Settling in

Asalaam-aleikum!

We’re here... it felt like we’d been awake and travelling for days, but it was only some 24 hours from Swansea to Kerr Serigne via Llantrisant/Newport/Gatwick. We spent the weekend settling in and finding our way around, and set off for Banjul on Monday morning for meetings with directors and development officers at the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital (RVTH). We had a fascinating guided tour of the hospital and met with Momodou Lamin Jammeh - a histopathologist based at both RVTH and the Gambian National Public Health Labs. He has kindly provided us with an office to work from at the NPHL (which is only a stone's throw away from Kerr Serigne) – here we have wi-fi and air-con, together with bottled water we have found them to be indispensible! We are very grateful to him and his team for all their assistance. Clinicians and directors from both bases have been amenable and seem supportive of our pathology programme – one project we are running is based on pathological procedures in the form of learning packages that can be used by Gambian medical students during their studies.

The Gambian summer is incredibly hot – each morning we prepare for the intense heat and downpours, arming ourselves with long-sleeves, light clothing, and plenty of mosquito repellent (as Nia has ended up being a meals-on-wheels for the local mozzies). To date, we have made social visits to the monkeys and explored Senegambia and its beach. It’s out of season, so all is quiet.

We are off to meet a Dr. David Levine this afternoon - he is a retired American doctor who has spent several years in the Gambia and has settled near Kerr Serigne. Tomorrow is a public holiday and so we hope to be back at RVTH on Thursday, gearing up for next week, when we’ll meet patients recruited by the pathologists and take our clinical photos. That’s if we survive the heat. And rain. And did we mention the heat?

Nia and Keith