February 2008 update
Algol
Hamish Tait, Robin Hastie & Jim Hepburn
Fri 1 Feb 2008 16:03
Hail from Cameroon. The good news is that the "Indominatble Lions" are through to the quarter finals of the African Nations' Cup. The bad news is that the charger for our lap top has still not arrived!
We have to say a huge thank you to everyone who's written, sent emails or Christmas cards. As we have said, mail delivery is quite random, so our Christmas is being extended as the cards continue to arrive. Anne has found this material really useful in her work with schools - these kids are completely starved of any visual material so a Christmas card is a real novelty. And we really appreciate knowing we're not forgotten back home!
Anne's news.
Work. All four schools have now chosen their priorities for the next five years. Infrastructure features highly in the form of getting more classrooms or wells. Other priorities include attempting to get more books, more qualified teachers and encouraging more girls to come to school and stay there - this last is not a high priority, unfortunately. The smallest school wants three classrooms built in the first year of the development plan and have resisted my plea for realistic goals to avoid disappointment. Its head teacher suggested that NGOs like VSO are actually responsible for the provision of schools in Cameroon and believes that money will pour from them to make the classrooms possible!
I have finally given in to a request from the head teacher of the local secondary school to go and help with English lessons, and now go there one morning a week. This week I had the joy of attempting to teach comparatives and superlatives to classes of 130 (yes, one hundred and thirty!) pupils with 10 books per class, chalk that disintegrates on contact with the board and no teacher's desk to work from. I was also given two minutes' notice of what the lesson would cover. Not an ideal and entirely pleasant experience but one that is good for me - to experience what teachers have to put up with all the time.
Home. We are moving house! We have decidied to follow advice and move to a bigger house in the hospital compound. It has an office, which will be useful for both of us, bigger rooms, more furniture, more storage space and will apparently be cooler when the intense heat of March to May arrives. We will be sorry to leave our little dolls' house but will be taking a friend with us - fridge number 6! Yes, it was number 5 in the last blog but since then we have had more traumatic days of black smoke and soot before it was pronounced extinct. Well, put into suspended animation really before being brought back into use for some other poor sod to deal with! Number 6 came from the hospital lab and was so filthy when it arrived here that I'm sure any hospital at home would have been closed down if it had been found there.
Domestically I have tried my hand at drying pumpkins, making peanut butter and papaya marmalade. We are still fighting a losing battle to keep goats out of the garden and stop cows in the pastor's field next door eating our garden fence - to be fair it is made from dried grasses and there doesn't seem to be much else for them to eat.
God Damn.Not a great couple of weeks with little sunshine - he had been drinking before one of our meetings and turned up at the house another day under the influence to give me details of his marital problems: his wife left him briefly over a bar of soap! He complained that his clothes were dirty; she said she had no soap; he said she is extravagant with soap.......... I think she is back now but GD had to buy soap and wash his own clothes. Excellent!!!
Village life. The harvests are all in now until March when the second crop of millet, which is growing now without a drop of rain, will be cut down. The countryside is dotted with huge piles of cotton and orange container trucks which have arrived to collect it. Donkeys, cows or people are pulling carts full of cotton through deep sand to the collection points. There each family deposits its harvest in similarly sized heaps (no weighing here!). Last year it was August before the families got their money from SODOCOTON - a state owned monopoly which deals with all the cotton.Because there is no field work at the moment a lot of building is going on. Mud bricks are drying in the sun to rebuild what was washed away in the last rains. The women are collecting firewood morning and evening - it is cold during the night and early morning here. Men and boys are wearing thich jackets or anoraks; the women just pull their pagnes more closely round themselves. The babies are wearing bobble hats - very cute!
Hamish's news.
We have now seen no rain for about 4 months. The countryside is largely bare and barren, except where the millet has been planted or where there's irrigation to provide water for onion fileds. Everything is incredibly dusty. The nights and early morning are cold: winter has arrived with temperatures getting down as low as 15C! We have a lot of "fog" - in fact it's a dust haze created by a wind called the harmatan which I think originates in the Sahara. Sometimes it looks like a real good east coast haar, but it's not damp!
