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.

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.

I made an episode of my radio programme "Another Way" from recordings I made in Malawi. It took up the whole of my horizon from one end to the other end of the week for two weeks when I first arrived home. It takes me a while to wind down and get my feet back on the ground here and I feel a bit sheepish about that but I think, perhaps, I just need to admit to myself that going to Africa and teaching is, in a small way, a big deal.

https://www.mixcloud.com/Another_Way/

The Malawi episode is just called Malawi.  

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.

This could be my last brush with internet so I better write something. Our first day was a little overwhelming – I had forgotten exactly what the “fresh” in fresh air means. At home if I can't sleep I have only to open the window and cool, liquid clean pours in with a secret tang of the deep sky. It is like water to thirst and I am asleep again in moments. Here in Lilongwe the air is warm and thick, smells of spice and holds the possibility of mosquitoes. I don't sleep much the first night though beyond exhaustion from the trip from Ireland.


On our second day Pastor Lameck arrives; Malawian hospitality being such that he must drive the three hours from Mzimba to escort us back there tomorrow, he has been given the use of a car by a grateful patient and we have only to buy fuel. He arrives in time to drive us out to the airport to meet Jane arriving from Tanzania. My suggestion that I wait (sleeping) in the hotel while he meets Jane does not compute – he can not believe of me that I would be so rude – so we all pile into the car and lumber back out to the airport which I am glad of, of course, once I have been made to do it.


In the airport we sit in the waving bay on the second floor terrace and excitedly wait to wave at Jane, who doesn't see us, but never mind, we now have the fifty minute ride back into town to catch up and reminisce on our last trip to Malawi which took 2 days, four buses, a car, three motor bikes and four bicycles. We volunteer Davy to sit on the hard part of the seat and we drive in the dark planning our teaching strategy in broad strokes; we will spend the first day interviewing each of our twelve students to find out exactly what their needs are, how they are getting on with homoeopathy back home and what we can give them that is going to help them the most. We will be teaching use of the repertory and distributing the repertories we have brought with us but there may be other questions that need answering.


End of the second day. Night's sleep. Don't feel quite so cranky this morning! Mzimba today.

Packing again. It seems very boring to write a post about packing yet packing has been all consuming in the past few days. So different from the time we left for Tanzania 3 years ago when we were really travelling into our imaginations, not having any reference for where we were going, yet still pretty scary.


There is one thing I will be doing differently – I won't be bringing presents for the small children that we meet. Nothing I bought last time was relevant; the bouncy balls didn't bounce in the dust or the mud, the stickers were too precious and strange to stick, so many children left the consultation worried by the little gift they were clutching. This time I will accept that gift giving is not my skill and I will stick to prescribing and teaching. BUT if I can find bubbles this morning before I leave I will bring those. On our last trip any time bubbles appeared they were met with such hilarious delight. And they are of the moment, there - and then magically gone, petrol rainbows in the sunshine, causing a dancing swirl of chasing, thrilled and laughing children and then run out. Totally useless – only for joy.


What we are packing this time is more heavy duty; computers filled with libraries and homoeopathic remedies filled with potential benefits for the people who receive them. Both those things packing a big punch for the relatively small space they are taking in our bags and the small amount of money it cost to get them together. What a relief to pack up those computers after a month of tripping over them spread all over the house plugged into every available socket having their brains cleaned out and rearranged. Good to go now.


A big THANK YOU to everybody who has made this trip possible. We have received such amazing support. Lots of people have stepped in and done one impossible thing; lent us the lovely room for the fund raising party, sourced computer batteries, found the courier to deliver the computer batteries, given us computers, offered to pick up remedy bottles, donated great prizes for our raffle, given us money, given us computer software, smiled at us!! Instead of being impossible it's been really great. Thank you all.

The group of students Jane and I taught in Malawi in 2013 and 2014 are extraordinary individuals. They come from all over Malawi and from Zimbabwe and they are now valiantly using homoeopathic remedies to help people in their communities. They have taken everything they have learned and they have run with it using every word of every book on homoeopathy that they own.


They really remind me of starting out in Ireland 35 years ago. I didn't even know what homoeopathy was I only knew that a bottle of belladonna 30 tablets bought in my local health food shop had completely healed my baby's bursting earache.


That bottle of belladonna sent me on an Odyssey to find books on homoeopathy, writing to book shops and publishers (no internet then). The first book I found, ordered for me by a tiny book shop in Dun Laoghaire, was Samuel Hahnamann's Organon of Medicine. I read it from cover to cover like it was a thriller. Well it is a thriller! Thrilling to find a medicine so effective.


