Many people supported our trip to Malawi. People gave us money and all sorts of different help we needed to get us on our way. I have been writing all these posts for you so that you will have some idea of what you have paid for.


Starting with possibly our weakest student; you have helped Blessings. Lameck describes Blessings as vulnerable because he doesn't really have a secure place or secure work. He has been to both our previous courses but didn't do brilliantly and hasn't been using homoeopathy. He went away from the last course without even getting a book – I am not sure why that was; possibly he was supposed to share but people disappear to far places where they might get work or a better chance and the book went too. All Blessings wanted from this course was the book. He got the book. But he also got two weeks of food and friendship and computer training. In the random way that chances come and go in this place that may stand to him.


The other students are using homoeopathy in their communities so you have helped communities spread across Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Most of the students are treating serious cases because the serious cases are there and no-one else can help them. They are making a difference to the lives of people with epilepsy, paralysis, HIV/AIDS, asthma (a crippling disease if you don't have access to inhalers) and others. After this two weeks they understand a little more about the people they have not yet been able to help. You have provided them with more resources; books, repertory on computer or phone and remedies to fill the gaps that have grown in their remedy kits. They leave with renewed energy to learn this difficult but so rewarding therapy and help more people thanks to you.


Lastly you have helped Flyness and Angelina, our two most brilliant students – secretly and quietly the most brilliant. In a class full of loud and confident pastors these two 22 year old women have the brains, the discipline to study and the ability to listen. They have more knowledge but less confidence than the others who hold positions of power in society and who are going to turn around one of these days and find themselves far out stripped. In every class there will be tortoises and hares but their patients, the people no longer in pain, whose CD4 counts are going up, who have one epileptic convulsion a month instead of 30 are not going to care if they are treated by a tortoise or a hare. All the students share a compassion for their patients and a desire to help.


Everyone has worked hard these two weeks. We have a graduation ceremony and hold together for the last few hours as a happy little band before we go our separate ways. That is what you have given, that classroom where magic happened for two weeks, where all of us learnt something and renewed our drive to help other people, where we worked together before scattering, where we found wealth in the poverty; you have held that in your hands. Thank You.


I have been home for a week and Africa has not faded from my imagination yet as I know it will do. I feel it in the breach when I try to explain to people I meet, people who don't get it and I know that in another few weeks that will be my reality too. Africa is very far away and this is my last Malawi post for now. Thank you for reading

The patients come in many varieties;


There are the broken ones, survivors of horrific crashes who have been heroically repaired by the surgeons, sport enormous scars and have been in continuous pain since their accident – for one man that has been 16 years. No prescription pain killers here. I give arnica or rhus tox, wishing they could have had these remedies years ago.


There are the women who have back pain and waist pain from carrying heavy loads over long distances every day. I find it hard to believe that a remedy is going to help when the carrying must continue with no chance to rest and mend, but I know from past experiences that a remedy that helps the woman to deal with her anger about her situation or her sense of injustice or hopelessness, is going to help the pain.


Epilepsy; no medication, just have your fits. We see patients who have already been given homoeopathic remedies by the student homoeopaths here in Mzimba. Patients who are having fits once a month now instead of every day. If you have epilepsy here you cannot get married, you will have no life. A mother brings a child who has recently started to have epileptic convulsions and her grief is palpable, she knows that as of now her little girl has no future. Why does homoeopathy work so well here? I have no idea but I am continually blown away seeing people's new lives emerging from the chaos of their illness.


Babies; I only saw one baby on this visit, Desire. Ten months old and bright as a button. I had a long conversation with her, delighted to discover that baby Tombuka is the same language as baby English which is a language I speak, I even got some smiles. Desire was born at 8 months gestation weighing only 3 lbs, she is healthy and the doctors say there is nothing wrong with her but she cannot sit up. She is fat and soft and she has no strength in her core muscles to hold her upright. Desire's mother sits Desire facing her on her lap, holds her two hands, looks in her eyes and says “stand Desire, stand” and Desire, eyes locked on her mother's in absolute trust and hope, uses every ounce of her obstinate determination to slowly, slowly, slowly pull herself to standing. I give her calc carb and hope to hear that she getting on well when she comes back for her follow up visit next month.