As far as work is concerned, the range of disease remains fascinating. Communication is still a huge problem for me although the nurses are very willing translators. Occasionally we get patients from Nigeria: they speak English so are sent in my direction. I have now been put in charge of the AIDS patients but am still feeling my way with all the protocols etc.
Traditional medicine plays a very large role in life here and I feel I should find the time to go and find out more about it. For example, the locals tell me if Francois (Anne Poppelaar's husband) had had his broken thigh bone treated by a traditional healer, he'd have been up and walking in just two weeks! We have had several patients arrive with limb injurues where an x-ray has shown a fracture but they have refused to have standard treatment with plaster, preferring to back to their village healers. Accidents are at least as common here as at home, but the main sources of injury are motorcycle accidents, falls from trees (usually adults who've been picking fruit) and house walls falling on occupants!
Recently, the wife of a lamidu (village chief) had a hysterectomy. Her husband couldn't be bothered to come and see her (well he had three other wives to attend to!) so one of the village leders had to take the excised womb back to the village for the chief to see!
Some of their traditional treatments create work for us. For example, in the village a new born baby's cords will be cut with a bit of dried millet stalk and this often results in tetanus. If you have a sore throat it seems a good way to cure it is to cut the uvula (that's the dangly bit of flesh hanging from the back of your palate). The knives used for this "operation" are, of course, not sterile, so horrendous infections result.
I think it's been decided I shouldn't be involved in any more emergency operations - the lights failed again in theatre when we were operating on a boy with a burst appendix last week. I suspect they think I'm some kind of a jinx.
The work load remains a challenge, even though the nurses do all the routine stuff. Over a period of two weeks, Anne P and I will work 12 days running, including 7 continuously on call. We have both made pleas to the co-ordintor to find a third doctor, a replacement for Sylvia who left in November, but that's easier said than done. If any medics reading this would like the clinical expereince of a lifetime, let me know - it's waiting for you here in Cameroon!
All in all, although demanding, this is an amazing expereience.
We have to say a huge thank you to everyone who's written, sent emails or Christmas cards. As we have said, mail delivery is quite random, so our Christmas is being extended as the cards continue to arrive. Anne has found this material really useful in her work with schools - these kids are completely starved of any visual material so a Christmas card is a real novelty. And we really appreciate knowing we're not forgotten back home!
Anne's news.
Work. All four schools have now chosen their priorities for the next five years. Infrastructure features highly in the form of getting more classrooms or wells. Other priorities include attempting to get more books, more qualified teachers and encouraging more girls to come to school and stay there - this last is not a high priority, unfortunately. The smallest school wants three classrooms built in the first year of the development plan and have resisted my plea for realistic goals to avoid disappointment. Its head teacher suggested that NGOs like VSO are actually responsible for the provision of schools in Cameroon and believes that money will pour from them to make the classrooms possible!
I have finally given in to a request from the head teacher of the local secondary school to go and help with English lessons, and now go there one morning a week. This week I had the joy of attempting to teach comparatives and superlatives to classes of 130 (yes, one hundred and thirty!) pupils with 10 books per class, chalk that disintegrates on contact with the board and no teacher's desk to work from. I was also given two minutes' notice of what the lesson would cover. Not an ideal and entirely pleasant experience but one that is good for me - to experience what teachers have to put up with all the time.
Home. We are moving house! We have decidied to follow advice and move to a bigger house in the hospital compound. It has an office, which will be useful for both of us, bigger rooms, more furniture, more storage space and will apparently be cooler when the intense heat of March to May arrives. We will be sorry to leave our little dolls' house but will be taking a friend with us - fridge number 6! Yes, it was number 5 in the last blog but since then we have had more traumatic days of black smoke and soot before it was pronounced extinct. Well, put into suspended animation really before being brought back into use for some other poor sod to deal with! Number 6 came from the hospital lab and was so filthy when it arrived here that I'm sure any hospital at home would have been closed down if it had been found there.
