Driving in the African Bush – What we’ve Learnt

1.       Driving in Sand – don’t accelerate too hard, don’t expect the steering wheel to do anything when you turn it. But whatever you do, don’t stop

2.       Driving in Mud – accelerate hard. If you stop – you/your wife will probably have to get out and push.  If you feel yourself sinking, be prepared for your wife to shout ‘keep going’ continuously whether it’s helpful or not.

3.       Driving over  small rocks – go slow.

4.       Driving over large rocks – go very slow (especially when the car is carrying twice its capacity), and prepare yourself for awful scrape-y noises. And pray that no vital parts fall off the car.

5.       Driving in long grass – have faith and don’t expect to see where you are going. The long grass may be taller than the car, but it’s generally safe. Don’t be surprised the ‘road’ looks suspiciously like a field.

6.       Driving through rivers – pray

7.       Driving through puddles – attempt to distinguish the difference between a puddle and deep hole. This is usually impossible.

8.       Driving around potholes – dodge, duck, dive, dip and dodge. Don’t hip them at high speed – bits will fall off your car.

9.       Changing a tire on a mud track – put a rock under the jack, or you can expect the jack to impact the floor more than the car!

10.   Driving past pedestrians – wave at anything that moves – they love it and new friends may come in handy when pushing is required!

11.   Driving over snakes – despite being strongly encouraged by locals to mow down the ‘spitting cobra’ in the road, we would advise keeping your distance

Additional – if you end up driving at dark, it can be difficult to distinguish between rocks/sand/mud/rivers, so apply all the above rules simultaneously. Good Luck.

The First Clinic

We were awoken at 6am by a juvenile cough outside the window, and suddenly the whole thing became a bit more real. We’re not sure when they got there or how far they had travelled, but it turns out our concerns about the news of On Call Africa’s first clinics of 2012 not reaching the villages was completely unnecessary!

On paper the concept is simple; we put a load of stuff in a car, drive to a school in a rural village and run a medical clinic. In reality, we have spent the last few weeks frantically, trying to figure out what we would need and how we could best survive for four days in the villages. Amongst the vitals were water, food, tents and an enormous pile of medication/medical kit. With the car loaded to bursting and the suspension complaining loudly, we set off. Despite having visited the villages just two weeks ago, the ‘roads’ were worse than we remembered (or maybe it was just that our car weighed about 8 times as much now). Less mud-track, more pile of rocks with a small river running across/through it. Our progress was slow and our beautiful new 4x4 took a good few knocks, but after many hours we made it to the first school. The school building is basically a concrete box with/without windows.  We erected our tents to provide make-shift mosquito nets and settled down for the night. By 7am we had more than enough patients to see us through the day, by 7:30am we were already starting to turn people away.

At 8am, Mattea & I nervously invited the first patients into our ‘ clinic room’ (a couple of classroom desks in the concrete box we had just slept in). The cheerful locals who could speak a bit of English were more than happy to sit with us for the entire day to translate the problems of the locals. Some serious, some trivial, some – we didn’t have a clue! But we did our best to provide advice and treatment for the patients we saw. At 4pm and 80+ patients later, we piled everything back into the car and set off for the next village. After 3-5 hours driving, we arrived, put up the tents, bed down, and start all over again!

The cultural divide is still massive, and the paucity of worldly belonging still astonishing, but we are learning how to bridge the gap. The ‘village people’ as we call them (still makes me smile as I imagine communities made up entirely of men in fireman/lumbarjack outfits!) are genuinely friendly and the Zambian children are a delighted when you wave and say ‘hello’ .  We are concerned that we’re seen as white outsiders that have come to give out free stuff, and this system of reliance is not helpful – but we’re doing are best to try and balance this with education and helping them to help themselves.

After 3 nights in the bush we returned to the luxury of Livingstone. We were shattered, smelly and desperate for a cold beer, but we are genuinely delighted with how the first week had gone. We have a few nights in Livingstone to get everything cleaned/sorted and re-packed – on Sunday we’re off again!

It's Good to be Home!

Ok, so it’s not quite like being back in the UK, but we’ve finally settled in our new house in Livingstone after 6 weeks of living out of suitcases and moving every few days.  During our time with PEPAIDS, we were based in the small town of Mazabuka with several visits to Zambia’s capital Lusaka.  And then of course there was my flying visit back to the UK for my job interview.  In case you haven’t heard, we got the news through at the end of last week that I was successful in getting a job in Public Health, a huge blessing, so I will start that on our return to the UK in August. 

We got the keys to our new house yesterday and spent the day walking round turning on taps and lights, amazed that water appeared and the lights came on!  Needless to say, we are literally overjoyed to be in a place we can really call home.  Up until now, we’ve been frequenting some of the cheapest guesthouses that Zambia has to offer.  Whilst we’ve both seen worse during our younger backpacking years, there were times over the past few weeks where it’s all seemed too much - mostly on the very hot days where we’ve sat sweating profusely trying to work on over-heating laptops without any form of cooling device, no running water and spiders lurking behind every door.

