the abdomen better for eating. The only symptom. Everything else fine. And she has only had this symptom for one week since her parents could not pay for her to have food in school. Food in school for one month costs 30000 Tanzanian shillings which is just less than €15. She was not the only one with pain better for eating but the others all had other symptoms. This girl is healthy and well, just hungry.


I gave her a remedy which might help her a little not to worry so much when she is hungry and I will find out from the school If I can pay for her food for a month. I wanted just to give her food and no remedy because she is just hungry but she had got herself on to the end of the queue so I felt honour bound to find her a remedy. The food is only going to last her a month but if she is less worried about hunger that is a longer term gift and the remedy is also going to support her general health.


Earlier I had asked a seven year old who was having trouble answering our questions if he didn't like being questioned – I was trying to understand the remedy he needed and his shyness was giving me a clue. He was almost too shy to speak but he said he didn't mind because he likes this medicine. All of these kids have seen their friends being helped by homoeopathy over the years.


Marina also had over 15 patients today in Majengo and had to turn others away. Luckily there are two more volunteers coming in September, which will mean less people turned away though transport is going to be a problem for us.


Davy spent this long day variously trying to break his own politeness barrier and be brave enough to film people or sitting endlessly, endlessly bored and waiting. I was proud of him and feel that his witnessing lots of hungry children, one after the other, all day long, is a contribution in itself. He is slowly getting the hang of the filming and gets better footage every day.


At one stage he managed to record some powerful singing that overwhelmed us from the room next door, drowning out the voices of our small patients but giving us a welcome break of beauty in the midst of hardship.


I haven't worked out how to eat during our long days work because how can you break out the hang sanwiches in front of people who are hungry? I gave away my lunch today. More comfortable to join in with the hunger for a few short hours.


Pendo was one of my first patients this morning, terrifyingly weak and frail but just about hanging in there. All of us keeping her in mind every day.

Sunday 25 August 2013

Up and Down Hill Trees

I spent Monday in Kibosho Hospital with Jeremy learning a huge amount and feeling even more intensely my slow arrival in Africa. I think by Monday I had more or less arrived


Kibosho is uphill from where we are and cool and green. It is farming country and most of the people that Jeremy treated were farmers. I know that banana plants are not technically trees but they are as tall as trees and the road to Kibosho runs deep between them. Everything is very clean here, even the ground is clean. Narrow, red, swept paths run from the road to small, house size clearings in the green and we glimpse houses between the bananas as we drive by.


My feeling that first day in Kibosho was of great ease as if the very warmth of the air, laced as it is with sound and smell, could support me.  It felt very much like happiness.


HHA is a very tiny organisation with a huge job to do and for many reasons not all of the patients who need to be seen are seen. Transport is a huge problem and sometimes people can just not come regularly to clinics. Sometimes HHA is just spread too thin and cannot hold every clinic as often as they would like to, and there are other obstacles. Two of the clinics this week had not been held for a few months and with many patients who returned the story was the same; good improvement on the remedy but relapse some time after the remedy ran out and then no more clinic so no more remedy. It is a little bit pannicky to see the fragility of it but many people are getting homoeopathy who otherwise would not and there are many good news stories. On Wednesday we hear that Pendo is still eating well with no vomiting or diarrhoea. She is a very sick little girl but this week at least she is doing ok.


On Tuesday We were in the Mwanga clinic which is down on the plain in the opposite direction from Kibosho on the road to Dar Es Salam. Lots of traffic, many people walking and stunning colour everywhere on a red earth ground, then, just after we turn off the road to the border, Baobab trees. The road is wide here and the view is wide and flat to the mountains in the distance but the flat seems convex with the road snaking along the top of the dish and the leafless baobab trees looking like silvered pencil drawings spreading on both sides in the clear sun.


My first actual work is in Mwanga and by Thursday evening we have been to Maryland and Majengo clinics as well and I have seen 18 patients and met some lovely people and I am wrecked.  Most of the people who I see have done well on the remedies, one or two have not which means taking a closer look and five are new including one small girl, Hadija, who, although she smiles shyly when she arrives, sits perfectly still on her grandmother's knee and never answers a single question.


Tomorrow it starts again and I kid myself that I am better prepared. Well you never know!


