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.

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.

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

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.