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.