Report from Mark Haden, 2003 VSA winner

I had always intended to take a gap year and spend some time travelling before going to university, telling others (and myself) that it was all to do with expanding my horizons and seeing the world before becoming a student. It came as quite a shock then when Oxford returned my UCAS form with an acceptance but with a glib note saying ‘some details of your application may have changed’. Not liking the idea of me taking a gap year, they simply decided that I wasn’t going to.

So, my plans had to change and my gap year became a gap summer. Luckily the States of Jersey help to organise three building projects a year in various Third World countries and that year there was a planned project to Zambia over August. It was a small project involving only 14 of us to St. Francis, a small rural hospital near Katete in the Eastern province of Zambia, hoping to build three small houses for nursing accommodation in the hospital compound. Before travelling out we had a small amount of training in bricklaying and carpentry etc, as well as some extra fundraising for money that could be donated to the hospital once we were out there.

So after a 14hr flight to Malawi, two border crossings and an eight hour journey in the back of one of the hospital trucks (the ‘Great Eastern Road’ being more potholes than tarmac) we arrived at St. Francis. We were staying in the disused isolation ward of the hospital, just opposite the mortuary - and on many occasions we were woken in the middle of the night by the wails of mourning women. But the accommodation was much better than we had feared and we soon made friends with the English hospital director, Richard Parkinson, his wife Sheila, who was the head doctor, as well as some student doctors on their electives.

When we first arrived the worksite consisted of two concrete foundation slabs (the third not being finished on time) and for the first couple of days my job consisted riding in the back of a rickety trailer to shovel sand from the local sand-pits (we only had the two shovels we brought with us) and collect bricks from the clay pits, where they were cut and piled up into giant kilns to be fired from underneath. The bricks often broke as we were handling them and were at best only roughly rectangular so we ended up often using as much cement as bricks to fill in the gaps.

It was not all building however, and I was most glad, as it was less than a month till I became a medical student, to go on ward rounds with a Belgian doctor. The hospital had a large maternity ward and women who had previously had difficulty with childbirth often came many months before they were due. In the medical wards at least 60% of people had conditions symptomatic of HIV, although AIDS was rarely diagnosed as there was no affordable treatment available. Paracetamol was often all that could be given. The anti-retroviral treatments commonplace in Western countries were simply too expensive for all but the richest to afford. There were also many problems with the local’s superstitions, for example children with epilepsy usually came to St. Francis with severe burns - as they were thrown on the fire as they were believed to be possessed.

But, against all this, the dedication of the doctors and nurses, both local and foreign, was unquestionable. They were all working away from the richer, copper mining areas of western Zambia, their wages from the government were often late and the banks (not judging it worth their time) constantly refused accounts to those on a nursing salary.

Over the month, we worked alongside local labourers and bricklayers who often demonstrated more skill then even the professional builders in our group. I’ve heard it said on occasion since I returned that overseas building projects take jobs away from the locals and I’ve often wondered myself whether it was worth the expense of flying out there when the money could have been spent elsewhere, on better medicines or repairing the buildings (when it rains on the tin roofs you have to shout above the noise). But the work really did proceed much faster with us there than it would normally have done (the locals were apt to work slower when we were not around) and, by the end of the month, I came to believe that to just send money was too impersonal. For the locals to see us actually working alongside them and to have people returning to Jersey knowing that it has made a difference is just as vital as the money itself.

As well as the work I’ll always remember some of the regular life at the hospital: the singing at the local church, wandering around to see some local villages, playing football against the hospital side, climbing the small mountain a short hitch-hike away, visiting the ‘Jersey school’ which had been built by a similar group to ours eight years ago, drinking beer at 45p per bottle (an inflated price for westerners) and the broad horizons which afforded a grand view of the sunset.

Unfortunately, owing to the difficulties of welding the roof supports, we did not finish all three houses. But as the costs have all been donated to the hospital, the local workers finished the buildings a few months after we returned home. I still hope to go back in a few years to work as a doctor and see the finished houses but I hope I have given an idea of my time and experiences in Zambia so far. The chance to live and work alongside local Zambians is something for which I am most grateful and I encourage and wish luck to anyone else setting out on similar travels - not just to see the world, but to better understand other cultures by working with them.

Mark Haden (Gervase '03)