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.