Tuesday 26 December 2017

As part of my work with HHA I made four trips to Malawi to teach homeopathy to a group of pastors and health care workers. This started as a way to spread knowledge of how to use Jeremy Sherr’s AIDS epidemic remedies which were so successful in Tanzania but grew and grew. The group we teach are pretty dedicated and diligently use all the information we give them. Because they are surrounded by people who don’t have much access to health care they end up treating serious illnesses. For instance they have had startling results with epilepsy.

For a homeopathic remedy to work well it must suit the individual it is prescribed for. One epilepsy remedy will not suit everyone with epilepsy and in some cases will not help the person at all. The students in Malawi only had one epilepsy remedy. With a certain portion of epilepsy cases they had great success but could not help others.


Last June we taught them other epilepsy remedies. This seems so simple, such a small act. It took me a week to write the booklet on epilepsy remedies and a week to teach it but the students in Malawi have turned it into incredibly real help for many people suffering from epilepsy.

Cicuta virosa is one of the remedies we taught. Even as I taught it some of the students recognised the symptom picture and knew of patients this remedy could help. One nurse in particular knew it was going to help the babies on her ward; babies with nervous systems so wired and sensitive that even a loud noise could set off a fit.

There is huge pleasure for me in putting this sort of knowledge into the hands of someone who knows where to use it. It is why I teach fever remedies to parents, labour remedies to midwives, it is why I teach.

Tuesday 11 July 2017

2017 teaching trip to malawi






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.