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.