13.6.17
It is the evening of
our first day and we are still traveling, driving North in a car with
no suspension which reacts with a sharp and violent crack to each
pothole, releasing thick, red dust form the floor to fill the
interior. But I am still lagging behind, my mind still snagged on the
endless, sleepless flight and the interminable wait in the queue for
visas when we arrived. Four queues actually; a queue to apply, a
queue to pay, a queue to receive the actual visa and a queue to have
it checked.
I sleep on and off
in the back seat as Africa reels by; then the sky is tinged with
orange in the West and lilac in the East and it is dark. We do have
lights, more or less, but we can’t see much and the road is at its
busiest now that people are walking home from work – each side of
the road lined with quiet shadows in the dark.
When we arrive in
the centre of the town most of our students are here to greet us. We
climb out of the car and are surrounded by hugs and laughs and
greetings. A sky full of strange stars and friends in the dark.
14.6.17
No Jane. I have
plenty to teach and I get on with teaching, then walk back into town
at lunchtime to see if she has arrived. No sign of her and I
concentrate on being annoyed because the alternative is to worry that
she is ok. I know that it is pointless to do either because here
things happen in an approximate sort of way which generally turns out
ok in the end. Our photocopied booklets all but one are missing page
13 and that one has no page 4. We traipse from copy shop to binding
shop to try to trace the missing pages – each blames the other.
Never mind.
15.6.17
Jane turns up before
breakfast and all is well. She likes the booklet I have written on
heart and epilepsy therapeutics and I am delighted as I have been
pretty obsessed with writing it over the past few weeks. Our students
see many cases of heart failure but up to now haven’t really known
which remedies to use. They see many cases of epilepsy but only use
one remedy – cuprem. I am
hoping that by teaching a selection of heart remedies and more than
one epilepsy remedy we will have the opportunity to teach the
students how to choose which remedy
will be best for each patient – how to tell the difference and
match the patient to the remedy.
Hopefully
this skill of seeing the differences between remedies will be useful
for all their other patients and
all their other remedy choices.
I,
in turn, am very glad of the organising work that Jane has done,
getting this course together against the African odds. While
I have had my head down writing she has been tearing her hair out in
a minefield of expectations, egos and politics.
This year our
classroom is on the main street and our days are coloured differently
by being in this different place. The main street is busy with many
people walking by all day long and open backed trucks carrying people
from rural areas who have business in town – maybe something to
buy, maybe something to sell. Luckily we are not bang in the centre
where we would not be able to hear ourselves speak over the cacophony
of business being done, many trucks parked waiting for the return
journey, the return load of people and bundles, and music blaring
with running comentary from enthusiastic, microphone weilding,
preachers the sheer volume of whom is felt more in the bones than the
ears – the normal range of hearing not being large enough to absorb
such sound.
We miss the domestic
intimacy of the road to last year’s classroom which made its way
between people’s houses and was a fascinating walk every day. That
tranquility is still there though, not fifty yards behind the street.
We hear that there are new piglets to be seen and leave the main
street to see them. We walk down a passage way between buildings and
find peaceful houses and cooking and kitchens and hens and washing
and children and the hype of the street seems miles away. The piglets are new,
extremely pink and look a little bit like baby rats.
16.6.17
So far so good.
Early morning on the third day and we have had our organizational
dramas. One of our best students Angelina waiting in her home town in
the North of Malawi with no money to travel. She arrived late last
night when we explained to Lameck just how badly we needed her here.
Lameck, our generous host, friend, organiser and bane of our lives
doesn’t have the same priorities as we do. He sees the success of
the course in terms of raising the profile of homeopathy and his
profile in the town. But what we want is to teach Angelina and other
gifted students who Lameck also failed to get here on time or at all.
We know that every remedy we manage to teach translates into relief
from suffering for people on the ground. And it is a pleasure to
teach students like Angelina who pay attention, learn and have
success in using the remedies. People in her community are depending
on her.
As I write it is
very early morning, not yet light. The dogs are barking and howling
all around the town near and far. Something has set them off and the
news is carried in relays repeated and repeated again. Many canine
voices. I presume that others lie awake as I do, listening to the
distance, woken by our local dogs who bark the loudest. But there is
not a word from any human. The dogs have the night.
This time we brought
with us six laptops only three of which were actually working by the
end of our journey. Davy spent his day in and out of the internet
station today, speaking to Eduard in Holland, dodging power cuts and
wrangling with operating systems and software which have to be sorted
again from scratch. It is, as always, extremely useful having him
here. Yesterday the photocopying was his task – he is familiar with
the town now and roams about on his own and I’d say that the town
is familiar with him. Only one long haired white boy in this town.
Actually only one white boy.
I am always very
aware when I am here of the people back home who have paid for this
course and I have a burning need to see every generously donated
euro count. Each year, wherever we teach, patients turn up and wait
outside our classroom. Word always spreads that we are here. This
year the students take the cases and Jane and I chip in when it comes
to discussion of the possible remedies. It is utterly heartening to
see that all of the students are capable of taking a good case and
choosing a good remedy.
18.6.17
Sunday – day of
rest. Just before first light people are outside our room yelling and
laughing greetings to one another and having loud, shouted
conversations. It is the same every morning and really it is the end
of sleep. I get up and set to making a set of the new remedies for
each student. At half past eight, job done, we are sitting at
breakfast and it feels as if the morning has gone. By the middle of
the day we have finished writing the exam and a Sunday stretches
ahead of us – empty. We walk to the top of the hill outside town
where our classroom was last year and remember our last three visits
to Mzimba, all running together now. The classroom has been at a
different place each time but we always stay at the Gappa Rest House.