This April 26^th I am heading back to Malawi to teach the same group of students again. Davy is coming with me, no longer a skinny 15 year old, and he will teach computer skills. Jane is Travelling from Tanzania and will meet us there. We are bringing lap top computers, smart phones and homoeopathic software – all donated – which will bring our students to another level.


Also on this visit I plan to spend more time collecting the students' individual stories. Having a radio programme has filled me with a love of story and, of course, everyone has one!

I lived without mains electricity in West Cork for a few years in the early eighties. We eventually got a diesel generator, a huge Lister engine that thumped away in the shed for a few hours every night giving us a certain amount of light and running the washing machine. We had it rigged so that turning out the last light at night would automatically switch the generator off and we would lie in the dark listening to it winding itself down to silence. We also had paraffin lamps and candles and I don't remember missing the mains electricity though I'm sure I did. Our house was high on the hill and during the many power cuts the rest of the parish could see our light shining on. We were a feature of the night landscape where every light meant a person or family alone in their stretch of darkness. We got the mains electricity at the end of 1987 and relaxed into an easier life.

In May 2015 I found myself without electricity again. But this time I was living on the main street in Dun Laoghaire where everyone has electricity, everything is electric and I was taking electricity very much for granted. The cut off was like a slap in the face and I sat in my newly silent house sipping a hot drink made from the last boil of the electric kettle and felt stunned.

When action returned I tracked down my landlord who immediately emailed the relevant piece of information to Electric Ireland but when I phoned them they informed me that they could not open my landlord's email for two days. They took my phone number and said they would phone me back.

As it turned out by the end of the two days of enforced waiting I had put the electricity free system in place that was going to last me four months. Which was lucky because they never did phone me back.

The thing that happened to me with the electricity cut off was that I discovered my town. No washing machine? Never mind there is a friendly and efficient laundry two doors down. No broadband? Never mind there is a cafe two doors in the other direction equally friendly and glad to see me, thank you Two Beans. Though I later discovered that the wifi from the pub across the road reaches conveniently to my desk which is inside my front window - thank you Gilbert and Wright!  But mostly the lack of electricity budged me away from my all electric desk where I had been firmly lodged and walked me around my town.

It became my habit to do the researching part of my case work in the library every day. This gave me somewhere quiet and pleasant to work and charged my computer which meant I had another three hours of computer time at home. I charged my phone in the car. I ran a paper free office and emailed receipts because of course I had no printer. I found a printer – I mean a man, not a small electric humming thing that gobbles expensive ink – three minutes walk away who did an excellent job of printing my leaflets.

Life settled into a new rhythm. I have a gas cooker so I wasn't stuck for cooking though I burnt out two saucepans before I bought myself a kettle with a whistle. Apart from that whistle a house without electricity is very quiet; no radio, no podcasts, no you tube, no Netflix, no washing machine, no fridge. All those plugged in things hum and groan. I did miss the fridge but I soon got into the habit of buying only what we needed each day. 2 big supermarkets downtown - 2 minutes walk away.

I started to love the silence and the candle light. I washed by candle light in the basin with water ladled from a pot heated on the gas, the softness and slowness of it a pleasure. I would get up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and the 'flup' of the lit match and the glow of the candle would hardly disturb my sleepiness compared to the unrelenting crack of a light switch and the startling bright of the electric light. Reading in bed by torch light was another unexpected pleasure because you don't have to lie with your book angled to the light, rather your torch can follow your every turn. But night time light was another thing that the town thoughtfully provided – we had only to open our window blinds for the room to be filled with street light.

It was a good experience overall - having no electricity - though I felt I had to get it back when the damp, cold, dark of Autumn set in.  Getting it back was a gift of the town as well - Citizens' Information around the corner set me straight on how to deal with the electric companies and now, three weeks short of the shortest day I am grateful to  have it back..

The radio programme I made this week for Another Way on Dublin South FM is an interview with Sarah Jackson who is a member of the Society of Friends also known as Quakers. I edit these programmes myself which can take quite a long time depending on how erratic the actual interview is. I learn a lot that way – listening over and over again as I edit. It has been really interesting but this week it was a pleasure, there is something about Sarah's lovely voice which I found very calming. Dublin South FM are running the programme today, 25^th August, without an add break so that anyone listening can get a whole half hour of calm.


I wanted to talk to Sarah because some of the complimentary therapists I have interviewed, all people who deal with the whole picture of health when treating someone, mentioned spirituality as an important part of the whole person. This has got me thinking – what, exactly is a spiritual illness?


