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.

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.

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.

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.