When we were in Mzimba we had real difficulty with food. We had no where to cook so we ended up eating chips almost every night in “Home of Chips” across the road from the rest house where we stayed. We became frantic for fruit and veg and, after the first few days as our monosodiumglutimate levels soared, for water as well.  Nsima (the local name for ugali) our other staple was cooked in MSG and was delicious but the price in thirst and headaches was high.

It wasn't until the very end of our stay that we found the market and understood the menu of the last few weeks.  The only foods available were tomatoes, onions, cabbage, meat and fish.  Literally a whole market selling only those things. 

In the evenings when the market was shut a line of traders sat beside the road and sold cassava, sweet potatoes and "Irish" potatoes - hence the chips.

 

 fish

 

things

 

things

 

tomatoes

 

meat

 

tomatoes, onions, cabbage

 

onions and one papaya

 

fish

 

things

I have slipped into this place and nothing seems strange any more so I have nothing to write about. I feel saturated by colour, the beautiful red brown earth, the magnificent flowering trees which stand in pools of shed blossom, the glorious colour sense of the people which makes every item of clothing vibrant and every washing line beautiful. I am just in it and I have nothing to say.


Things have been very hectic and we are stretched thin, going to more clinics and starting earlier in the mornings and my writing time is used more and more for working on cases. But last Monday afternoon there was a pause. We found ourselves waiting for the local organiser to arrive and bring us to the next home visit. Our host brought us chairs and we sat in the shade and at first my hurry washed over me splashing around in the stillness but we were there long enough for it to ebb completely away.


Our shady place was a yard enclosed on three sides by the house and on the fourth side by a mud and stick and stone walled shed and laced across from eave to eave with washing line. Waiting seems to make the colour more intense as if stillness gives it time to saturate the senses and the red earth brown, which is the colour of the ground and all the buildings, plays host to any other colour which might fall on it or hang from it lending intensity as contrast with the brown. So the washing lines are like abstract paintings and the blossom beneath the trees a blessing. On this day the blue of the sky and the green of the trees seen above the earth brown buildings have such a strong colour it cools just to look at it even while I feel the burn and sting of the sun on my foot which cannot fit with the rest of me in the shade.


Irene, the first Tanzanian homoeopath to qualify from the school in Kenya who is now working with HHA as homoeopath and translator, goes to the nearest fruit and veg stall and buys tiny mangos and we eat while we wait.


I haven't seen Ava for a while and when she arrives she brings me up to date on last month's home visits. Ava has seen a lot of homoeopathy over the years so she is not surprised by results and she can tell me without pause that a man who has been in bed for four years is up and walking around, but I am amazed.


Michael's story is that he took the news of his HIV status so badly four years ago that when he went home and lay down after hearing that he was positive “it was forever”. To make things worse for him he had had to wait four days to hear the results of the test and those four days of waiting and anticipating were nearly as bad for him as the results themselves. Now after a few years of homoeopathic treatment he is well and can speak (he lost his ability to speak on the day he lay down) but he is left with a trembling weakness and inability to stand on his own.


I had given him Gelsemium which is one of the remedies for ailments from anticipation and bad news and is also a great remedy for trembling weakness. Some times a remedy seems to be such a good fit you just know it is going to work so I had high hopes but I am still amazed all over again by what homoeopathy can do when I hear he is up and about.


Our last home visit of the day is to a lady who is lying on her mattress in her yard in great pain. She has not been able to work for a month and is depending on the kindness of her neighbours for food. Tomorrow I will hear how she is getting on with her remedy

.

The 11^th of October, the first day of our journey to Mzimba district in northern Malawi, was Jane's birthday. She and Davy and I celebrated with a ten hour bus journey from Moshi to Dar (we actually thought that was long!) and followed it up with two more days of traveling in one plane and then more buses, each one more decrepit than the last and stuffed with more people until we eventually arrived in Mzimba bus station on the third night still in one piece if a little ragged and worried as there was no-one to meet us and we didn't know where we were to be staying.


We found a hotel (the wrong hotel) and the next morning being Monday we turned up for work at the hospital where we were to be teaching Jeremy, Mani, Noam and Naomi's HHA correspondence course hoping to find our hosts, Pastor Lameck and his wife Veronica, or maybe even our students.


