A Typical Day in the Camps

So this is how my day would usually go

2.30am Rooster would start talking to his friend on the other side of the village, it became a bit like chinese water torture, you knew he was going to squawk and the agony of waiting was nearly as bad as the roosting itself.

4am My GI system would wake up with a sad game of twister and someone beating my insides with a plank of wood with nails on it. After going to the bathroom go and get a bucket of water to flush. We were leaving buckets in the bathroom but after a few hours the mosquito larvae would start swimming and then they would hatch so you would get attacked by a swarm of mossies every time you went to the bathroom

6am Make a pot of tea and coffee for the team shortly followed by bacon, eggs, oatmeal, stale bread and peanut butter whatever we could find

8am Load the bus with our clinic supplies and go and get the local medical team

9.30am Arrive at camp of the day set up clinic. See kids until the last child had been seen

3-5pm Arrive back at the house, everyone was forced to have afternoon tea with me and just chill for half an hour

6pm Dinner and then start processing the paperwork. For every child we saw we created a medical record, we took every height and weight and crunched the numbers to assess the chronic and acute malnutrition rate for each child

9pm- completely wiped but not finished. Played cards and drank beer (the only thing that was really cold) this usually degenerated into stupid card slapping games

11pm bed in the heat and the sweat and the filth of the day, usually without a shower. Glad to have survived the day to do it all again tomorrow :-)