Sometimes it’s a bag of fruit – mangoes, oranges, limes and bananas – brought with a shy smile to my clinic by a patient with a chronic illness.
Sometimes it’s advice learnt the hard way through years of experience from an old fisherman: don’t wear rings, watches or belts when you fish with a net or you could get dragged in the sea, and don’t fish on moonlit nights because the fish can see the net – it’s much better on dark nights.
Sometimes it’s a child who comes running at the sight of me and wants to carry my bag to the dispensary for me, although it’s only another 10 metres away.
Sometimes it’s an invitation to dinner – sitting on a mud floor with children crawling all over me laughing and showing me their talents, or sitting more formally at a table with an array of dishes where I suddenly notice I was the only one given a knife and fork.
Sometimes it’s a free wooden carving, if you remember that story…
Sometimes it’s a gift for the dispensary that turns up anonymously out of the blue, like the young boy who came carrying a pair of electronic scales into my clinic room yesterday, put them carefully in the corner, and then ran out again without saying anything!
Sometimes it’s a teenager seeing me wandering the village back-streets and asking “are you lost?” to which I reply “not yet!”
Sometimes it’s an attempt in a croaky old voice to teach me some Swahili words, like hat or scissors, and endless patience as I try to find something to anchor the foreign sounds to in my associative memory… Cofia means “hat”, and I have to imagine a coffin on someone’s head to bring back the word!
Sometimes it’s a handshake where the patient envelops my hand with both of theirs and we understand each other perfectly although we don’t speak the same language.
Karibu, Shela villagers – you are very welcome indeed.
