Happy St Andrews Day to all our readers!

ANNE

Work:

Still working on good governance, looking particularly at the functioning of the Parent Teacher Association. Parents hand school fees to the APEE to pay the salaries of the unqualified teachers and much of that money is often unaccounted for e.g. “borrowed” by committee members. We are trying to encourage the use of receipts and proper accounting with transparency. I have now paid fees for some girls in 5 different schools and have been given a receipt by only two schools in spite of repeatedly asking for them. Corruption is everywhere in Cameroon and it is very difficult to find someone you feel you can trust. Cameroonians laugh about it and say that everyone is born with a corruption gene; they accept all too readily that money will vanish.  They will know who has taken it but nobody will do anything about it. Somebody might or might not go to jail but either way, it is accepted that money has disappeared for ever. There seems to be no attempt ever to retrieve missing funds.  We sometimes ask ourselves whom we will trust when we leave here. So far we have identified three people in whom we have confidence. Very sad but true.

Great news from St.Andrews that the African Book Appeal in the Citizen has raised over £500 already.

Home:

We seem to have little free time at the moment but what time we have, we spend planning the visit of the next batch of family to arrive – buying new pillows, mosquito nets, organising extra accommodation in another of the hospital houses and planning our little trips with Nicola, Mark and the boys. All a pleasure.

Hamish, who wanted nothing to do with TV here is in 7^th heaven since he discovered Tom and Jerry cartoons for half an hour each evening, often followed by a James Bond film. When we come home he will enter Mastermind with them as his specialist subjects. Meanwhile I am still limited to my French news channel – I keep hoping he will be called back into the hospital to work

Village life:

This morning we left Zidim with three human passengers (two of them unexpected) and two live chickens (also unexpected). Our 4 extra passengers were going to visit someone in hospital. Here people believe that if you eat chicken every day, you will get better more quickly.  The chickens travelled in the boot along with our luggage and there were hardly any chicken droppings on our cases when we arrived – this time!

Random facts/thoughts:

• By 8.30am the temperature is reaching 40C and stays like that until about 4pm
• We have now had 17 punctures since April
• Managed Skype last weekend and saw our grandsons for the first time in almost 15 months. We hope to try again this weekend and see grandchild no. 4 in bump form
• I stepped on a dead cat in Maroua this morning – it had been there for days

Hamish

Week on call started with an exploratory op for a suspected ectopic pregnancy (pregnancy growing outside the womb).  This proved more complicated than expected; we had to call on Anne Popelaars for assistance and the whole thing took an hour and 50 minutes.  By the end of it, I felt my age!  Then came Wednesday – 4 emergency sections in one day.  Anne Poppelaars did two of them and I assisted at the other two.  Of the two I was involved with, the first baby was delivered without difficulty but we had problems controlling bleeding.  The second baby was difficult to extract, but Aman Kavou (the nurse doing the real work) eventually succeeded, delivering a live girl.  By now, I was feeling about 102 years old!

Life is never dull here and on Wednesday morning at 5 am we received a patient who’d been attacked and robbed in his house.  The robbers had assaulted him with a large machete type knife and he arrived with a huge wound in his scalp.  The knife had actually penetrated the bone and there was some brain tissue showing through.  We patched him up but I didn’t give much for his chances as he was severely injured and deeply unconscious.  Surprisingly, as I write this, he is beginning to show signs of improvement and just maybe he will survive the ordeal, but I’m not optimistic.

International AIDS day is 1^st December and normally the hospital offers free testing.  This year 1^st December is a Monday and Mondays are always very busy with new patients (just like at home!), so we chose Friday 28^th November as our day of “open doors” for HIV.  On the day before, I accompanied two of the nurses on a visit to the local secondary school (“CES”) to talk to the pupils and invite them to our open day. Friday started calmly enough with a manageable number of people attending for screening; then the pupils from the “college” arrived – about 300 of them!  All at once!  Talk about mayhem?  While we were glad to see them, it was a bit overpowering to say the least.  And we didn’t have enough testing kits for all of them.  Our nurses did a great job controlling the situation, and the first photo shows Aminou (one of our maternity nurses) giving them all an introductory talk.  One problem of mass screening is ensuring everything is scrupulously accurate.  The second photo is of lab staff searching through the discarded tests to find results which had been overlooked.  Not ideal!

As a thank you for their hard work, the staff were all given a soft drink at the end (yes, there’s no expense spared here at the Oeuvre Medicale!).  Dr Djemba, who had been conspicuous by his absence all day (well he was fatigued after a trip to Maroua on Wednesday), managed to turn up just as the drinks were being handed out!  Anne has a new word for him, something like supercallifrabjialisticexpialidocious, but goes more like lazygoodfornothingsonofabitchfatslob!

Have also attached a photo of Thomas, our “houseboy”, wearing a Madras FP Rugby Club sweat shirt as he does the ironing – surreal or what.  On a prettier note, there is also a photo of a bush called “pattes d’élephant” – elephant’s foot.  This shrub blooms at the height of the dry season when everything else has shrivelled up – an amazing sight.