I've already said farewell to two outreach sites and in less than
forty-eight hours I will wave goodbye to one of the bases. Half of my job
effectively will be over. So I've turned a little introspective and thought
about what I will really miss and what I will, frankly, glad to see the back
of. So here, in an ever so, Sunday night Channel 4 kind of a way are my top
five of each. In no particular order, I'll end positive so start negative.
Things I won't miss….
1) Guns – This is a country supposed to be grabbing the opportunity of peace
with both hands, sadly the young men here seem much more willing to grab
their AK-47's and use the to lethal effect. We in the 'developed' world
should hang our heads in shame that we allowed such an enormous quantity of
armaments to flood this place, and have done nothing really to stem the
steady flow for decades. The results are clear everyday with the men women
and children I've seen killed and maimed, many by being shot accidentally.
It's such a waste of human life, and we should do so much more to stop it.
You can give me all that stuff about arms manufacture being really important
for the creation of jobs in the UK, but lining the walls of all our schools
with asbestos would create jobs, it's still not the right thing to do, is
it.
2) Villages with no access to water- I think this became a bit of a mantra
at some point around December I reckoned you'd probably all got bored so I
stopped writing about it. The problem hasn't gone away. In fact converting
our arms factories into water pump manufactures would kill two birds
...there's a plan
3) Statistics- can't stand maths, hate calculators. To be able to get
Microsoft Excel to do anything vaguely useful requires a brain the size of a
planet and a PhD in nerdology. Days of my life writing reports that no one
ever reads anyway. Dull dull dull dull dull dull dull.
4) Watching people die of preventable illnesses- It's pretty hard watching
people die at the best of times, it is almost unbearable when they die of
things that are preventable and curable in the west. In my opinion it is the
worst aspect of coming from a first world to a third world country. You know
what you could do if only you had the equipment, or drugs. I've lost count
of the number of times I've wished for a ventilator to fall from the sky, or
even just that parent's had been given the education to know when their
children were sick and bring them to the clinic sooner. And most of the time
it's really simple stuff.
5) The office politics- It's funny that if you ask most people what the
worst part of their job is they'll say, "oh, God the politics!" So, if this
is the case, why does it exist? I guess because we are all human, but it's
taken a super human effort to stay out of it, thankfully, by and large I've
managed it.
Things I will…
1) Discharging cured patients- nothing more satisfying in the world,
full stop end of line, paragraph and book. Watching a child who was close to
death running with his siblings around the clinic and then running into the
family in the market months later bright eyed and bushy tailed as if nothing
had happened has made any of the points listed above pale into the
background.
2) The walks to the clinics – with the recent dry weather and the use of
the car I've come to appreciate just how interesting the walking is. I've
been through villages that haven't changed greatly for hundreds of years,
and I've certainly been one of the first white faces ever to meet the people
who live there in their own homes. A truly once in a lifetime experience
3) The people I've worked with - Both local and international staff have
been truly inspirational, if I have given to them a tenth of what they have
given to me then I will be very happy.
4) Walks along the airstrip at sundown – Yes I know completely soppy,
but it is time for me, the only part of my day when I'm completely off duty,
it only takes about ten minutes but it really has kept me sane. And no place
does sunsets like Africa.
5) This! Writing this blog has been a wonderfully cathartic experience. But I'm
really not sure I'll have quite the same sort of material to write about in
the UK. I'm so pleased so many people from across the world have taken the
time to read it. If I have provided even a glimmer of what life is like in
this corner of the globe then it has been very much mission accomplished.