HIV/AIDS, always there in the back ground, mostly unspoken of. I have a long conversation on a break one day, sitting in the shade, with a man who speaks English. He talks at length about the cost of living, inflation – food costing more in the market each week, the price of rent, cars, houses, funerals, how to make money and how to make money. He is voluble and friendly, chatting openly until I ask him about HIV/AIDS but now he is upset. When he was nine his father died. He does not know if it was HIV/AIDS but his mother died soon after. When his father died his father's family came and took all of his father's possessions. They took everything including the chance for this man and his three sisters to go to school, get an education and have any kind of future.


We have patients who know they are HIV positive and are on ARV drugs, patients who know but cannot tell anybody because of the enormous, life stopping stigma and patients who don't know. The beauty of homoeopathy is that you treat the person not the disease so we don't actually have to have a diagnosis of HIV to give someone a homoeopathic remedy that is really going to help them but the atmosphere in the room when we have a patient who hasn't dared to go to the hospital yet is pretty grim.


After a day of seeing patients the overall feeling is one of endless, enduring, suffering. If I was here for a month I wouldn't write about it until I could see the good results but I am on my way home today – we will hear next month when Fulgensio, Flyness and Lameck do the follow up visits. I would like to stay forever to do this work but I cannot. Hopefully teaching twelve other people will have a better result.

And suddenly it's over. The Zambian's have 14 day visas, Malawian airlines decide that Jane's flight will leave a day early, we teach for one last day, have our graduation ceremony, pile back into the kindly provided car and Sidney, who is an APPALLING driver drives us at TERRIFYING speed and danger the 300 km to Lilongwe in the dark and the freezing cold. We left in hot sunshine at five, our warmer clothes are in the boot, Sidney must have the window open because he did not sleep last night and he is having trouble staying awake and none of us want to prolong this horror by asking him to stop to get our cardigans. Each time I leave Malawi I say never again.


All of us have given too much. The widows, two great women who have done all the cooking and cleaning and food buying and budgeting have been underpaid by Lameck who does not value them. He thinks of them as charity cases and although he has been given money to pay them he feels that as charity cases we will also give them charity so he does not have to pay them the full amount. This is as plain as day to him and he sets them up to beg from us. We have no way of understanding the situation, we don't feel that if you have no money you should not be paid and we are angry at Lameck which is ridiculous. He in turn is confused and baffled by us. And hurt.


Lameck himself has given too much, he has been so busy wheeling and dealing that he has missed many of the classes and he does not do as well as he might have done in the exam. He is distraught yet he had to wheel and deal, he had to make money out of the kudos of having us here, where else will money come from? There are layers and ramifications beyond our comprehension.


Jane and I have given too much; our students tell us we have been provided by God, which is the nicest and highest compliment they could possibly have given us and probably true! But our Western souls have been slogging it out and working at an intense pace as our personal contribution to students we believe in. We didn't realise it was God's contribution. We come from a culture where you choose to make a huge effort like this, where effort is valued and has some chance of success, and we are faced with a culture where everybody works incredibly hard all the time but only luck can bring you money to feed your family.


The students have given too much. They have given the studying their all but we have covered too may difficult concepts and in too short a time. We have wrecked their heads. They go away feeling they know less than when they came. They were at the end of learning acute prescribing and they were confident in it, they are now at the beginning of learning chronic prescribing, a much bigger thing. It is like reaching the top of a steep hill, glorying in the king of the castle view and then looking round and seeing the mountain. It will fall into place for them over the next few months, they have a great spirit for learning and knowing more will help them to help many more people which is what is driving them but for the moment they are drained. And all of us are facing long journeys now we are turned for home.


In my next blog I will write about the patients which is, somehow, too big a subject to talk about but the reason we are all here.

I have a new prayer or mantra or thought that goes constantly through my head “we have everything we need”. I don't know what has bought on this feeling of benevolence unless it is that we are in a place of invention, a place where everything is used. This is a clean place; every front yard of bare earth is swept every day, every floor is washed and every hand before every meal. There is rubbish on the road walked into the dust but only in small pieces, a last desiccation of bits too small to be turned into tools or rugs or water containers or string.


It is a great frame of mind to be in and makes me look at every problem in a new light. For instance at home if I don't have a remedy that someone needs I buy it, here we must work with the remedies that we brought over for the students on this trip and on or last two trips. If someone needs an unusual remedy there is nothing we can do, we have to work out of this smaller remedy kit. But it is very good for us to know what it is like to prescribe from a smaller range of remedies – we need to put ourselves in our student's shoes.


