Tomi's Road Itinerary!
0700hr Wake up time!
0800hr Packing treatment packs, donation forms, all other paraphenelia of office into the rugged vehicles which at one time consisted of a toyota hiace bus with no seatbelts, no fuel guage and no speedometer, thankfully it had brakes that worked!
0830hr We are off to some rural locale with part of the journey being on extremely good roads and the other half on cow tracks. The road networks in most parts of the states I visited is pretty good, but roads to some local governments or villages are not actually roads but paths which just happened to be paths for animals and people!
0900hr Still on the road. The journey is either done in silence if there is a language barrier between driver and me or if the driver is not particularly friendly. If there is a driver who likes to talk and knows more than a few words of english, I would probably get a running commentary on all the places we pass. 'Ah in that town they eat dog meat, so if you ever eat there be careful'. 'In that town women outnumber men, so men from other towns come here to look for wives', 'The hills surrounding this town kept away marauders and enemies thats why this town has its own emirate though it is much smaller than other emirates'. On and on the stories would flow until we either get to our destination or I fall asleep:)
01000hr A few minutes or another hour to destination.
01015hr Arrival at destination, Introduction to health authorities inthe health centre who were more often than not community health extension workers than doctors and nurses. The only doctors seen in most of the rural outposts were doctors serving the country in the one year mandatory youth service corp! A round of the hospital to see the affected patients, donation of drugs and other medical items to the hospital and a compulsory signing of the visitor's register! I wonder if any of my descendants would travel the same paths I have and come across my name and signature in an ancient visitors book, it would cost a fortune on ebay certainly:)
If it was our first visit we were most times treated like visiting kings and queens from distant climes and we would be served drinks and in some cases suya. It was considered bad manners not to accept to eat these meals. I once rejected a plate of rice and meat that was offered me once and even though I was assisted to obtain the data I needed an icy frost was built up between my hosts and I that not even my million dollar smile could thaw!
If it was a second visit we would go round the hospital to see patients, drop off more drugs after seeing a record of utilisation, assist if there are any problems and then drive off to visit the next health centre along the way or out of the way. These trips to health facilities took the better part of the day and eventually at....................
1730hours we would either be arriving back at the hotel or be on our way back to whatever town we were spending the night at!
1900hours Before now we would have been compiling the list of cases seen in each health facility according to the political wards they are from and at this time we would be sending reports either via gsm or the ever unreliable www in remote arears where you pay 250naira per hour to spend one frustrating hour trying to open your box and another unsuccesful hour trying to download or upload attachments as the case may be!
To cut a very long story short 75days on the field with 65 of those days spent travelling an average of 300km or more daily is no small matter, if I was from another planet I probably would take a month long vacation to an island where I would drink champagne(not zobo o!) all day long and be waited on hand and foot and generally be spoilt silly. But as it is if man no work man go die of hunger, so after eight days holidaying(if you can do any such thing in naija) I am back to work and there are plans in the offing to send me back on the road:)) Wetin man pickin for do!
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