So what is the medicine really like?

Here is a mixed bag of some of the things I’ve seen since being here and there has been quite a range.

The oddest experience I think was seeing a man who had a painful bottom- he seemed reluctant to take his clothes off in front of my interpreter. I thought he was shy because she was a woman but it turned out that it was because he didn’t want her to see the pistol he had hidden in his coat. Mental note to self- don’t mess with the taxi drivers around here!

Another that sticks in the mind was a 14 year old girl I saw a few days later who was 8 months pregnant and had just found out she was HIV-positive. She just sat there in her school uniform sucking a lolly-pop as if nothing was the matter.

Unlike what you are told about South Africa there seems to be very little gun crime in the Transkei (the odd taxi driver excepted). Apparently most with a criminal tendency tend to move to the cities as they are not tolerated here. That’s not to say that there isn’t a constant stream of drunken men who have been fighting but they seem to stab each other instead and so far the consequences have not been too bad.

The same can’t be said for the roads which are lethal. Just before I arrived 17 school children were killed in a coach crash. On call a few weekends ago 6 (drunken) men were brought in after overturning their truck. One died at the scene another while we were treating him and another on the way to the referral hospital.

Had a typically African experience this week. We went to a peripheral clinic and there was a young man who needed to have his blood taken. The problem was that he was in the middle of his 4 week circucision school which is where the boys go off into the bush to learn how to become a man. As a result he was not allowed to see any married women at all so I went to take his blood in the security hut at the entrance to the health centre. When I got there I found this man crouching behind the door dressed only in a blanket covering his shoulder and a some leaves tied around the end of his penis. Under the blanket he was covered from head to toe in white clay. It was uneventful from then on but an interesting start to the clinic.

By the way there are plenty of PHOTOS on my facebook page just follow the links below
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=11146&l=cf191&id=573386765

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=5776&l=a3887&id=573386765