Cooper is didn't work that well. Explaining that, now, his main role is to
try and convince the UK population to be vaccinated against a deadly disease
(flu) met with equal bemusement - 'the government has to tell people
vaccination is a good idea? I thought you all went to school?' Fair point.
We then got onto a conversation about boxing. For someone who has only ever
seen fighting that ends with a burial this seemed about as alien as people
not wanting to be vaccinated.
'Why do they wear gloves?'
'So it doesn't hurt'
'But you just said that people can get brain damaged'
'yes they can..er..it's a strange sort of sport'
'hmmmmm'.
Being a white face seems to mean you have to have all the answers to
everything all of the time.
Those, in the UK who see vaccination, as some sort of optional extra should
come to a place like this and see the children here who are maimed and
killed by childhood illnesses such as (to pluck three at random!) measles,
mumps and rubella. The more people you vaccinate the less likely the others
are of getting sick, so everyone is a winner.
Anyway I'm getting off the point. After much logistical huffing and puffing
we finally got the equipment in place to vaccinate the clinic staff against
meningitis. Just getting to this stage was a difficult enough from an
explanation point of view 'you want to give us an injection, but we're not
sick!' 'Why will you vaccinate us, but not our children' the simple answer
is that we haven't enough vaccine, but that's not a very satisfactory answer
for anyone.
It also involved one of those GCSE maths questions that I loathed with a
passion at school. Marcus has to vaccinate 137 staff each vial will
vaccinate 50 staff. How many vials will he need? Obviously it's not exactly
degree level arithmetic, I still managed to press the wrong button on the
keyboard and went quite far down the line towards ordering four vials, until
someone pointed it out!
Anyway the appointed day arrived and I sat with a translator and a large box
of syringes under a large tree and zapped the vast majority of the staff.
Very refreshingly when one of my outreach staff was late the rest of them
feigned immense pain in their upper arms, as if I'd injected them with a
pitchfork!! Glad to see stupid schoolboy humour crosses seas and deserts
with such apparent ease.
At least we have prevented a few people from dying of a preventable disease,
but in the grand scheme we really haven't scratched the surface, or as Henry
Cooper might put it, our guard is very much down.