An important aspect of treating an individual patient is understanding where is the centre of the case in that person. If someone has stubbed their toe or caught a flu germ these are both external physical causes and could be treated with homoeopathy by matching the physical symptoms that ensue from the physical cause. But look a little deeper and there is possibly more to see; perhaps the person with the stubbed toe wasn't looking where they were going – perhaps they were not concentrating and the lack of mental concentration is actually the cause of the stubbed toe? In that case I must treat the bruising of the toe AND the lack of mental concentration if I am to see a good result and a person who is able to protect his toes in the future. What about the flu germ? Not everyone who meets a flu germ is able to catch it but perhaps my hypothetical patient has been having trouble sleeping because of grief or anxiety – if someone has been worn down by his emotions to the point where he is vulnerable to catching the flu then, when I treat him, I have to treat the emotional cause as well as the physical cause if I am to get a good result.


So what is a spiritual cause? I think, perhaps, loneliness. I am interested in other suggestions? I was interested to speak to Sarah because my radio programme looks at other ways of doing things and the Quakers certainly do things differently, but nearly the whole way through the programme Sarah talks about communication, connection, listening and hearing and it strikes me that it is the spiritual part of us that does this work, making us part of the whole, keeping us connected to our fellow man, holding us in the community or connecting us to nature or even to the beauty in man made things which is, after all, an expression of the creative in man.


I enjoyed making this programme, I hope you enjoy listening to it. www.homeopathydublinsouth.ie

watching the tide turn


I was lucky enough to catch a ten minute talk by Jason McChesney yesterday at the Dun Laoghaire chamber B2B meeting. Jason is a business coach and I found every minute of his talk inspiring – it was all about goal setting and in only ten minutes he managed to get across the nitty gritty of How to set goals in a way that was very useful.


But the thing I have come away with was his question why. Why do I want the goal I have set? My goal is always boringly, more patients, more work; I need to pay my rent, I need to make ends meet. But after Jason's talk, when I really stopped to ask myself why, the answer was that the satisfaction of treating someone successfully with homoeopathy is breathtaking. And I don't necessarily mean the big things like less pain for someone with arthritis or a diabetic needing less insulin or someone coming out of depression and feeling it is ok to try to live again though those things are pretty amazing. The thing that I am hooked on is seeing the way that people's lives take a different direction as their health improves – I love watching the tide turn.


You may have heard of the cascade of intervention that can happen in a labour where, if a woman is induced, her pains will be much harder to bear than normal so she will need pain relief which may make it more difficult for her to push when the time comes which may lead to the use of forceps which requires an episiotomy or even a C section. You end up with a sore and traumatised, stitched up woman and a baby who might not want to feed because he is bruised and full of drugs which upset his stomach just at the crucial time when you are trying to establish breastfeeding which will strengthen the bond between mother and baby, protect the baby's health for years to come and protect his mother from breast cancer. The war is lost for the want of a nail. (Homoeopathy is incredibly useful in labour and if you are my patient I will give you every help I can to ensure good progression in labour and pain relief). But I am referring to the cascade of interventions in labour just as an example of how one thing can lead to another and another to the next.


There are so many knots that we can get our lives into where small things add up and up over the years; think of the teenager who has a sports injury, looses physical confidence and doesn't want to go back on the pitch, puts on weight from lack of exercise then loses confidence some more and doesn't want to see her friends. Or think of the teething baby who cries night after night, ends up with an exhausted mother who is dragging through the days unable to meet his needs which makes him more and more clingy and her more and more exhausted and both of them anxious when it is time for the baby to go to the creche where he catches every available bug because he is so below par. If that teenager had the homoeopathic remedy arnica on the day she hurt herself and the baby had chamomilla for his teething neither of these stories would unfold like this.


Most of the people I see in my practice have a back story where one thing has lead to another and another and at each step their health has suffered, hardly noticeably at first but worse as the years go on. People end up in situations they find intolerable; the job they once loved is now too stressful, the people they live with give them no peace. As health suffers over the years so does patience and sense of humour and courage and love.


My job as a homoeopath is to listen to the story, try to understand the tightest part of the knot and how it got tied then find the homoeopathic remedy that matches that particular situation. This is when I get to see the tide change that I love. The remedy gets the person back on track and they begin to use their energy to sort themselves out. Health improves, confidence builds, a sense of humour returns. I have literally seen lonely people find their soul mate and fall in love, troubled teenagers welcomed back into the bosom of their family and people re-engaging with a work situation or a home life that they had thought was impossible. I can't claim that homoeopathy did all that but it did untie the knot that was preventing those people from living the happiest, fullest life that they could live.


