Uninvited Guests

Time was, I could sit outside the back of my house, in the dappled shade of a guava tree, enjoying a delicious coffee and reading a good book or writing in my diary. The only thing I had to worry about was the ants making their way up the legs of the chair and crawling all over me. I could get over that though for the pleasure of being able to just relax in the glorious African heat and feel at ease. No more though. I have new neighbours and not just neighbours across the wall, oh no, these neighbours have moved into my attic! Nowadays, if you spend more than ten minutes outside the back of my house between nine in the morning and five in the evening you are likely to get buzzed, bothered, barraged and maybe even stung by the hundred or so bees that have settled in the attic directly above my kitchen. They fly in and out of a hole at the rate of about four or five a second, seemingly all day long. They don’t seem to like me very much and I have been chased around my own house on three different occasions while checking on my laundry. I am not at all impressed, I can tell you!

Now in an ideal world, this wouldn’t be a problem. In my head, I see the bees and the giant feckin rats having a war in the attic and essentially wiping each other out. No more rats and no more bees seem like a wonderful outcome. Horrifyingly though, the two seem to be coexisting just fine. I know this because the rats are still doing their best to knock a hole in the ceiling and/or ensure I get as little sleep as possible. So I am left in a bit of a tricky situation. I quite like the idea of honey but I’m not so keen on being stung repeatedly for the next six months. The bees and I need to become friends! Apparently you doing this in much the same sort of style as you would with a girlie you are trying to convert into a “petite amie”. You bring them their favourite thing in the whole wide world! No, not diamonds or chocolate or flowers, well maybe flowers; I’m talking about honey. When the bees realise that you can provide honey, all of a sudden you are less of a threat and so don’t need exterminating. So we are about to embark on a black ops mission, code-named “Lets not get stung again because it hurts like a bastard”. A snappy title I’m sure you’ll agree. Time will tell what the outcome will be but one way or another, we need to deal with these unruly and very much uninvited guests.

To add insult to injury, last Thursday, upon my return home after a hard days toil I was unable to gain access to the house. I could hear the noise even over the music of the ipod. The sound was the simultaneous beat of two hundred odd wings. A second swarm had arrived. I was beginning to wonder if I had missed a sign somewhere which read “Free Luxury Bee Accommodation” with an arrow pointed at my house. This time they were in my front yard. There was no way in hell I was going to risk going anywhere near them and so I had to just stop, wait and marvel at the sheer number of them and the noise they were producing. They disappeared from the sky but I could still hear them. I took a few steps forward and realised that they were sussing out the abandoned doghouse in the corner of the yard. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do with two swarms to contend with when one is more than enough! Thankfully, the darlings decided the accommodation was not up to scratch though and so slowly dissipated into the last rays of sun of the dying daylight. I breathed a large sigh of relief and slowly made my way toward the door. A few bees still hung around, like ASBOs on a street corner but they seemed more intent on the doghouse than me. I was very, very happy to close the front door and feel the safety of the house engulf me.

Your unintended and hapless beekeeper in the middle of nowhere

The most repugnant sight of my life

A damp cloth covers the woman’s left leg, just below her kneecap. The ever-present flies hover, buzz, land, take off and dance on and around the cloth. I can see it’s sitting on raised flesh and I suddenly think that I really don’t want her to lift that piece of cloth off of her leg. I sit with the HBC nurse, a HBC client and this woman, another client. The woman didn’t show up for the monthly outreach meeting and news reached the nurse that she had a bad ‘sore’ on her leg and couldn’t walk with it. The reality was far more perverse, disgusting and downright unbelievable!

One of the sure fire signs that someone is HIV+ is the presence of Kaposi's sarcoma. It is a cancerous growth found either internally or externally on the sufferers’ body. Now I have googled the condition as part of the research for this article but I can tell you that nothing online compares to what I saw when the woman lifted the cloth…

