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!