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.