A Much Needed Rest

We returned by car to the base site in the early evening. It was so strange being driven up the rutted dirty track to the base we normally walk down. A six hour walk became an hour long drive. Fortune had been on our side, this was about the only month we could have used a car, and used it had been, with great success. A mixture of insecurity and flooding meant that most of the year the villages are cut off to anything other than travel by foot.


The sky was a light orange colour as we crisscrossed the plains of this barren country and wound our way back to base. We drove past soldiers on drill, a water pump with maybe a hundred jerry cans lined up in a neat queue, herds of cattle and an old man playing with his grandson outside his house, the evening’s meal bubbling away in an old, battered pot on an open fire just behind them. Being in a car gives you a certain distance from life, anonymity, it was a strange way to view a country and it’s people I’ve come to appreciate hugely since last year.



A shower and an orange juice and I was fast asleep. Awoken just an hour later…”sorry mate there’s a gunshot, need you in theatre”.



Matthew was a young man who earlier that evening had been shot through the hand. Normally we would have just dressed it and organised for him to be flown off to a surgical centre for repair. In this case however the injury wasn’t so serious, just a lot of skin and muscle damage. So with a hefty dose of Ketamine we set about putting the bits of his hand back together. It took three hours. Admittedly a good fifteen minutes of this was spent hunting down a large grasshopper that was jumping round the room as if not constrained by the laws of gravity and evading all attempts to kill it.


Being a room full of blokes we suffered a complete failure to multi task and had to halt proceedings completely whilst we hunted for our errant foe. It was, however a bit too quick for us and finally escaped through a hole in the mosquito net covering the door. Back to work, hand repaired and patient left to sleep for the evening, wandering back to bed.


Two days later I was on the move again, but this time for a few days off at the missions’ base, the pace has been relentless it’s important to get your breaks when you can. The whole cliché of the work out hear being a marathon not a sprint is more true than I could ever have thought possible.


The clouds of rainy season have begun to gather again, bringing the climate to full circle. I've tried to explain to people who haven't been here long enough to experience the joys of the rains. The painful stagnation, the weeks without planes, trying to treat patients outside in driving rain. I've tried, I've failed.


It's rather like trying to explain this country and it's problems to all of you. I can give you a glimpse and hope that it makes sense but it's impossible to give you more than a vague feeling. Theres so much i'm unable to put into words.


As more and more of the people who I started with pack their bags and prepare to leave I find myself in the position of being an ‘old-hand’. It doesn’t seem very long ago that I was stepping into this madness for the first time, In some ways it doesn’t seem five minutes in other ways it seems like a lifetime.