And we need the forty minute walk to our classroom every morning and the walk home again in the evening. We could go by taxi but that would be an expense and we need the walk. This is our pace, our count of days and time, our preparation for a full on day and our chance to release the adrenalin in the evening before we crash into sleep at eight thirty (nearly three hours after dark in a country that gets up at 5am – not an unreasonable time to go to bed).


Yesterday we saw quite a few patients after teaching so it got dark as we were walking down the hill. The first stretch of our walk from the classroom is through fields on the high plain above the town, up here there is a lot of sky and, to the North, we can see the mountains in the distance. The most built up area starts when the road turns down the hill and for most of our walk is lined with houses and full of traffic, more traffic as darkness falls and rush hour begins. We join the weave of foot traffic spread across the road, stepping aside when we hear the rattle of a bicycle behind us or when we are lit from behind by the dancing lights of a car.


The road is made of baked mud and has deep, dry gullies on either side, cut by the past rain, it has the constant sound of feet, many conversations and calling voices. During the day the children shout to us “wazungu, wazungu!” delighted to have seen such a sight as three wazungu walking down their road but in the darkness no-one can see how strange we are. The cars and bicycles come and go with their rattling and beeping, pushing everyone aside but the constant is the walking people giving an age old, footstep beat stringing through the random chaos. We have everything we need.

Saturday today, we spent the day seeing patients and I want to rave about Complete Dynamics which is the homoeopathic software we are using; gorgeous, beautiful, clear, fast repertory program for checking that all the important symptoms of the patient are in the remedy. Roger van Zandvoort and Eduard van Grinsven have made a fantastic program which is literally a joy to use. Roger gave us four copies of Complete Dynamics to put on the four donated computers which we lugged over here for our students so I was going to have to say something good about it anyway but I find my mouth hanging open in an attempt to find an adjective great enough to describe it.


I only started to use it at the beginning of this week and I have been learning it as I teach it but today it was the oil that soothed a stressful day's work. A stressful day because the people we saw are really suffering. Many of the patients are in the congregations of the pastors we are teaching who are more inclined, now that they know us better, to tell us the background story of each person so case taking becomes more harrowing. Some people lost all their wares when the market burnt down putting them into a debt which there may be no way out of. This could mean that their lifetime's chance of having an ok amount of money to live on might be gone and no amount of hard work is ever going to bring it back. How can you make money if you don't have money? How can you grow food if you can't buy seed?


My solace at the end of each story is the speed and ease with which I can find a remedy using the Complete Dynamics repertory so I know that some of each person's distress is going to be eased at least.


So here is my review; Complete Dynamics opens fast, is clear, simple to use and logical, has two excellent search methods all on the same page so no worrying about which page to have open, cuts out many of the excess steps involved in getting rubrics into clipboards so is fast, allows you to pop rubrics in and out of the analysis with out getting overwrought, (I mean the program doesn't get overwrought but the practitioner doesn't either!) has an incredibly useful highlighting tool so you can see exactly which rubrics of the analysis a remedy is in or which remedies are in a rubric, can skip easily and quickly to materia medica and back again, saves each analysis in the right place at the end of each case all on its own leaving you free to move onto the next patient fast, has lots of pathways back if you make a total mess of anything, is visually pleasing and easy on the eyes AND it uses up less battery which means we get to work for longer when we are working without electricity like today.


I have found a single problem, something I would like to be able to do on the analysis page, but this program is so consistently intelligent that I am presuming that as soon as I have internet again and am back in touch with the world Roger is going to be able to tell me how to do it.


We have had six copies of Complete Dynamics on the go all week, being completely missused by people who are not used to it and not used to computers and we have not had one crash.


Ps It takes about an hour to get a blog online. I hope you are appreciating my dedication to blogging!!

The buildings where the students are staying and where we have the classroom are a 40 minute walk out of town. The only problem with this is that there is no mains electricity in the classroom or student accommodation. They have solar powered lighting which is great but not enough to charge the computers which we brought for them. As a result we have to carry the computers up the hill every morning and down the hill every evening so that we can charge them. But some times we don't have electricity in town either.


When we arrive back in town in the evenings it is rush hour and the wide street is full of people; lined with food sellers, their wares polished and neatly arranged on a piece of cloth on the ground and thronged with customers going about the serious business of buying food.


Music blares from the shops along the street behind the food sellers and everyone is talking, shouting, hailing friends. We buy our breakfast as we go by on our way home – avacados, tomatoes and onions; Yum. We arrive into the rest house exhausted and the electricity goes off accompanied by a roar of disappointment behind us from the town.


