11 year-old Judith

As well as the girl with the displaced ureter made dry another sad girl aged 11 came to the camp. She complained of daily unconscious leakage of faeces and frequent leakage of urine both day and night for 2 years. She was an outcast. After careful questioning and examination I felt she had a muscular inco-ordination (sphincter instability) which might respond to retraining of muscles. Judith’s T shirt caption reads ’Quick repairs 24 hours’, but it took 3 weeks of daily instruction and eventual co-operation before she became became completely dry. Big smiles!

Bean Feast

Cassava and beans are the leading staple foods. They are often served for school lunch. Cassava is definitely an acquired taste!

We are in the middle of the bean harvest, and Helen has received baskets of beans (in their pods) from friends, who don’t want us to go short. In fact our fridge is half full of them, and after some weeks we have had enough!

The colourful beans are about 8 different types, each looking and tasting a little different. They are all planted and harvested together. If one type does badly that year, the others make up the loss. To store for next year’s harvest you dry the pods in the sun for a week, thresh them to get out the beans, keep them in the sun for further time (difficult in view of the daily heavy rain), then rub them with oil, and finally store them in earthenware. We consider ourselves semi-experts in beans!