A ragbag of topical issues

I was sat outside yesterday mulling over what I'd call the random collection of things I wanted to say and 'ragbag' came to mind. This reminded me that I'm probably missing the quarterly risk updates... for a short while I was disappointed and then I went back to enjoying the sunshine.

Are you enjoying it or do you want to come home?

Quite a few people have asked me this question in one form or another over the past week. This prompted me to re-read the blog to see if it was written by two depressed individuals. The simple answer is that we are enjoying it. That's not to say that there aren't challenges - we've just moved to a completely different country, effectively started new jobs and all before you consider the resource constraints of the hospital and poverty of the patients. But, nothing here is significantly different from what we expected.

There is some bias in what we put on the blog. I haven't written about the Mess and the medical students (yet), I don't spend ages talking about sitting in the sunshine with my book or working, or about the times I wander around the hospital smiling at / scaring small children. Strangely, Geoff hasn't mentioned all the time he spends sitting in the Theatre coffee room drinking the strange sweet tea or eating buns. I also haven't mentioned the time I decided it would be a good idea to poke the (very) small wasp nest on our window with a stick - the wasps weren't impressed and I ran quite quickly away...

So what is the routine?

Days start early. Geoff starts work at 7.30am either with a ward round or a clinical meeting. I get up with him to have breakfast together but generally decide that starting work at 7.30am is too keen, even for me, and take my chair and book outside to the shade in front of the house until about 9am - at this point the shade is too small for me so it's a good clock to work to.

Then I have 4 hours until lunch, during which I am either learning things for our two projects (Cost Effectiveness Analysis and Managing the Burns Department) or typing up the forms / spreadsheets that we need. I'll explain more about what each entails in the next few days. We are hoping to start data collection for the Cost Effectiveness work starting tomorrow for 12 weeks.

Depending on what I think the water situation might be later (Geoff likes to shower before dinner), I might have a shower before lunch - this is also contingent on there being enough pressure to run the shower, which quite often there isn't.

Lunch is either in the Mess (most days during the week) or some form of salad that we've cobbled together from things left in the fridge and bought from the market 200m away in the hospital grounds. The market is quite restricted in terms of fresh items - eggs, tomatoes, onions, bananas, green beans, white aubergines and 'rape' (This is a green veg a bit like Kale that the Mess serves every day so no one  cooks it for themselves).

Dinner is at 6.30pm (yes, a bit too early really). It is pitch black by this point. I tend to stop working / re-locate just before 5 to sit in the evening sun, working on the principle that anything urgent left undone can be done after dinner indoors when there's not much else to do.

Occasionally we will have tea/beer at someone's house or in the local community centre (Tiko's) after dinner. Going to Tiko's at least means that we leave the hospital grounds but it's not the most salubrious place in the world. However, Coke is 30p per bottle and beer is under a pound, so it won't bankrupt us. The loo is definitively NSFP (not suitable for parents).

The Mess - there is electricity but the students preferred candles last night

Geoff and Rory

Hamish

Things you don't normally see in the UK - fire right next to the Paediatric Ward!!!

Have you seen any wildlife?

The driver on the way up seemed keen to 'reassure' me that I wouldn't see baboons or anything of that nature on the hospital grounds. How disappointing!

But, there are things here! Each house seems to have its own animal theme.

Nat and Will have cockroaches coming out of all their plug holes so they have to keep the plugs in all the time. They also had a scorpion one morning. The new students have massive spiders whose bodies are about 2 inches across!! We have a family of geckos by the front door (one fell on my hand in the dark the other day, causing both of us (I imagine) to scream). We also have frogs on the grass outside when there's been some rain. There are also lizards/skinks of various sorts living around the house that can be seen scuttling up the walls or around in the grass during the day. Some of them are very fancy, I'll try to get some photos.

On the way back from the Mess we've seen chameleons (they don't know what colour to be at night so they go pale green - which glows in torch light) and a snake. The snake was about a foot long, grey-green with a black head. It didn't seem interested in us.

Then there's the mysterious beast that lives by our front door. It is a creature of habit that comes out at about 5pm. It moves under the grass / leaves around the front door. The first few days I heard it behind me I'd look round, see nothing, then carry on working/reading. A couple of days ago Geoff said he'd seen a pretty lizard at that spot at that time. So I looked harder when I heard the noise. I could see the grass moving as if something was underneath it. The creature knew I was there because it stopped moving every time I moved. At one point I thought I saw an ant scurry out over a leaf and then back. The creature moved on. Then I got thinking - this thing moves quickly under the grass, and very smoothly. What if it wasn't an ant that I saw but something black and forked? The beast is a snake?? But yesterday I looked for it again and I thought I saw something scurry back in the grass (more like a mouse) so we still don't know!

Lastly, there's juvenile homo sapiens (yes, yes, not strictly wildlife). There is a small group of young boys (they claim to be between 6 and 9). I first came across them when two fell in step beside me as I walked in the grounds - 'are you going to follow me everywhere?' 'Where are you going?' 'The workshop' 'Where's that?' 'Well, if you follow me then you'll find out!'. They were eating lemons that they'd half inched from a garden. The other night they paid us a visit outside the house. They were disappointed to discover that neither my Kindle nor the MacBook are touch screen. And I wouldn't let them play with them or my phone either (they called me stingy for that). But I got a thorough examination - my hair was stroked and declared to be brown (Geoff corrected that mistake quickly) and my forearms squeezed (they clearly haven't seen the picture of Jodie Marsh). After they started staring into the house they were told to get lost :)