After a few minutes of talking with the nurse, the woman very tentatively lifted the cloth off her leg. What I found myself looking at was a cancerous growth that had been left unattended for many, many months. It was hideous beyond anything that I can describe to you here! It was 10 to 12 centimetres in length and almost as width as her leg. It had grown up to 2 centimetres off the surface of her skin but not evenly, oh no! There were lumps, hollows and sores like little craters all over. The ‘flesh’ was brown with cream coloured puss, congealed blood and a clear sticky fluid covering various sections. I really, really wished she hadn’t taken the cloth away and yet, like passing a car crash, I was compelled to stare at its monstrous and unimaginable appearance. I wanted to look away, honestly, but I was so totally shocked by what I saw that my neck refused to move my head sideways. Then to add insult the injury I watched as the flies moved in, almost as quickly as the cloth was lifted. They stormed all over the monstrosity and even with the woman’s persistent swiping, a few refused to leave the ‘mana from heaven’. I thought I was going to be sick. I was very glad I had yet to eat lunch and was unsure if I still had an appetite; yes me, David Shorten, man of three stomachs and two hollow legs!

After what seemed like an eternity, our nurse had seen enough and the woman got sick of chasing persistent flies, who were as determined to lay eggs on the abomination as drunk men are to pull at the end of a night in a club. I blinked away the mental image and realised that my mouth was wide open. I quickly closed it before a fly decided to try its luck. I blinked some more and then turned my head and tried not to think about what I had just seen. Of course, ALL I COULD THINK ABOUT was what I had just seen. I shivered despite the 26 degree heat and wondered what sort of idiot this woman was. I mean, why, why, oh dear Lord why, would you let it get that bad? The woman was near tears as the nurse explained the situation to her. The nurse suggested she come with us to Chikuni but to my continued disbelieve she refused, quoting a need to do laundry as an excuse. LAUNDRY!?! This woman looks like she’s going to need to have her leg amputated and she’s worried about the feckin laundry… I stared at her face, then at the cloth (now covered with flies), then back to her face, then back to her leg and just felt totally lost as to how this situation has occurred. She was insistent though that she remain and promised that she would go to Chikuni the next day. So we had no choice and leave her to be harassed by the flies and the midday sun.

Later, the nurse explained to me that it’s a common side effect of being HIV+ and that that growth is almost certainly a sign that the woman hasn’t been taking her anti-retroviral drugs. Much to my disbelief, the woman did turn up at the hospital the next day, true to her word. I haven’t heard what has happened since but irrespective, I am still left with the sight of that growth imprinted on the inside of my eyelids. The thing of dreams, it most definitely was not!

Your reporter in the middle of visual trauma

The awesomeness of people

“Your heart will always be where you riches are” was a line I came across in a bible passage I read recently. It really stuck me as true because without doubt, the relationships in my life are the most precious things I have. I’ve lost friends over the years and every time it has hurt a lot because that person nearly always meant a great deal to me. And I still miss them because they have left a hole in my heart where they used to occupy. The love I received and indeed continue to receive has added wonderful colour to my life and made me so happy time and time again. I often feel like there is no way of really thanking these people for this other than to be the best friend I know how to be. We support each other as best we can.

There are a few people who have really gone above and beyond the call of duty while I have been out here. It has reminded me of just how much I love receiving stuff by post. There is something really special about receiving a letter that somebody has taken the time to sit down; craft in their head all those thoughts, pieces on news and funny incidents and then finally and carefully transfer onto paper, where there is no backspace key or spell checker. I cherish those letters and indeed the postcards, birthday cards, and photos that have also turned up to further brighten my days here.

Somebody though has even gone beyond that. Aoibhinn, my favourite cousin in the whole world has sent me so many books and so much chocolate that I couldn’t quite believe it when I saw the parcels. When I got home the other night I made myself a cup of proper coffee (still loving that I am able to drink coffee again) and had a cold Maltesers bar. As I munched through the bar, I thought that my dearest cousin really is a goddess, with a heart made of pure gold and who represents, I sometimes forget, my oldest friendship, starting at the tender age of 3. Now I just have to engage my (often feeble) will-power and not devour the whole lot within a week or two and instead eke it out like I am doing with the letters and cards many of my lovely friends gave me just before I left.

Sometimes I don’t know what I would do without my friendships. I feel like my life would be in greyscale rather than Technicolor and I would only be a shadow of the person I am today. I miss those friendships here and it’s one of the things I look forward to going back to at the end of the year. I wonder though, when was the last time you told your dearest friends just how much they mean to you…?

Your sentimental reporter in the middle of nowhere