With no sign of anyone we sat in plain view on the pavement outside the hospital administration building reckoning that, as we were the only wazungu in Mzimba, our hosts might eventually find us. Jane and I proceeded to teach the course to Davy as our only available student. Start as you mean to go on I say!


It turned out that Lameck had traveled in the opposite direction all the way to Lilongwe to try to speak to the Minister for Health who wanted to know the details of someone turning up to teach homoeopathy in his hospital.


Our sticking out like a sore thumb plan worked, Veronica eventually found us and by the afternoon we had met most of our students and, with the minister for health's go ahead tucked under our belts, we were teaching.


That first day we had about 16 students but by the end of the course there were 29. Poverty in Malawi is even more marked than in Tanzania and even in a family that manages to get a child through secondary school there might not be the money for third level education so you end up with a town full of people with brains to burn but not that much to use them on. Because the internet is beyond most people's pocket there is no access to the greedy, easy source of information we are all so used to. Faced with a classroom full of students so hungry for information our teaching was inspired. We were teaching a subject that we love and find fascinating but our students were drinking our words like they were the stuff of life. Homoeopathy is not an easy subject but they tackled the new concepts willingly. Also English is their second language. I have no end of admiration for them.


By the end of the two weeks we had photocopied the correspondence course book over 30 times and Jane's copy was ragged from being taken to pieces and put together again every time more students turned up.


We had also treated more than ninety patients. On the day before we left for Mzimba Camilla had casually suggested that we should be treating AIDS patients while we were in Malawi (even one dose of the right remedy can change the course of HIV turning the clock back for a year or a month) so our bags, which had been rubbing shoulders with bags of fish and hens and other unlikely bus cargo, were rattling with all of the AIDS epidemic remedies and, again starting as we meant to go on, we treated our first patient that very first day in the bus station.


We finished our first day in Mzimba with a long tour of the hospital which practices kangaroo care and truly deserves its baby friendly status, a meal of Nsima and an exhausted early night.


This is a very short, not finished and not perfect bit about us in Malawi from the HHA news letter made by Davy who has made me swear to tell you it is unfinished;

Cars and rain; rain; drenching, glorious, ecstatic, thunderous weight of rain. Wet water and dry earth meeting in an unstoppable orgy of joy and the smell of the ground all pervasive as it is released upward into the wet air. I wish I could have been down town when the rain hit, watching the magnificent drains that I have been admiring since I got here but I am at home this week editing the HHA news letter with Davy (coming your way soon!). But watching the thankful dry earth accepting the rain with open arms and turning into delighted mud was enough.


The temperature plummeted to 22 degrees – definitely chilly – and made me homesick. I have stood in rain like this in Reentrisk wet to the skin and with a bow wave at my ankles as a four inch deep sheet of water slakes down the road. Watching drains is one of my favourite things. In Reentrisk it is as good as watching history and the men and women who read the land and made the drains over the last centuries may as well have been standing with me admiring their work; as pertinent today as when they did their digging.


While Jane and Davy and I were innocently in Mzimba the Suzuki drew its last breath and is gone. Yesterday the land cruiser went “clunk” (a technical term) in the middle of a narrow road and refused to move again causing a serious traffic problem. Though if the road is mud you might as well drive in the field and I have seen new roads spring up easily around obstacles. Meanwhile Rebecca's husband Brett brings home amazing stories every day of his adventures through Tanzanian bureaucracy as he attempts to buy a replacement for the Suzuki.


So this has been a week of cars and rain. The news letter is a film, mostly of Jeremy and Camilla telling the news with Davy's footage of clinics and day to day life here added in.  Davy who was one of our top students in Mzimba and earned himself a HHA certificate with his 99% in the exam (he claims to have cheated by studying homoeopathy since he was born) has been working all day every day this week on the newsletter and hopefully we have only one more day's work before it is finished. Then on Monday it is back to the clinics for me and on Wednesday we return to the Maasai.


I wake and write at 4am. Here in Shanty town the only sounds are the insect song and the dogs' indignation in the distance. In Mzimba at the Gapa Rest House where we stayed for 5 euros a night the day was starting at four with buckets rattling to the rooms that have no hot water and conversation around the fire lit to heat it.


Those early hours of the morning were manic for me; preparing for the day's teaching, working on yesterday's cases, rewriting the exam for people whose English was not up to a double negative, reading essays and untangling the broken English to find unbroken meaning, at six we ate dry bread for breakfast, by seven we might see our first patient of the day, we walked up through the town to the hospital at half eight and I would be teaching at nine while Jane began on the patients who were waiting at the hospital.


