Sorry its been a long time since I’ve properly updated you on what is going on,
Life has got quite busy here and its more difficult to find time for long emails and blog updates.
Things have changed a lot in melut in the last few weeks, the buildings in our compound have been finished so now I have a room to sleep in and we have an office and a dining room. We still have no furniture so life is not much less basic than in a tent, it is nice to have a roof though. The disadvantage of houses is that now all the bugs that were outside your tent are inside you room .. I little unpleasant and we seem to have a giant grasshopper and beetle invasion at the moment.
So we are turning into a bit of a farm/zoo with hens, a cockerel and now lots of little chicks. We also have 2 goats. Unfortunately the chickens have attracted some less welcome wildlife and the guards killed a large black cobra the other week!
Social life in melut is still limited and people seem to be resisting my attempts to get them to play monopoly .. movie nights are the main social highlight of the week and apart from that its usually bed at 9 o’clock … it means that I’m getting through my books though.
Work in nutrition has been busy .. we had predicted that the numbers should be slowing down by now but they keep increasing, I’m out 2 or 3 days a week doing food distributions for the supplementary feeding programme and the rest of the time working with the severe malnutrition cases in the clinic, writing reports, looking after stocks, dealing with staff etc….
There has been ups and downs we have had a few very sick children die in the last few weeks, but also we are seeing more discharged better and doing well. There is a little story about some of my patients (and a fairly horrendous picture of me) on the medair website (
www.medair.org) if you want to know more about it. I’m constantly surprised by the number of seemingly fairly well off and well fed mothers who have malnourished children … the main problems seem to be lack of knowledge on feeding children and disease rather than a lack of available food in most cases. Also had some challenging cases with children who just do not won’t to eat … which is more similar to work in the uk than I thought I would see!
I had an intersting week staying in an even more remote place called pariak to do some training .. it went well and there was a big celebration happening in the village as a very old and important man had died ... it was really amazing to see the dancing and celebrations as quite often here we are quite seperate from the normal village life.
The weekend when i got back from there we had a celebration for the opening of our compound buildings which we invited some of the un officers to .. it was good to see some different people and we had pizza! (it is possible in sudan when you have an italian on the team!)
Things like the heat and the insects and the lack of anything to do have started to get me down a bit the last couple of weeks so I’d appreciate your prayers for perseverance! Also the political situation in southern sudan is becoming more unstable with the SPLA threatening to withdraw from the peace agreement if the north do not fulfil the things they are supposed to do … this is quite a tense area due to the oil and being near the border so please continue to pray for lasting peace in sudan and protection over medair teams and their activities.
Can't seem to upload pictures today but will add some soon so you can see the new buildings and the crazy dancing in pariak!
