First stop- Addis Ababa, Ethiopia with ‘Facing Africa’ www.facingafrica.org

So……Africa……

Every part of the journey getting here has been fascinating. From the flight, full of Westerners going to climb Mount Kilamanjaro to the culture shock when driving through the city, seeing people working and living around shanty-villages and mud huts. We arrived at our home, the Cheshire home- built by Leonard Cheshire after the Second World War, met with swarms of smiling and waving little children, all with varying deformities affecting their legs, feet, hands and faces. They had been expecting us and everyone at the home, some seventy people, were there to receive and show us around the unit and our quarters; a one-hundred year old magnificent guest house, built for the infamous emperor Haile Silase as a retreat. The home is set in the lush green countryside with small mountains and trees in the horizon, with wild animals roaming free aplenty. After a brief rest (deep sleep for Hiba!), we got to work and started organising and preparing our patients that had arrived from the most remote parts of Ethiopia. These humble and friendly people, with horrific disfiguring conditions affecting their faces would follow every misunderstood English word we uttered and action we demonstrated as if their lives depended on it. That night was a bonfire celebration for Meskel, an Orthodox Christian festival. The children and adults danced around the fire singing songs in Amharic and the horizon was filled with scattered flames in the distance reflecting the nation celebrating this festive day.

Communicating with the patients is very challenging as they do not speak any English and the fact that Ethiopia has around 80 different languages, so even learning a few words only aides a small amount! The one thing that every boy knows around the world, and now I really know it’s around the world is….’FOOTBALL’!! As soon as I mentioned it, they all began to jump up and down and got ready to play on the grass, organising themselves into two teams and making goal posts from bricks. Luckily, I had come prepared with proper footballs and a pump and we all soon got into a great match, which would instantaneously become a daily ritual.

The new week brought upon serious work where we set up and ran our own clinics, assessing the patients from a medical and dental perspective. Using the nurses as translators we tried our best to get as much information from the patients as possible. If the nurses didn’t understand the patients dialect/ language then we even had to do four-way translations with myself asking the patient a question via the nurse, who asks the same question to the second translator in Amharic, who then asks the patient the question in the dialect they understand. The patient would respond and then bounce the answer back via the chain eventually to me, who perhaps hears a completely different response to a completely different question that was originally asked!!! (hope you followed that!).

So the rest of the week promises to be a busy one, seeing all the patients, playing football (how tiresome!), and also starting work at the CURE hospital, where the patients will eventually be operated on.

Finally, apologies for the delay in getting this post up (I wrote it like 3 days ago but internet access is hard to find and terrible when it comes!)

More to come….

Marwan