In theory I know there are people who don't watch the clock like this and I get a glimpse of the African awareness of time and I wonder if I could ever share it. In Swahili time starts every day at 6am and goes to 6pm, the hours numbered nought to twelve, and then stops. So how do I count the hours of the night? I think I wake at four and write for an hour or two but time might stretch and stretch as I write if it has no calibration and morning may never come; like a nineteen hour bus journey might be surprisingly easy if no-one is counting the hours past dark.


That hour after dark seemed to be a social time for the people in Mzimba with unhurried crowds walking in the town.  And on the bus as the sun went down conversation rose to a pitch even becoming hilarious as full dark fell so that for a while we were traveling in complete darkness surrounded by shouts and laughter, then silence. I don't remember much about the last six hours.

This is a picture of a little Davy in the Irish rain.

  

I am back at my writing post. Two weeks teaching in Malawi which was very intense and involved long hours of work each day and no internet so a long story to tell and I am just going to have to start at the end.


The end of the story was a nineteen hour bus journey from Mbeye in the south west of Tanzania near the border with Malawi back to Moshi at the foot of Kilimanjaro where Jeremy and Camilla are based. We had been told it was a fourteen hour journey and had braced ourselves accordingly and what is another five hours?


By the time we made this journey we were toughened travelers and bought all our provisions from the hawkers who appeared every time the bus stopped, or even slowed down, holding their wares up so that they bobbed at window level enticingly as the trader ran beside the bus; water, apples, oranges, bananas, soda, biscuits, crisps, cashew nuts, skewers of fried meat, cooked bananas and maize. Or, at one stop, shoes which lapped our window ledge like eager puppy dogs. At that stage we were too tired to even look out and see the man at the end of the outstretched arm, but he had spotted our open window and was pinning his hopes to it.


One thing that made the journey easier was that we each had a seat of our own. By this time we had made many journeys by Dala Dala (Hiace van with seats) which never move unless they are “full” (full being at least eighteen people though at one stage we were in one which held twenty six, twenty eight if you include the hens) so we were used to being bruised and squashed and impossibly uncomfortable and one whole seat each was bliss.


The day before the nineteen hour bus journey we had started the day's traveling on bicycles from our hotel in Karonga to the bus station. We had asked the hotel for a taxi and this is what turned up. One bicycle for each of us and one for our bags and great hilarity for the early morning people of Karonga to see the wazungo on the back of the bikes. Our bicycle riders posted us directly into a shared car to the border where we arrived forty five minutes later for the long hot walk between the Malawi and Tanzania border posts and eventually, after a bit of visa wrangling on the Tanzanian side, a motorbike ride to the next bus; a three hour 'stuff-em-all-in' to Mbeye where we arrived just in time to book the last three seats on the nineteen hour Hood bus to Moshi and Arusha.


That was the second day of the journey. The first day saw us arriving in Karonga after dark worrying that we had risked just once too often, bus stations not being famous for safety in the dark, but the driver told us to stay on the bus and took us on to our hotel and we were fine.


Often we were fine in Malawi. For the first few days after our arrival we were still being careful not to go out after dark as was our custom in Moshi but we soon got caught up in our work and forgot to be home by dark. We were walking everywhere to save money and soon we were just as happy to walk in the dark with hundreds of Mzimba people who had places to go and no other way to get there. Davy especially took to the town, wandering on his own when we were up to our ears or running errands for us and making friends with the towns people. By the second week word had spread and everyone knew who we were and the whole town was buzzing with talk of what we were doing up in the hospital.


The end of the story for me was standing at the rest house where we stayed in Mzimba on the last day shaking the hand of Fulgensio Tembo who was one of our best students and who had translated tirelessly for the two weeks as we took case after case after case and finding that I was still holding his hand minutes later and not wanting to let go. None of us could believe that we were leaving. The students were so excited by what they were learning that they could not believe that we were leaving them and taking our knowledge away.


We left them without a single book between them and in Mzimba, with no affordable internet, books are the magical doorway to knowledge that they must have been a hundred years ago.


As soon as I reached internet I emailed my trusty Dynamis class to search their bookshelves for books they no longer need. I have all the addresses of the students who are spread across Malawi and Zimbabwe and already books are on their way. Some of our students have been trying to learn about homoeopathy for the last few years and have actually been using the few remedies they have with good success but without books they have been working blind.