Davy and I have always been in the same room and this Sunday it feels
as if we have never been away from here, that our lives in the North
are nothing but fantasy and that we will be here forever.
trip by pick up to see the clinic the Mzimba group are building
19.6.17
Veronica Ngulube,
one of our students who is an experienced senior nurse misses a day
of teaching because she is called back to the hospital for a
C
section. At the end of the day I catch her up, going through the
heart and epilepsy remedies we have been studying. She is easy to
teach because she has an immediate understanding of the physical
conditions the remedies relate to. When we come to cicuta virosa
which is a remedy for people with a nervous system keyed to the limit
such that even a loud voice or the shutting of a door can send them
into a renewed convulsion, Veronica recognises the irritability of
the nervous system and the type of convulsion with arching back and
stiff neck from babies she sees at the hospital. It is a moment of
epiphany for both of us – she now knows she has a remedy that can
help those little babies and I know that traveling here, bringing
this remedy and this information has been worth every moment of
effort and expense.
20.6.17
Sitting with
Fulgensio’s family in the dark interior of his home. We sit for a
long time and talk and talk while the sun gradually sinks low enough
to find its way in and light the room – now I can see where we are.
Our conversation is long and many turned, and I hear what it is like
for a family trying to live in this town where there have been food
shortages and run away inflation during the year. Fulgensio’s wife
has a market stall outside their house and people call out when they
want to buy one of the piles of tomatoes she has for sale. They also
have a pig and two hens. For a family with three bright daughters the
cost of secondary school is a big worry. Secondary education which
begins at 17, happens far from home and costs an arm and a leg.
Fulgensio’s own schooling was cut short when his sponsor died. He
had hoped to become a lawyer but had to stop school when there was no
money. Law’s loss is homeopathy’s gain.
Discussing cases
during class today Fulgensio stood to read the case of one of his
patients who came for a return visit yesterday. He had given her a
remedy to help her with horrendous piles and difficult asthma. She
came back to report no piles, no asthma and the fibroids which had
her on a list in the hospital for surgery now a 1/4 of the size and
no longer a problem.
Fulgensio is tired
now having been up until one am last night preparing for today’s
exam (his result 91% - the highest in the class). He rubs his face as
he translates for his daughter who needs a remedy for abdominal pain.
Alinafi, his eldest daughter, is 15 and wants to be a teacher.
21.6.17
And we end with a
bang. A crowd of patients, a chaos of case taking with much
discussion over and back.
Today it is Davy’s
turn to teach all the technical stuff the students need to know about
their new laptops (all six working now after a hectic week). He works
steadily through all the questions with one group at a time while
Jane and I answer questions on how to navigate Complete Dynamics (the
homeopathy software program generously donated by Roger van Zandvoort
and Eduard van Grinsven).
The students new to
the computers are painfully slow, one finger at a time and it reminds
me of last year when we spent much longer on teaching the computer
program but left wondering was anybody going to be able to persevere
and master it. Our answer is clear as day in front of us now as we
watch the students who have had a computer for a year; their
fingers fly across the keys, they know exactly the questions they
need to ask and instantly assimilate the answers. These are also the
students who have progressed the most in their understanding of
homeopathy and remedies. Complete Dynamics comes with nineteen books
and they have been reading them!
One of our students
who was so bright and buoyant last year and came top of the class is
very silent this year and I worry about how vulnerable she might be
as she is young and female but in truth all of them are vulnerable.
The men who we teach who are pastors are obviously more confident in
dealing with people and grab themselves a patient from the queue
outside and get to work while the two younger women hang back but
Davy spots them and the last I see before the chaos overtakes me is
the three of them sitting outside under a tree leaning over the
computer. He makes sure they set passwords that no-one knows but
them. We all want them to hang onto those computers and the chance to
learn so much more. We do not want their computers commandeered by
someone who, mistakenly, feels more entitled.
We work on until the
last patient has been seen and the battery on the last computer has
died. Home to the rest house, a game of cards as we wait for our
dinner of chips and goat, pack and bed.
22.6.17
Seven am and we
stand beside the main road to Lilongwe. A taxi has brought us out of
town so we can catch the Lilongwe bus going by from Mzuzu. The
shadows are long and it is cold while we wait. Lameck has accompanied
us because he believes we would not be safe out here on a lonely road
through the bush.
The bus is luxury
and only takes four hours. And I cannot write any more. Our flight is
tomorrow and all we have to do is wait. Will we come again next year?
I always hope that I will never have to come to Africa again but I am
pulled viscerally by the students who I want to see succeed. I want
them to be able to help the people around them; the boy who tried to
stand up at the end of the football match he had been watching and
found that his legs no longer worked, the young woman with epilepsy
whose life cannot start because no-one will marry her, the couple who
have been together for ten years living with the grief of no
children, all the HIV people who have come to the end of conventional
treatment and have nothing now but homeopathy.
But, also, I want to
see the students grow in confidence. I want to see them able to make
money so that they and their families are safeguarded from hunger and
poverty. They are valuable to me. They are valuable to their
communities. All lives are valuable and death is unremarkable in
Africa.