There is something very peaceful about sitting in the pitch black in the restaurant where we have our dinner (€1.25 for nsima, beans and goat, 50 cent for omelette) knowing there are people at every table, soft voices in the dark, but seeing no-one. Later they bring a candle which helps us see our food but doesn't really dispel the darkness.


We don't see the main street from where we are enclosed in a courtyard but we can always hear it and the happy hoots and whistles that go up when the electricity goes on again remind us that we are surrounded by a thousand people. No noise of traffic, which is minimal, but always voices.


After a night of no electricity the bonus is the huge bucket of scalding, wood smoke smelling water delivered to your door in the morning.


This trip is not so exhaustingly intense for us because we don't have to see a hundred patients as well as teaching. Four of our students are from this town so there are four competent prescribers here now and we know that people are still going to be cared for when we leave. Instead we see the difficult cases only; four people with epilepsy on Tuesday, five homoeopath's children on Wednesday (very difficult to prescribe for your own child!). This leaves us free to concentrate on teaching and the teaching has been amazing. It is a small group, they are here to learn and you can literally see the information going in like water dropping in a well. There is serious discussion and questions that push the edge of the pool of knowledge wider and wider as the week goes on. Jane and I teach together and if one of us misses something the other picks it up, this is a very easy sharing of knowledge. The students are delighted, it is two years since we have been here and the questions have been building up. I am glad we came.

It is 3.30 on Tuesday afternoon and I have hit bliss. It is exactly a week since we set out from home, the end of our second day of teaching and I am sitting in one of the small rooms with Fulgensio, who is translating for me, our 24 year old patient, who suffers from epilepsy, and her mother. I have been hurrying, hurrying, we have crammed so much into two days of teaching and now we are seeing patients who have been waiting since morning. Of course I woke at 4am to work on yesterdays cases and at this stage I am seeing through a haze. I give up, what can I do? I have asked a question that seems to take a lot of translating and while I wait for an answer I zone out and watch the conversation. We are in a new building with unpainted walls which give a perfect grey saturation to host the bright sun blazing at the window and the beautiful black faces and vibrantly coloured clothes that fill the room. I am happy, and, in my moment of zoning out I understand what remedy to give the girl and I think she will do well – always worth giving up!


I am happy with our students too; SUCH hard workers, they have spent the day today captivated by their books. They cannot get enough, reading, discussing, listening learning. The stakes are high for them. All of them are helping a lot of people back home and they are keen to fill the holes in their knowledge and for us it is a great experience to teach such motivated people.


Or whole camp is happy! We have cooks and carpenters (the extra chairs), children (a four year old boy who has travelled from the South of Malawi with his mother who is one of our students) and the patients who wait and chat and wait. In the middle of the day everyone gets fed – the cooks, the carpenters, the students, the teachers, the organisers, the film crew (Davy), the patients waiting patiently, the patients mothers and the boy. Today we had nsima and goat. This may be an expensive way of running a course but every student we teach will help a hundred people and when a thousand people have been helped we won't regret the cost of those extra lunches. Which are very delicious by the way!

Such a pleasure to meet Pastor Fulgensio Tembo today and hear how homoeopathy is thriving in Mzimba. He tells us how he has been using the remedies since we were last here and learning more and more about them as he sees them working in different patients. I find it very encouraging to hear that he is continuing to teach himself and lovely to spend an hour in the company of this sound man after our whirlwind arrival yesterday. We sit in the bus station, drink a soda and chat, my spirits rise and I am thrilled with the realisation that Jane and I have helped him along the way.


Pastor Lameck Ngulube is a different personality, he was HHA's first contact in Malawi, his enthusiasm brought him to Tanzania to study the introductory course with Jeremy, and Davy and I first met him in Moshi on one of his return visits. He holds this whole project together and wheels and deals and organises. It could not be done without him. He is up to his ears over the next few days trying to get everything ready for the arrival of the students, he has organised accommodation and food and a room for us to teach in. This afternoon he is sourcing chairs so we may not have to hire them.


So many things have changed in the town – the market, inspiration for all my prints, burnt down and has been rebuilt – but our room in the Gapa Rest House is exactly the same and there are scary moments when I feel we have always been here. But part of my soul hangs onto the knowledge of a cool, damp, fresh Island with no government and this is a short trip after all.