So maybe my story ends at the beginning, individual books posted from across Europe to people in Africa who are at the very beginning of their homoeopathy journey.  I wish I could have stayed with them for more of the way.

Fulgensio

On the way to one of our clinics in the suburbs of Moshi we drive through a stone mason's area. People sit outside their houses at the side of the road and break stones. As far as I can see each person has their supply of stones about the size of a football and then piled all around them in neat pyramids are the results of their work; from the finest of sand piled like a sugar loaf to coarser sand then fine gravel and coarse gravel and two inch stones which we, a world away, would use for drainage. Drainage here is a totally different matter with deep, square, open concrete gullies beside every road that describe an incomprehensible volume of water startling in its absence. Building of these gullies is also done by hand with stone and mortar, each stone cut to fit and then plastered.


I have noticed that they do concrete beautifully here. Floors especially have a very fine finish though may not be exactly level. As I stroll the gentle slope between kitchen and bathroom I am happily reminded of home. Charlie and I built a house together and got the floor dead level thinking that that was how a floor should be but every other house I have lived in over the last 35 years has had a sloping floor.


Further out in the country, glimpsed as we hurtle by on our way to one of the village clinics, I've seen small scale concrete block making going on seemingly in people's front yards. Again the blocks are beautiful, made by hand and clean and fine and pristine.


What this adds up to in terms of homoeopathy is back pain. The stone masons are possibly the worst, sitting all day literally mashing their muscle against rock, but everything has to be carried; from the women with a huge weight of bananas on their heads walking, walking all day every day into town to the men in town with heavily loaded barrows. And as we know from the mountainy banana farmers in Kibosho and the coffee workers in Loyamungo farming is back breaking work.


Trying to treat back pain with homoeopathy is a bit like trying to treat hunger; how can back pain ease without respite from work or hunger ease without food. Nevertheless we give the best choice of remedy that we can hoping that there is a possibility that a person strengthened by their remedy will work easier or old injuries will heal and the accumulation of years will be lessened. Ironically Camilla says that she has more success treating AIDS than she does at treating back pain. She sees people's CD4 counts go up steadily once they start homoeopathic treatment and respond to the remedies.


I treated an elderly man a few weeks ago in Mwanga. He cannot afford to retire and must keep working. He is a stone mason and has no pain in his back while he is working but straightening the back at the end of the day is excruciating. I gave him natrum mur because he has pain from walking but cannot stop for a rest because people might fuss over him. I will let you know how he gets on.

On Friday Davy and Jane and I go to Malawai where Jane and I will teach. Having worked tirelessly to find the epidemic remedies for AIDS and having seen how well they work, Jeremy's vision is to share the knowledge and spread it as far as possibly through Africa. Apart from sponsoring students to go to the homoeopathy school in Kenya he has written a correspondance course which a group in Malawi headed by Pastor Lameck have already completed. When I first arrived here Marina was in the middle of marking their exam papers and when Pastor Lameck came to pick up the papers (a six day return journey) he ate with us so Davy and I have met him.


Our teaching job is to make the course work real for these people. Anyone who passed the exam received a Helios remedy kit for Africa and if we can help to give them the confidence and the knowledge to use it we will be winning. Once you really understand that like cures like, which can be difficult to get your head around, and learn to tune into your observational skills you are on your way to becoming a homoeopath. And for each person who manages to get their head around and their hands on homoeopathy a community will benefit.


On Friday (which is Jane's birthday) we take a six hour bus journey to Dar Es Salaam where we stay overnight flying to Mbeye on Saturday. Pastor Lameck says we must stay in Mbeye on Saturday night because we arrive too late to get across the border in daylight so on Sunday we take three more busses, one to the border, one from the border to Mzuzu and from there to Mzimba which is where we will be teaching.


When Pastor Lameck made this journey in September he didn't use a plane but did the whole three day slog by bus and arrived hungry and without any money in Moshi. It was one of our first night time tasks to go down town and meet him and bring him home to eat with us. It would make you appreciate street lighting! A pool of light falls in front of each house but that seems only to emphasize the darkness and make a difficult silhouette of all the activity in the street.

So three more days of clinics this week and then we head off.

Two small pink reasons why we are working.