Anne

Village life:

Now that all the planting has been done and everything is growing fairly well, there are the weeds to contend with. Traditionally that is women’s work along with cooking, fetching water, washing clothes, cleaning, having and bringing up the many children. The men are free again to play cards or sleep under trees. Oh, it’s hard being a man in Cameroon!

I missed a terrific photo opportunity this week when there were 12 pairs of oxen working in the field behind our house. I didn’t want to be late for a meeting. Silly me! I waited an hour and a half to get started on the meeting.

We have reached the point in the year when people are getting very poor and short of food. Three people arrived with “gifts” of mountain fruit within 24 hours. Dilemma: give a little money and risk having barrow loads of the stuff or say, “No, thank you” and send them away hungry and offended. Answers by email, please.

Work:

Our treasurers’ workshop went ahead last week with Godam in charge in preparation for my departure (We have just heard that I won’t be replaced until January). He set the groups a little challenge: the PTA has received 100,000 francs. One member spends 53,000 on materials to teach cookery in the school. How would you record these transactions? Each group included at least one teacher or head teacher. An hour later one group came up with a pretty good answer. The others were way off the mark. This week it was the turn of the secretaries with equally revealing results. At the end, one participant wondered how something could be arranged to say goodbye and thank you to me. With a big smile. I opened my mouth to reply when Godam jumped in and announced that it’s too late now. They should have thought of it sooner. I have honestly tried to like him. I would have declined the kind thought anyway as I hate goodbyes but it would have been nice to answer for myself. I told him so the next day – politely, of course!(ish!) He didn’t even remember doing it.

Yesterday, Hamish and I both had our leaving interviews with our respective bosses. Think interview! Think smart suit, neat hair, looking calm, composed, clean and tidy on arrival. Think again when you are in the bush. It had rained for hours overnight so there was absolutely no question of stepping into the car. The humidity was so awful that my hair would not dry after my shower and to add insult to injury, I had to go by motor bike, jamming the helmet over the soggy, dripping haystack. Because of the rain, Godam and I had to go further off road to bypass the broken bridge. We came a cropper in a deep puddle and I ended up knee deep in mud. Three times!! My boss’s first words? Your hair’s wet! Great for morale. What should have been a quiet chat amongst the 4 head teachers, Moh and me turned into a 4 hour marathon because the chairman of one development committee summoned 20 parents to join in!

Mandoula School is very anxious that they will not get their borehole/well after I leave, so, to reassure them, the Rotarian whose company will install it, offered to come out and make an initial visit to the site. Communication by phone was impossible so I had to arrive in the village and search for committee members. Mandoula, which is usually teeming with people, was like the Marie Céleste - the only witness to the visit was the head  teacher’s 5 year old son. I took photos as proof.

Membeng’s new classroom had its final surprise paint job thanks to money that arrived from our grandson Jack’s class in Wormit Primary which is twinned with Membeng. It is the only building outside Maroua to have anything like this. As there are only 4 geography books in the school, I am sure the maps will be put to good use.

Random facts/thoughts:

• This week Lydia announced that her shoes are too good to do the washing in. Could she just wear mine?
• Next day she followed me into our bedroom to get a chair, bypassing six others on the way through. Does she realise I’m on a knife edge here?!
• Word is out that we leave soon so we are having lots of visits and promises of visits from people who seem to think we would like to give them something - like a sewing machine or a house. We will take turns of answering the door for the last couple of weeks. Mohamadou says it’s kind of them – they want to make our journey home easier!
• The car became an ambulance for the second time this week when a vehicle carrying a patient got stuck in the mud. The poor man, who looked more dead than alive, was carried to our car. Turned out to be dysentery and he went home 4 days later. My first passenger was not so lucky - a little girl who later died of malaria. A photo shows the unfortunate vehicle, an ambulance which is a rare sight here.

Hamish

We’re trying hard to resist the temptation to count off the remaining days.  While it seems a long time since life was “normal”, the two years have passed very quickly.  Now we have to decide on our priorities when we get home: hair cuts (well, at least for Anne!), dentist, Morrisons, which first?  Do we need to have health checks (don’t feel there is a need, but you never know).  Then there are huge catalogues of photos to organise.  But most importantly, we need to spend some quality time with the family.

