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 The implacable sky which is hiding Kili again all this week has withdrawn from the foothills and I can feel, now that I can see the the hills, how we are enclosed in the folds of the land.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.

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.

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

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.