The road safety slogan in Nairobi reads ‘Hospital ceilings are boring – drive safely’. They should apply a similar warning to the food. Twelve of us travelled to Africa and after our first meal, five came down with a vicious dose of food poisoning.

All my life I’ve admired volunteer workers. I often expressed the thought that I’d love to spend a year abroad helping the starving kids of whatever humanitarian crises was popular at the time. Admittedly, I only ever mentioned it in the company of pretty and impressionable save-the-world types. But then an opportunity presented itself. A group of medical personnel from UCHG, including my better half, were heading to Tanzania to help out at a health centre for a fortnight and I was offered a place on the team.
I’ve no real medical experience apart from a summer spent wiping bums and shaving pubes while posing as a nurse’s aide some 20 years ago. However, thanks to the deteriorating health of the group, my limited skills soon became invaluable.
Our destination was the Simanjiro Health Centre, which is in the middle of nowhere in Tanzania. If you need directions – fly to Kilimanjaro, drive for an hour to Arusha, then for three hours over dirt tracks filled with potholes the size of Rift Valley lakes. Turn right at the failed maize crops and you can’t miss it. Whatever you do, don’t stop to eat in the deceptively plush-looking Impala Hotel.
The Health Centre is basically a small hospital run by the Divine Word missionaries and largely supported by the impressive fundraising activities of a group from Athenry, Co. Galway. They call it The Athenry-Simanjiro Partnership. Not the catchiest name, I’ll admit. It doesn’t have the cache of Concern or Trocaire, but in its own way it is extremely effective. This group have, for all intents and purposes, adopted a tiny area of Tanzania and made a huge improvement there.
It’s not unique, this partnership, but there are very few in existence, which is a shame. I found myself comparing it to the rather pointless town-twinning which is faddish in Ireland. My own city of Galway is twinned with Bradford, as far as I’m aware. Wouldn’t it be more productive and satisfying to adopt somewhere in the developing world and make a real difference – Leitrim, anybody?
Another, more valid point is that contributors to schemes like this get a tangible feel for how their money is spent. Provided there’s a capable committee in charge, every penny goes to the chosen project. In the past year, a container was purchased, stuffed with medical supplies (including an ambulance) and shipped to Simanjiro. The Partnership paid and accounted for every penny; including the bribes required to pass customs. The previous year, they sank a well to provide a clean and reliable source of water – which is more than we had in Galway all summer. This well has saved local women walks of up to ten kilometres a day. I say women, because it is they who do all the work. We were in a Masai area, and frankly, the fairer sex gets a raw deal within this ancient culture. As far as I could see, the men do nothing, or at least nothing that would raise a sweat, even here on the Equator. They attend an occasional meeting, keep an eye on the cattle and father children. Having said that, each man may have up to six wives, so they’re probably kept busy.
This is the aspect of Masai culture I found intriguing, because most of the community attend church every Sunday. We stayed with local priests Fr. Eusebio from the Philippines and Fr. Peter from Goa in India. Both were impressive can-do types who understood the Swahili phrase pole pole (slowly slowly) which applies to everything, including any attempts to change ingrained cultural beliefs. Catholicism is, of necessity, a more flexible belief system in a country where a man can have multiple wives. It’s pointless preaching your version of sexual morality to the Masai. It’d be like telling Irishmen they have to be circumcised.
The locals dwell in mud huts in the direst conditions. They’re susceptible to TB, malaria, infections of every sort and of course AIDS. Without the help of the health centre, their life expectancy would be reduced below the already pitiful age of 55. It’s a case of always being pragmatic. If they insist on female circumcision, try and provide them with a clean blade for the purpose. If they’re using the local Witch Doctor, don’t laugh; just supply the correct medicine even though he’ll take credit for every cure. I’m told Irish doctors take the same attitude to the legions of crystal-jangling, aura-cleansing homeopaths growing rich on the superstitions of the gullible. Maybe we’re not that far removed from the Masai. They’d certainly rival us for mobile phone ownership. Every one of them laughed when they saw my Nokia.
The most valuable work done by the centre is the vaccination of pregnant women and their kids. We spent a few days out in the wilds at this work and while it was always chaotic – the women try to get jabbed twice because they reckon it’ll be twice as healthy – it was immensely rewarding.
After a week my partner Sinead had failed to recover from the bug and had to be air-ambulanced to Nairobi. If you’re not put off by anything I’ve written and you fancy going to Africa – do so, but make sure you have decent health insurance. VHI multi-trip could not be faulted. They chartered a plane, flew us to a private hospital and put her up in a room bigger than my flat at home. It turned out she had amoebic dysentery of some sort, which was cleared up pretty quickly. The doctor said he’d let her out as soon as she could form a stool properly. Turns out all she had to do was get her shit together.
Africa has a way of throwing everything at you. We were less than an hour out of the hospital when a car ran into the back of our taxi. Nobody hurt, thankfully, but with Nairobi’s dodgy reputation (the locals call it No-rob-me), I was sure it was a scam. It wasn’t, the real scam was the city tour we took the next day. It’s a bad sign when the driver tells you “Not much to see in Nairobi”. He took us to the national museum (closed) and the former President’s tomb “guarded 24 hours a day by soldiers” (gone to lunch). The National park was open however, and our guide managed to drive us to a picnic spot where an enormous baboon climbed into the van and tried to make off with the bag containing our passports, tickets, phones and cameras. After a brief and scary stand-off – the smell of my urine must have freaked him out – he left with just the air freshener. Time to get out of Africa.
So overall did we make a difference? It’s hard to know. Certainly the money we raised beforehand will do some good in the short term. Unfortunately if things are to improve long-term it will be, as always in Africa, Pole Pole.