2022 - a busy year

2022 is proving to be a busy year! After being confined to the UK for the last two years while working fulltime in the Hospital to help with the Covid epidemic, we’re aiming to get back out to develop our African projects, both old and new. I will continue to work when I’m back in the UK to fund these projects as sponsorship has dried up recently with so many other claims on emergency relief and more difficulty in organising social events.

Our first trip was to Zambia for 3 weeks over Easter when Sukie, Louisa, Catherine and I worked with the very poor in the slums of Lusaka where western diseases are becoming ever more prevalent. Then we took a motorised canoe down the Zambezi to work with the Bush People on the border with Zimbabwe at Siavonga. They have very little access to medical care and suffer from a wide range of tropical diseases. We took everything we needed with us including the medication required to treat the disorders we encountered. We’re now in the process of writing a paper on the conditions we came across.

I was asked to return to Tanzania in the summer to teach and set up a new research program, while advising on the management of complex conditions in Zanzibar. Its gratifying that those whom I first taught as final year medical students back in 2017 are now running Departments in some parts of rural Tanzania and have stayed in regular contact. We’ve been able to ensure clinical progress remotely through regular case conferences, zoom seminars and powerpoint sharing, but it was important to re-establish direct contact with the patients and clinicians again to plan our next steps. We managed to advise on clinical care and to put in place a plan requested by the Minister of Health for the future development of clinical services in and around Zanzibar, where I’ve been asked to return regularly to maintain the momentum.Meanwhile,we continue to held monthly seminars by zoom on educational topics for all interested clinicians and students.

Humanitarian work followed in Uganda and Kenya where a visit to both Kelah Home and Hope House was well overdue. Jake is 11 years old and the same age as many of the boys we visited this August. Separate pages detail our work in these areas but there’s been a lot of change and much more to come!