The 11^th of October, the first day of our journey to Mzimba district in northern Malawi, was Jane's birthday. She and Davy and I celebrated with a ten hour bus journey from Moshi to Dar (we actually thought that was long!) and followed it up with two more days of traveling in one plane and then more buses, each one more decrepit than the last and stuffed with more people until we eventually arrived in Mzimba bus station on the third night still in one piece if a little ragged and worried as there was no-one to meet us and we didn't know where we were to be staying.


We found a hotel (the wrong hotel) and the next morning being Monday we turned up for work at the hospital where we were to be teaching Jeremy, Mani, Noam and Naomi's HHA correspondence course hoping to find our hosts, Pastor Lameck and his wife Veronica, or maybe even our students.


With no sign of anyone we sat in plain view on the pavement outside the hospital administration building reckoning that, as we were the only wazungu in Mzimba, our hosts might eventually find us. Jane and I proceeded to teach the course to Davy as our only available student. Start as you mean to go on I say!


It turned out that Lameck had traveled in the opposite direction all the way to Lilongwe to try to speak to the Minister for Health who wanted to know the details of someone turning up to teach homoeopathy in his hospital.


Our sticking out like a sore thumb plan worked, Veronica eventually found us and by the afternoon we had met most of our students and, with the minister for health's go ahead tucked under our belts, we were teaching.


That first day we had about 16 students but by the end of the course there were 29. Poverty in Malawi is even more marked than in Tanzania and even in a family that manages to get a child through secondary school there might not be the money for third level education so you end up with a town full of people with brains to burn but not that much to use them on. Because the internet is beyond most people's pocket there is no access to the greedy, easy source of information we are all so used to. Faced with a classroom full of students so hungry for information our teaching was inspired. We were teaching a subject that we love and find fascinating but our students were drinking our words like they were the stuff of life. Homoeopathy is not an easy subject but they tackled the new concepts willingly. Also English is their second language. I have no end of admiration for them.


By the end of the two weeks we had photocopied the correspondence course book over 30 times and Jane's copy was ragged from being taken to pieces and put together again every time more students turned up.


We had also treated more than ninety patients. On the day before we left for Mzimba Camilla had casually suggested that we should be treating AIDS patients while we were in Malawi (even one dose of the right remedy can change the course of HIV turning the clock back for a year or a month) so our bags, which had been rubbing shoulders with bags of fish and hens and other unlikely bus cargo, were rattling with all of the AIDS epidemic remedies and, again starting as we meant to go on, we treated our first patient that very first day in the bus station.


We finished our first day in Mzimba with a long tour of the hospital which practices kangaroo care and truly deserves its baby friendly status, a meal of Nsima and an exhausted early night.


This is a very short, not finished and not perfect bit about us in Malawi from the HHA news letter made by Davy who has made me swear to tell you it is unfinished;