Monday August 5th 2013

That is Andrew's garden, over there on the left. All the tents are the same, except for Andrew's, which has got a small Kew Gardens sprouting in front of it. We all deal with the stresses of compound living differently, and Andrew has embraced nature. Every time we go out his eyes are scanning the local flora for anything that he can take a cutting of, or trying to knock down one of the huge seed pods that hang from the trees, to sprinkle about and "see what happens". The locals, of course, think he's mad, as what he sees as plants, they see as weeds. Still - it helps to keep him relatively sane I suppose.....and it looks nice...


We were very pleased with ourselves this week, as we diagnosed a hookworm in the foot...one a local Dr, trained in the field, had diagnosed as scabies, and prescribed calamine lotion for ! We were very smug. That expensive course in London paid off after all.... Some of the things you hear are quite worrying - I saw a girl who had had the most awful cellulitis on her leg from an insect bite - and the Dr had given her Deep Heat. Good grief - imagine smearing raw chilli on a huge paper cut. That is how much the deep heat must have hurt.....


We popped down to the Nile on Sunday, and now I can actually say I have seen the biggest river in Africa. It was quite majestic, with small islands covered in Egrets, and children and adults doing their washing and having a bath. We decided NOT to join them, thinking of the huge fish on the back of a motorbike we'd seen, which I now know is a Nile Perch. Jeepers - don't want that sucking at your toes....


On the way there there is a "IDP" camp, or "Internally Displaced People" - people who used to live in the North, but now after the fighting are re-located to the South, to live in tin shacks held up with stones and sticks, with old clothes/sheets/tarps as makeshift roofs.This is not the first IDP camp I have seen, but it is the first I have seen located on a graveyard. Amongst the shacks, and half-naked children playing with a bit of old cardboard, there are stone tomb-like markers, half covered by the scrubland. Here and there are tin poles, with bent signs, handwritten with names, and dates of death. I am still not quite sure what to think - whether to be glad that a place up to now reserved for the dead, should have children and families breathing life into it, or to think that is was the most depressing thing I have ever seen. It was certainly something to think about.


On a lighter note, along with the cabin fever that is creeping in, comes a bit of hysteria - the laughing kind. I absolutely cried with laughter this week in a moment of extreme silliness, at the idea of all of our little compound "family", in the event of a proper coup, filing out after our German boss, like the Von Trapp family, gaily singing "Doe, a deer...." on our way to the Ugandan border.

Our accountant is even called Maria........