It is a full year today since I returned from Tanzania. I miss my friends and patients there intensely but it has been a very satisfying year's work watching the tide turn for so many of my patients here.

Well, there has to be a last blog. I am back in Dublin where the day is a short tunnel of grey rain which I run through in an attempt to keep warm. Grey but not depressing because the light, when it comes, is white and clear beyond belief. Rinsed and clean, from a low sun we never see, it suffuses the cloud and expands to a great size forcing a white space and holding up the sky. Coming from the end of the street or from the sea it washes everything in subtle tones so the world is like a pigeon's plumage, holding colour inside grey. And the rainbow, when it comes, is such an intensity of colour that I love the implacable density of the grey sky that hosts it. The grey sky that closes in and then it is night again.


I know I have been in Tanzania because my arms and legs (if I was to peel back my long underwear and catch a glimpse of them) are still brown from the sun but the sun tan and mosquito bites are strangely out of place here and anyway are tinged with blue from the cold.


I have lived through the waves of grief that went through me on the journey home and I am immersed in this world now. People here apologise for their problems knowing that I have met people whose problems are more of the life and death variety but they shouldn't; our problems are our problems and they can feel like life or death to us. We all do the best we can with them. Mine all seem to be to do with rain and hard streets which I march in my shoes and the pains in my legs and my feet which are used to a slower, warmer life in flip flops. And public transport which is AMAZING! In Moshi public transport was the public's legs, and stepping out onto the road to walk to the shop was to join a journey that started a thousand miles ago and will go on for a thousand miles and while you are on it there will be no time or hurry only walking. My new strong African legs are coming in useful here at home but my old weak Irish chest has succumbed to the cold and coughs and wheezes.


I have learnt so many things in the last six months. I have loved the people that I met and the sheer amount of work and I can't wait to get my clinic up and running here again so that I can keep doing the work that I love, Which is why I venture out into the rain again and again, organising, organising.


I have been writing this blog to give an insight into the work that HHA does, the big story that happens in a small way day after day after day but I can no longer do that, all I can tell you about now is greyness and rain. If you are able to and would like to support Jeremy and Camilla and the great work that they are doing a standing order for five euro or five dollars a month is a very tangible, bread and butter, way to do it.


http://www.homeopathyforhealthinafrica.org/donate/

It remains only for me to thank you, dear reader, for keeping me company all this time. 
Thank You
Sandy

Leaving Tanzania. I think perhaps I stayed here one day too long. My last two days have been easy compared to Jane's but I have dragged my way through them. Finally the heat is too much, the endless onslaught of people too much, the haemorrhaging of money that comes with being a Mzungu, the impossible foreignness of it, all too much.


On my last day there are a few people who I want to see just one more time, people who have done very well on their first remedy but now need the next step. This “second prescription” has been a Holy Grail for me and a puzzle since the time I first started prescribing 25 years ago. The first prescription is the beginning of the journey but being able to continue without losing your way when you hit the first hurdle and then the second and third, being able to negotiate around the obstacles, sticking with the person around all the bends on the road to recovery is the only way to help them to be really well.


The first prescription is often the “Wow” one, especially in someone who is very ill. To give a remedy to someone who can no longer walk to the door, someone who has given up hope because they can no longer work which means they have no food, someone who is in terrible pain and despair and then watch them turn around and head back towards life can really look like a miracle. But the real miracle is all the hard slog which comes next; sticking with them, possibly for years, as they slowly untangle their health. People who are HIV have the incentive to keep coming back for treatment because they see their CD4 count going up and up and up and they actually seem to get better very fast but it is the same for anyone, we all have the challenge of our own long term health, often our most important challenge.


On my way to today's home visits I reflect that I have loved driving with impunity through the areas of Moshi which are maybe a bit rough, I've had a place here because I was on my way to one of the outreach clinics or doing home visits. It has become normal to travel through people's lives on their intimate streets. But today is different, I am marked out for home now. I will leave and the gap that had me in it will close in a moment and life will go on.


In Moshi you can drive across the tracks to the other side of the town, it is quicker than driving around. There is one place where there is a gate which a man might open for you. It is the strangest gate because there is no fence or wall only gate posts and woven around on every side are cycle paths or piki piki motorbike paths or paths made by feet, running and weaving like ribbon or tangled hair. Only the cars or the lorries or the carts must go through the gate, everything else winds around. The obstacle is the track itself and some buildings with not quite enough room to get around though the piki piki's fly through giving the illusion of free passage.


