In which the terrible reality of life in Africa hits home

OK. This post is not going to be blogging-lite. If you want blogging-lite, click away now. Normal service (rabbits, Katherine etc) will be resumed soon, but you can't live here and meet Ugandans without at some point brushing against the desperate misery that so many of them face. As I said: not blogging-lite today.

Remember the neighbours? From time to time I have visited them. I bring bits of food and homemade playdough for the gangs of kids which seems to go down a storm, especially as not many of them speak English. A while back we exchanged mobile numbers. (An aside: no-one does landlines here. You guys are so backward in this regard.) They have always welcomed me into their home. Sometimes we've prayed or read the Bible together. No-one has a job or much in the way of schooling. No-one has ever asked me for money either. A surprise -and very humbling.

When K was born, Pastor Rashid asked if they could come and visit. So last Wednesday, a little troupe of 4 adults and 2 children, all looking immaculately smart turned up at our gate. We sat on the balcony, drank sodas and ate chocolate brownies while they cooed over the new baby. They gave me a gift: a Pepsi Cola T shirt and a cook book from the 80s entitled "Fresh ways with soups and stews." I re-iterate - none of these people has a job or anything like a regular income. Baby Israel, who I saw being born, was looking very healthy and huge for a 3-month-old. Baby Simon, 7 months old, was climbing all over his mother and seemed fine. When I asked how he was, I was told "he is diarating." (Ugandan English, and a neater way of saying, "he has diarrhoea.") I didn't probe: he really looked fine. Just the week before I'd gone to the doctor with one of our guards and his baby daughter, worried that she was "diarating", only to be told that up to 10 loose stools a day is normal for a breast-fed baby. (Shows how long I've been out of the nursing game. But it was reassuring to be told, anyway.)

The next evening, quite late, I got a phonecall at home in the middle of a leaving party for a Medair colleague. It was one of the neighbours, telling me that Simon had died. I was stunned.
At first I panicked. Just the day before we had all been sitting around my week-old baby. Could she have caught something life-threatening? By the morning I was more rational. We went over to see Simon's mother in their tiny shack. Simon was there, under a blanket on the floor. He looked beautiful and peaceful. His mother was distraught. "My heart is hurting," she said. This lady is an orphan herself. We all cried. They buried him that day, in a town about 60km away.

Rob bumped into Pastor Rashid later that week. Apparently, they had taken Simon to a local clinic. The doctor there assumed he had malaria and injected him with quinine. Very soon they noticed that he was having a bad reaction to the drug, so they got in a taxi to Nsambya hospital, but by the time they got there it was too late.

Did he have malaria? He might have done. Diarrhoea is one of many possible symptoms. Many places can't afford expensive microscopy, and even if they could, the clinical conditions aren't great for effective diagnosis. Blind treatment is the only option for many people, and malaria is a killer. But quinine is also a nasty drug; it has horrible side effects and (I have a good source for this) should never be given by injection. More likely, he just had diarrhoea and would have got through with clean water and a couple of oral rehydration sachets. We'll never know.

His memorial service is tomorrow, under the tree by the shack where they live.