Sandy

The first time we saw the mountain we got a shock because it turned up in a place where we thought there should be sky.

After a week of overcast skies and a night and day of rain on Thursday and Friday the mountain made an appearance yesterday again.

The lizard just happened to be passing.

Sunday 18 August 2013



We have been here for four days and it feels both like one day and a month and like the strangest place on the planet and like home.


It is beautifully cool so we have not yet had to acclimatise to great heat but everything else is new and I'm told the heat is coming soon. We are 1000 meters above the sea which could explain the sudden random exhaustion or maybe that was the long flight which was mind boggling.


Most of what I have to write about is the diffusion into a new place. For the first few days everything was so strange that I could not process it, just a blaze of sights and sounds and smells. But slowly it has risen up around me like soft water or a dream and now I am inside it.


Yesterday was my first day of driving so the map of the town is settling into my brain for the first time and I realise that the streets actually stay in the same place and can be relied on to be there the next time I drive around the same corner.


Traffic in the town is made up of cars, lorries, pici pici motorbikes, bicycles, big square hand barrel carts on bicycle wheels, shallow wheel barrows made of hand beaten metal and many, many pedestrians.


The main roads of the town are lined by traders with their wares neatly arranged on the ground in a continuous strip but women also walk around carrying their wares for sale with an example placed on their heads so you know what they are selling. This makes sense to me now but for the first few days seeing people walking around with one shoe sitting on their heads was another example of the upside down world I had found myself in.


For the homoeopaths amongst you I'll say that regular doses of mercurious have calmed my insect bites, mended my toothache and my ability to understand the exchange rate and turned my world right side up again.


The up hill road from Moshi back out to Shanti Town where we live is wide and tree lined and shady and long and straight. All day there are women walking down the dusty strip beside this road carrying bananas on their heads from out of town. And at our corner Rosie's fruit and vegetable stall. Up here the houses are big and hidden behind high hedges and gates which are locked at night.


Yesterday we drove out of town in the other direction to make a home visit to a young patient of Marina's. The roads in this direction are very different, a bit like the road from Allihies up by the mines and over into Urhan only flat and made of hard baked red dust. The fact that the road is on the level makes the constant climbing into ruts and over bumps easier but the bumps and ruts are huge. Turning into a side road may involve a steep descent into a three foot ditch and climb up the other side again. Here the road is narrow and we are driving right through people's lives, almost through their kitchens.


Marina's patient Pendo is 14 and very, very ill and Marina is making a visit today because she is afraid that this little girl might not make it to Monday if she continues with vomiting and diarrhoea but when we arrive we find that the remedy Marina gave yesterday has helped and the vomiting and diarrhoea have stopped. She still may not make it but she has a better chance. This evening anyway she will eat green banana and meat soup, Marina has given her mother some money for the meat.


Yesterday, trying to get a smile from Pendo, Marina brought bubbles. She got her smile and has put a video of the joyful bubble game on face book.


Tomorrow we actually go to work.


With love,


Sandy








Rosie at the corner of our road



















Saturday 10 August 2013

This is a packing post.  Well, a gathering all the various pieces together post.  If we get as far as packing I will certainly rejoice!  This morning I wondered through the pound shops of Dun Laoghaire unable to decide what gift a small child on the other side of the world might like?  I eventually buy a selection of the rubbish that I would get for my grand children - don't children everywhere love glittery bits of plastic and things with wheels on?  I hope so.

This is symptomatic of my sheer inability to comprehend what it will be like in Tanzania.  Reading the guarantee on one of the pieces of camera equipment we have gathered I noticed that it mentioned every country in the world but left out the whole of Africa and when I first tried to send money to Jeremy and Camilla my internet banking just didn't have Tanzania on its list.  Couldn't be done.  I feel I am traveling way beyond the borders of my world, well, actually, even beyond the borders of my imagination.

The last I heard from Jeremy was "The choc situation is very bad" so it's out I go again this afternoon to buy chocolate with nuts to bring them comfort.  An area where I at least have some expertise.

The other thing that is on my mind all the time is the huge amount of goodwill that goes with us.  It has been an extraordinary experience to be helped and supported by so many people. 

We leave in three days' time.  I hope my future posts will have more of the grit of reality in them.