2022 April 20th

It looks as if 2022 is going 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.

 We’ve just returned from Zambia where we’ve worked for three weeks with ‘Opportunities Zambia’, a Charity for poor children. Our first week was spent working in a large school which the Charity opened in 2013 in Kabanana, one of the slums in Lusaka, where we saw 400 patients. The next week was in a semi-rural school at Chomwe which the Charity opened more recently, where we saw 300 people. Our final week was in Manyama, an isolated lakeside colony down on the border with Zimbabwe, where we saw another 300 patients. I took a medical friend, Louisa, and a final year student Catherine, who worked with with me often under very unusual circumstances. It was possibly our biggest (ad)venture to date, with a four hour boat journey down the crocodile infested waters of the Zambezi, sleeping on the floor of tents next to Kariba lake and being visited by hippos in the night! We spent £1,000 to buy medicines for everyone who needed them and restocked the pharmacy in the rural clinic at Manyama with what was left. I’m preparing a detailed report of the trip, along with an analysis of the casemix and recommendations for improving healthcare among the poorest people in Zambia in a sustainable and cost-effective way.

I have been 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. 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 will be important to re-establish direct contact with the patients and clinicians again to plan our next steps.

Humanitarian work will follow in Uganda and Kenya where a visit to both Kelah Home and Hope House is well overdue. Jake and I spoke to the boys at Kelah last week and he’s keen to come with me on this trip: At 11 years old he’s the same age as many of the boys were when I last visited in early 2020, and he’s excited, if not a little nervous, to meet them for the first time.