When, after a wait, you do get through with your lumbering car you climb up onto the track which has no trains but is a straight die highway full of people walking, clamber down on the other side then make your way along the woven piki piki paths to the clinic which is back on an actual road. This must be what it is like to travel from the left to the right side of the brain; on one side the grid of the proper town, on the other the wild chaos of the cycle paths which made themselves up as they went along.


I have done a lot of driving around on this side of town and even remember my way but my comfort here is illusion; Roger tells us of a robber who was hacked to death a few weeks ago by the owners of the shop he was robbing, or our local piki piki driver in Shanty Town who, only this week, gave two men a ride across these tracks and got beaten up for his trouble. Motorbike stolen. End of his career as a piki piki driver.


Jane has had a much heavier few days at work than me. Because we have been away the busier clinics got put off until this week and it's only Tuesday but she has seen nearly 50 people. Our limits keep getting pushed like this; you think it's impossible and then you do it, if it is necessary you do it. Mind you she did come home from work today and buy herself an iron, it must have felt as if sanity and calm might be possible if only her clothes were ironed. Clothes are washed by hand here, then wrung out and dried fast in the sun and end up very crumpled and possibly infested with mango fly eggs which we kill with an iron, when we had an iron. Comforts are small and important. She must get up in the morning and start again. Me and Davy get on a plane.

I have loved it though, no matter how hard it is, I am very glad to have had this chance. I am very glad to have made friends I don't want to leave.  Jeremy and Camilla have been stunning in their generosity and friendship and I was very sad this evening to say goodbye to Amy and Noga and Ike who have been especially good friends to Davy and me.

Davy washing our clothes to come home

It is difficult to write about teaching in Malawi because it is so intense. Everybody involved has a whole lot wrapped up in the venture. Some badly want to help members of their families, some are full of excitement about homoeopathy and know that their chances of learning are limited to this one week because we don't know when we will be back, some are reaching out to a possible future, an education, a chance to make a living, some are just power hungry and knowledge is power. I for one am cranky; I want to teach them ALL I know, every scrap of it. I want to cram it into their heads so that they know as much as me and can deal with the huge need for homoeopathy which is all around them. Impossible of course, you get to learn a lot as the decades go by and you just can't pass it all on in a week no matter how much you might want to. And not the best way to teach.


The days are intense too just because they are so full. In every spare moment Jane was writing out the remedies we were teaching so that we would have something to leave them at the end of the week and I was writing out explanations on the case of each patient we saw so that the students understand what to do when they check up on that patient in a month. We were also preparing our lectures each day and seeing patients when we were not teaching. Just as an example of the intensity, on Sunday having seen 18 patients each, I heard Jane say my name and realised I had not spoken to her all day though we were working in the same room. I hadn't spoken to Davy either who was stationed on a bench half way between us making up the remedy for each patient as we saw them.


That day was a particularly gratifying day for me because the last time we had been in that village I had seen nearly all very old grandmothers who are difficult to treat because they are just old and in pain from a life of hard work and loss and struggle and the remedy picture is not always clear. Seeing them again with smiles on their faces and less pain or no pain was amazing. Having met them all last time I could vividly imagine an old age full of the accumulated strain and injury and pain of the years gone by with no hope of relief until death. Old people are central to the community so having a village full of grannies who are smiling instead of moaning is definitely making a difference to the world!! Homoeopathy could change the world one granny at a time.


Our students translated for us each day and it shows their dedication that they would do that hard work all day without complaint. The very dedication of the studants also made the week intense.


On Saturday we saw as many people as possible in an AIDS support group that one of our students who is a nurse is involved in. The day wound on and on and still there were queues outside the door. It got dark but there was electricity so we carried on but then the rain came – a little at first so we raised our voices over the sound of the drops on the tin roof but then the crack of thunder was directly overhead, the rain increased to the loudest possible downpour and then doubled in volume and the lights went out, the whole queue of patients bundled inside in a rush with Davy and his remedy station trailing behind and the room was packed with people to the extent that you couldn't put your foot any where on the floor.


For a while we sat inside the pitch black explosion of noise thinking we couldn't possibly carry on working and then we carried on working. Alwin, who was translating, held his phone so that I could see the paper I was writing on and we literally put our heads together with the patient jammed between us on the bench and shouted.


By the time we finished the last patient the rain had stopped and we stepped outside to see a bright but wet three quarter moon and a large tree fallen in the yard.


This is Thursday, it is dawn and outside my window the birds are doing exotic stuff with song. We traveled all day yesterday and two hours the day before but when we reached Mbeye last night we heard that there is no room on the bus to Moshi until tomorrow so we are stuck in Mbeye for another twenty four hours. We might just have to spend a whole day doing nothing!

A mud filled river in Mzimba

Green things happy for the rain