I am back at my writing post. Two weeks teaching in Malawi which was very intense and involved long hours of work each day and no internet so a long story to tell and I am just going to have to start at the end.


The end of the story was a nineteen hour bus journey from Mbeye in the south west of Tanzania near the border with Malawi back to Moshi at the foot of Kilimanjaro where Jeremy and Camilla are based. We had been told it was a fourteen hour journey and had braced ourselves accordingly and what is another five hours?


By the time we made this journey we were toughened travelers and bought all our provisions from the hawkers who appeared every time the bus stopped, or even slowed down, holding their wares up so that they bobbed at window level enticingly as the trader ran beside the bus; water, apples, oranges, bananas, soda, biscuits, crisps, cashew nuts, skewers of fried meat, cooked bananas and maize. Or, at one stop, shoes which lapped our window ledge like eager puppy dogs. At that stage we were too tired to even look out and see the man at the end of the outstretched arm, but he had spotted our open window and was pinning his hopes to it.


One thing that made the journey easier was that we each had a seat of our own. By this time we had made many journeys by Dala Dala (Hiace van with seats) which never move unless they are “full” (full being at least eighteen people though at one stage we were in one which held twenty six, twenty eight if you include the hens) so we were used to being bruised and squashed and impossibly uncomfortable and one whole seat each was bliss.


The day before the nineteen hour bus journey we had started the day's traveling on bicycles from our hotel in Karonga to the bus station. We had asked the hotel for a taxi and this is what turned up. One bicycle for each of us and one for our bags and great hilarity for the early morning people of Karonga to see the wazungo on the back of the bikes. Our bicycle riders posted us directly into a shared car to the border where we arrived forty five minutes later for the long hot walk between the Malawi and Tanzania border posts and eventually, after a bit of visa wrangling on the Tanzanian side, a motorbike ride to the next bus; a three hour 'stuff-em-all-in' to Mbeye where we arrived just in time to book the last three seats on the nineteen hour Hood bus to Moshi and Arusha.


That was the second day of the journey. The first day saw us arriving in Karonga after dark worrying that we had risked just once too often, bus stations not being famous for safety in the dark, but the driver told us to stay on the bus and took us on to our hotel and we were fine.


Often we were fine in Malawi. For the first few days after our arrival we were still being careful not to go out after dark as was our custom in Moshi but we soon got caught up in our work and forgot to be home by dark. We were walking everywhere to save money and soon we were just as happy to walk in the dark with hundreds of Mzimba people who had places to go and no other way to get there. Davy especially took to the town, wandering on his own when we were up to our ears or running errands for us and making friends with the towns people. By the second week word had spread and everyone knew who we were and the whole town was buzzing with talk of what we were doing up in the hospital.


The end of the story for me was standing at the rest house where we stayed in Mzimba on the last day shaking the hand of Fulgensio Tembo who was one of our best students and who had translated tirelessly for the two weeks as we took case after case after case and finding that I was still holding his hand minutes later and not wanting to let go. None of us could believe that we were leaving. The students were so excited by what they were learning that they could not believe that we were leaving them and taking our knowledge away.


We left them without a single book between them and in Mzimba, with no affordable internet, books are the magical doorway to knowledge that they must have been a hundred years ago.


As soon as I reached internet I emailed my trusty Dynamis class to search their bookshelves for books they no longer need. I have all the addresses of the students who are spread across Malawi and Zimbabwe and already books are on their way. Some of our students have been trying to learn about homoeopathy for the last few years and have actually been using the few remedies they have with good success but without books they have been working blind.

So maybe my story ends at the beginning, individual books posted from across Europe to people in Africa who are at the very beginning of their homoeopathy journey.  I wish I could have stayed with them for more of the way.

Fulgensio