Domestically I have tried my hand at drying pumpkins, making peanut butter and papaya marmalade. We are still fighting a losing battle to keep goats out of the garden and stop cows in the pastor's field next door eating our garden fence - to be fair it is made from dried grasses and there doesn't seem to be much else for them to eat.
God Damn.Not a great couple of weeks with little sunshine - he had been drinking before one of our meetings and turned up at the house another day under the influence to give me details of his marital problems: his wife left him briefly over a bar of soap! He complained that his clothes were dirty; she said she had no soap; he said she is extravagant with soap.......... I think she is back now but GD had to buy soap and wash his own clothes. Excellent!!!
Village life. The harvests are all in now until March when the second crop of millet, which is growing now without a drop of rain, will be cut down. The countryside is dotted with huge piles of cotton and orange container trucks which have arrived to collect it. Donkeys, cows or people are pulling carts full of cotton through deep sand to the collection points. There each family deposits its harvest in similarly sized heaps (no weighing here!). Last year it was August before the families got their money from SODOCOTON - a state owned monopoly which deals with all the cotton.Because there is no field work at the moment a lot of building is going on. Mud bricks are drying in the sun to rebuild what was washed away in the last rains. The women are collecting firewood morning and evening - it is cold during the night and early morning here. Men and boys are wearing thich jackets or anoraks; the women just pull their pagnes more closely round themselves. The babies are wearing bobble hats - very cute!
Hamish's news.
We have now seen no rain for about 4 months. The countryside is largely bare and barren, except where the millet has been planted or where there's irrigation to provide water for onion fileds. Everything is incredibly dusty. The nights and early morning are cold: winter has arrived with temperatures getting down as low as 15C! We have a lot of "fog" - in fact it's a dust haze created by a wind called the harmatan which I think originates in the Sahara. Sometimes it looks like a real good east coast haar, but it's not damp!
As far as work is concerned, the range of disease remains fascinating. Communication is still a huge problem for me although the nurses are very willing translators. Occasionally we get patients from Nigeria: they speak English so are sent in my direction. I have now been put in charge of the AIDS patients but am still feeling my way with all the protocols etc.
Traditional medicine plays a very large role in life here and I feel I should find the time to go and find out more about it. For example, the locals tell me if Francois (Anne Poppelaar's husband) had had his broken thigh bone treated by a traditional healer, he'd have been up and walking in just two weeks! We have had several patients arrive with limb injurues where an x-ray has shown a fracture but they have refused to have standard treatment with plaster, preferring to back to their village healers. Accidents are at least as common here as at home, but the main sources of injury are motorcycle accidents, falls from trees (usually adults who've been picking fruit) and house walls falling on occupants!
Recently, the wife of a lamidu (village chief) had a hysterectomy. Her husband couldn't be bothered to come and see her (well he had three other wives to attend to!) so one of the village leders had to take the excised womb back to the village for the chief to see!
Some of their traditional treatments create work for us. For example, in the village a new born baby's cords will be cut with a bit of dried millet stalk and this often results in tetanus. If you have a sore throat it seems a good way to cure it is to cut the uvula (that's the dangly bit of flesh hanging from the back of your palate). The knives used for this "operation" are, of course, not sterile, so horrendous infections result.
I think it's been decided I shouldn't be involved in any more emergency operations - the lights failed again in theatre when we were operating on a boy with a burst appendix last week. I suspect they think I'm some kind of a jinx.
The work load remains a challenge, even though the nurses do all the routine stuff. Over a period of two weeks, Anne P and I will work 12 days running, including 7 continuously on call. We have both made pleas to the co-ordintor to find a third doctor, a replacement for Sylvia who left in November, but that's easier said than done. If any medics reading this would like the clinical expereince of a lifetime, let me know - it's waiting for you here in Cameroon!
All in all, although demanding, this is an amazing expereience.