Meantime, although the full blood analyser has arrived at the hospital, we have encountered problems getting it set up to become operational.  A friendly technician in Maroua offered to organise it, but I don’t think we’ve been a priority for him.  I’m remaining optimistic and expecting it to be up & running before we leave.  Thanks to Callum Duncan, Kate Russell and Steve McFarlane, the analyser will be paid for soon!  These three are undertaking a sponsored cycle from London to Paris and have offered the proceeds to my appeal.  Callum replaced me in the practice, while Kate and Steve are from the other practices in town.  (I was going to say the Health Centre, but guess that’s closed now!).  The sponsored ride starts on 21^st August, so I wish them well.

We are now into the wettest month of the year.  While this is welcomed by the “cultivateurs”, it has two major negative effects.  Firstly the dirt tracks become a challenge; either they’re impassable mud or the track develops deep chasms where the rain water has cut up the sand.  Makes for exciting driving!  The road to Membeng (one of Anne’s schools) is now impassable for cars and will soon be the same for motos.  And to think how we moaned about the state of roads back home when there was the odd superficial pothole!  The second problem is that, needless to say, mud bricks are not exactly water repellent.  That means that we are in the season of falling walls – another source of casualties for the hospital.  Last week, we received one woman with back pain after the bedroom wall collapsed on her.  It turned out she had a crush fracture of one vertebra in the small of her back, an injury we see commonly at home as the result of osteoporosis.  In this woman’s case, however, the underlying problem was TB of the spine.  It is natural that people look for a cause for a health problem but commonly, they put two and two together and get twenty two.  Another patient presented with problems of bowel and bladder control.  He blamed it on surgery he’d had in Zidim a few months ago, but I remember he was perfectly fit when we let him go and there was no way I was going to accept any kind of responsibility despite my free professional indemnity cover from the Medical Defence Union of Scotland.  (Yes, they classify me as a Medical Missionary and waive the normal fee!)  On further investigation, it turned out he too was a victim of TB spine.

We now have two African doctors in the hospital.  The first, David, is a newly qualified Cameroonian.  Although he may lack experience, he is a very bright and knowledgeable young man and is enthusiastic for his work.  Dr John comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo and has considerable experience, including surgery.  He too seems enthusiastic.  In short, the two of them are the complete antithesis of Jemba (who did the locum for Anne Poppelaars last year) – thank goodness!  Unfortunately, there is little time left for handing over, but the docs seem to be picking things up quickly.

When we were faced with the problem of Michaelou (the boy with the horrendous head injury), I tried to get some advice from sources in the UK.  Gordon Peterkin, a long time chum and expert in telemedicine, put me in contact with an organisation called the Swinfen Trust.  They provide links to enable medics in the developing world get advice from specialists in the UK.  Although, in the end, we did not need their help and sent the boy to Yaoundé, this link has enormous potential.  Recently Roger Swinfen emailed me for an update on the outcome with Michaelou and I took the opportunity to let him know of the changes in personnel here in Zidim.  I was delighted when he immediately got back to me offering to maintain the link with the new doctors.  Next week, we’re hoping to test the link using a dummy case, and no, I’m not volunteering to come down with malaria, typhoid, or any obscure nasty tropical illness just to provide teaching material!

A cheery note to end with.  Two months ago, we admitted a ten month old baby with severe malnutrition.  The infant was too weak to swallow.  His mother had abandoned her two children when she walked out on her husband in Douala (the commercial capital of Cameroon).  The children’s father managed to provide for the older child but the baby was still dependent on breast milk.  He brought the child to his family home here in the Far North and granny took over.  Initially, we had to tube feed the child, but granny was a real hero and was willing to give the mixture of bouillie (a kind of porridge made from millet) enriched with peanut oil every two hours, day and night.  The first photo shows the wee waif in the state he was in on arrival.  The second was taken just a month after, and what a difference!  Granny’s body language says more about her relationship with the baby than I could put into words.  In the midst of all the sad cases we deal with here, it’s great to see an occasional success story!