The first place we stayed was potentially the best, but it knew it, and so charged double what anywhere else was charging.  After a couple of nights in their cheapest rooms, having to trek across the lobby to the bathroom (the lobby was always crowded with the managers and their friends watching TV at top volume, all hours of day and night), we decided we could do better for cheaper.

So we packed up and moved down the road.  For the first few hours, all seemed well.  They had agreed (after some persuasion) that we could use their kitchen to cook in because there were almost no eating-out options in Mazabuka, and we had an en-suite, all for a fraction of the price.  Unfortunately, as the heat of the day developed and we realised there was no fan, we started to feel a little less smug.  But at least we could have a cold shower to cool down.  In fact, a cold shower was all we could have.  Whilst the guest house itself had hot water, for some reason it wasn’t connected up to the hot tap in our room.  That evening, we attempted to use their kitchen.  It turns out they really didn’t want us to use it.  On discovering it was locked (with all our food in the fridge), we enquired and were told the man who had the key was no longer on site.  After a day or so of bugging them, we were finally given almost free access to the kitchen.  But we soon realised we wouldn’t be cooking any gourmet dinners in there.  The whole place was crawling with bugs and looked like it had NEVER been cleaned.  But we’d got a special deal by paying for a whole week so we were kind of stuck there.

Zambian guesthouses seem to have a strange habit of encouraging/employing 5-7 people whose main occupation is to talk loudly outside the guests’ window/door. This complimentary service is provided 24 hours a day, but is especially vocal between the hours of midnight – 2am and then again between 5-7am. That is, all except guest house number 3….

Once the week was up in place number 2, we decided to try somewhere new, because you never know.  A little further down the road, we got an en-suite for the same price in a lovely-looking house with a relatively clean kitchen, which we were very much encouraged to use.  They seemed delighted to have us, as if they’d not seen any customers in quite some time.  Once again, we got a good deal by paying for a whole week up front (why don’t we learn!).  The kitchen was great, and they even had a big TV in the communal lounge, which was empty except for us so we had free range of the satellite TV!  Unfortunately, that didn’t really make up for the lack of running water. The plumbing was quite amazing. Most of the day, there was no water, but occasionally, the water pressure would increase and for no apparent reason, water would start seeping/dripping/spraying out of numerous faults in the pipes. These pipes had varying bits of plaster/plastic bag/rope holding them together – but with little or no effect. The quantity of spiders which had taken up refuge in the place was the horrifying, but the deal breaker for guest house number 3 was that there was no security.  In the previous places we’d been kept up half the night with people constantly chatting outside our room and comings and goings.  So we went to bed that night thinking we would have a lovely quiet night’s sleep because the place was deserted, it was just us, or so we thought.  At around 2am, I was woken by hearing something bang in the kitchen.  I lay there for a few minutes, but became convinced that someone was in the house.  I cautiously woke Dave, and told him.  At first he wasn’t convinced but soon there was more banging and then some conversation, whoever was there was not trying to be quiet.  Whilst we were almost certain it was probably one of the owners, we just weren’t sure, and when they tried the door handle of our locked room, we really weren’t convinced.  Any way, after what seemed like an eternity, we heard people leave.  It’s odd how stupid things seem in the light of the day.  I had been convinced that if we had gone out and confronted whoever was there, we would have been attacked by a machete-wielding maniac.  But the next morning, after 3 hours of larium-fuelled nightmare-filled sleep, we couldn’t for the life of us think why we hadn’t just gone out to see who it was.  It turns out that it was of course one of the owners, who had come back drunk after a football match with a girl from a bar.  But every night for the next week I found myself lying awake longing for the comfort of the all-night noise at the other guest houses.

On my return to the UK, Dave made his way down to Monze to work in the local hospital. True to form, he found the cheapest place in town. His first morning in the hospital, he was asked by the local doctor where he was staying. David proudly announced the name of the establishment only to be told ‘Isn’t that where the prostitutes go?’ and ‘Are you paying by the hour?!’ So Dave spent his week hiding in his room in the brothel (or so he tells me).

This weekend we house-sat for some friends in Mazabuka (they daren’t leave the house unoccupied because they’ve been burgled every time they’ve done so in the past, a fact which I’m sure had a big part to play in fuelling my night time fears).  Whilst it was actually quite a lovely weekend and much more homely than the guest houses, we were woken in the middle of Saturday night by a cockroach rustling in our room (of course I was convinced it was the machete-wielding maniac again).  Our attempts to catch it merely resulted in it running under our bed so we decided it could stay there until the morning.  Unfortunately, it somehow decided, and managed, to get inside our mosquito net!  So after more chasing and herding, we finally managed to trap it in a glass and get it out.  All part of the adventure I guess.

I love night time back in the UK, snuggling under a duvet after a warm shower, in the quiet, secure, cockroach-free haven that is our bedroom.  Come August, I hope I appreciate that a bit more.  Until then we have our new Livingstone house, where we have so far slept wonderfully, certainly a home-from-home.

Our work with PEPAIDS has now come to an end and we’ve begun our work with On Call Africa.  We’ve bought a car, moved down to Livingstone and have set the wheels in motion to start clinics in late March.  We have arranged to visit the village ‘headmen’ next week to let them know the dates of the up-coming clinics.  We can’t wait to get started!