First Day in Danja

Arrived last night when it was nearly dark. Spent some time with Nigel and Carolyn and kids, had a meal of 'street cooked chicken' and Danja champ. Came back over here (the house in which I’m staying) around 10:30pm when the adventure really began.

Found it really hard to settle. Wandered round the house sorting some of my things out but not really sure how to sort them out. Everything is thick with dust. My left heel aches having been bitten by something nasty in Galmi hospital - goodness knows what it might have been carrying. Finally manage to sort my clothes but decide to leave my shoes in the carrier bags, just in case. In case of what I don't know but it feels like the sensible and protective thing to do. Sprayed the bedroom with mosi killer, sprayed the bath and watched a few cockroach breathe their last, sprayed the kitchen cupboards and work top and instantly became a mass murderer of cockroach. Decided it was time to go to bed - but couldn't really face it.

I don't know how long I hovered before deciding that I really had to go to bed sometime. Nursing my short-wave radio as the BBC World Service ebbed and flowed across the 2,500 miles from Bush House - anything familiar is a blessed comfort at this point in time - I turned out the solar lighting, and entrusted myself to the light of my double 'A' Mag Lite and the noises of the night. Foolishly I had expected the desert to be quiet. It probably is. But this is Danja and the hospital compound and it is anything but quiet. I scanned my memory for the accounts of the night in the old Jungle Doctor books but decided that I'd soon get a sense of things first hand, never mind my memory.

The act of getting into bed was a kind of moment of faith. I was committing myself to sleep of some kind or other and that meant that anything could be going on around me and there would be nothing I could do.

The bedroom is like a cell. It's small and the bed is in the middle of the room. It's a kind of flimsy iron four poster, the posts being for the mosi nets in the wet season. There's a chair, an old rickety bedside table, an old trunk and some built in wardrobes and cupboards. There are three doors and two sets of windows in the room which is why the bed is in the middle. Here I am, lying in the cell, on a metal iron island in the middle of what feels like a very narrow fiord. It’s dark - very dark. It sounds like I've arrived just in time for the finals of the Danja cock crowing competition. Out across the compound the boys are giving it everything, (aren’t they supposed to do this kind of thing in the mornings?) no doubt the girls are strutting their stuff and 'egging' them on. The frogs or toads are joining in and the cat whom I've displaced tonight is going daft at the cat flap trying to get entrance to the bedroom, sorry the cell. No hope, not a chance moggy, shoo!

Once all falls quiet outside I become more conscious of the sounds inside. They are much more sinister. Each creak is new, each rattle is a challenge to my mental stability and why did Hannah and Jonathan feel it necessary to point out that the lizards, whose droppings are much in evidence around the house, live in my roof at night? Thanks, kids.

Every now and then I think of David Livingstone, chastise myself and rebuke my irrational unease. I think of the children fast asleep in the neighbouring houses and rebuke myself again. I try to return to the World Service but this metallic four poster is playing havoc with my receiver.

I suppose it isn't unreasonable that my sleep should mirror the activity of the compound. Silence reigns for a while and then the dogs start up, more silence, then the cocks start, more silence and then it sounds as if the moggy has come back with a pneumatic drill to break its way through the obstructed cat flap. I fear that the moggy has enlisted Grommit to come and sort out this nasty man. I can see the look of determination on Grommit, out to right the injustice inflicted on a fellow animal. I am afraid, very afraid and mutter those wise words from the East (Belfast) 'catch yourself on, man dear'.

The daybreak comes as a welcome reprieve and I begin to feel like a prisoner anticipating release. Something long and trying is about to end, my first night in the bush. A sense of security begins to return and a Wednesday's daylight never felt so good.

To next part.
To journal from Niger.