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

We are back at the Gappa Rest House in Mzimba. If you ever need to stay in Mzimba this is the place; 11 euro a night for me and Davy, very hot shower, lovely pink cotton mosquito nets, very clean, your clothes washed and dried for 50 kwatcha an item (about 10 cent), very friendly staff who greeted us with open arms and big smiles.


We have just had a very social evening on the narrow porch which joins our rooms; meeting our students again, seeing patients, and eating the most delicious food cooked by our South Korean neighbour who has smuggled a stove into his room. He also cooked us breakfast of fried eggs and tomatoes. Sometimes life just turns out to be bizarre and there is not much you can do but embrace it. And it meant I had to run over to the market to buy more plates and that market is my favourite place.


Our journey here didn't turn out to be too bad. The 19 hour bus journey only took 17 and a half hours because of less road works on the road to Dar. Of the four buses we took yesterday one stank of fish but that one was only for an hour and only one was hell; half a seat each with our bags on our knees, literally swimming and sliding in sweat. This bus from hell (something like a Hiace van with 24 passengers) stopped almost every 100 yards to stuff more passengers in and I truly believed that we would never arrive. Every time it went uphill we had to take our feet off the floor because the floor was burning hot and literally too painful to touch, not that we had any where to put them and every movement required a push and a shove to our fellow passengers on each side because we were jammed so tight. But that was all yesterday and the memory is fading fast.


The last bus was a delight; it was the National Bus Company so it was an actual bus and it was headed all the way to Lilongwi, first stop Mzimba, so apart from a long refeulling palaver before we set out (hand pumping fuel from barrels) it actually felt like we were getting somewhere and the sunset landscape we traveled through was like a child's drawing; an extravagance of hills in every shape and size.


One of the exciting things since we arrived has been seeing the books that people sent and hearing about the joy of their arrival. Kathryn sent books to Fulgensio and he is in the process of consuming every word. It was strange for me to come across my old friends Kent and Phatak here in Mzimba and to hold the books that Kathryn packed and posted from so far away and feel connected again to another place a world away.

 The last time we went to Malawi we flew from Dar to Mbeye. We hadn't realised there was a bus direct (more or less) from Moshi. This time it's going to be bus all the way but I have been remembering my first glimpse of Mbeye from the air; it looked to be a completely black and white landscape or more accurately black and sepia. From the sky it looked like a landscape drawn with pencil on beige yellow paper, as far as we could see in every direction every field carefully cross hatched with parallel lines. I couldn't puzzle it out from the air at all but when we landed and drove by bus into town I understood that what I was seeing was dry, dry, dry yellow grass and black burnt ground all still in last year's ridges line by line by line.


Our next surprise was arriving in the town late on that quiet afternoon and finding a town on hills dressed beautifully in blue Jacaranda trees. I know now that they are Jacaranda trees that I have been admiring since October. I also know that it will now be raining in Mbeye and Mzimba and hopefully that is going to make a difference to out diet while we are there and we might get to eat fruit and vegetables. The last time we were there everyone was waiting seed in hand for the rain to begin.


As we traveled south there were more and more blue trees in bloom and then, astonishingly when we arrived home two and a half weeks later our very own tree lined road in Shanty Town in Moshi turned out to be blue too.


Everything here has been surprising every day. At the moment it is wedding season with four or five weddings driving past each day. Every wedding has a brass band decked out in shirts the same colour as the bridesmaid dresses and riding on the back of an open truck in the wedding procession playing as they go. In the first few months we were here I thought there was one band with an enormous wardrobe of coloured shirts and endless work but now that they drive by every ten minutes I have to admit there must be many of them. When I get married I want a multi coloured band like pastel sweeties. That's my plan.


I know I keep saying that everything here is so colourful but it is true. I knew within a few days of arriving that I would not be doing any drawing. Drawing is a thing of low, white, northern light where line is a gift of the light and a quality of everything you see. Here it is colour and shape and the gift of this light is pattern. Me and Davy are trying to photograph it a little now that we are on holiday and not always hurrying to clinic or home again – maybe we will come up with something.