An extremely serious situation in the Serengeti

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Tropical Medicine is amazing. Two weeks into my diploma I find myself on Safari in the Serengeti with 6 men! Our learning objectives: to have an adventure (oh and complete a project on rural healthcare, but that will come later). A large emphasis of this course is on the ‘hidden curriculum’ of sharing life, academic interests, medical experiences and beer with our African colleagues. There are 20 doctors from East Africa on the course and 39 ‘Westerners’, and so far we have been blown away. While the ‘wazungos’ tend to gabble away analyzing this and that, fumbling over new terms and concepts, boasting about their ‘near miss’ clinical cases and NHS disasters, the East Africans tend to sit back, nod wisely and speak softly, silencing us with nuggets of profound wisdom. Some of the most interesting discussions have been over clinical case reports that we have all been asked to ‘bring and share’. A Ugandan microbiologist was asked what he would do with a case of internal bleeding that the NHS with its defensive and under-experienced docs, and over-advanced scanners had spectacularly missed. ‘Well actually I had a very similar case,’ he says nodding wisely and we lean in to hear what happened ‘I was the only doctor in the town and we had no scanners… so I opened him up’. Wide-mouthed we look at each other to check he must be joking because a microbiologist providing life-saving surgery would never be heard of in any of our ‘resource-rich’ countries.

I was a little concerned about how well the cultural exchange would go on safari, when our Tanzanian colleague started reeling off ways we should avoid meeting any dangerous predators whilst in the park. He was well kitted out for the experience with black shined shoes and brief-case and liked to tell us at regular intervals of the various ways that we might not survive the trip and what are chances of escaping alive were likely to be. I wondered how he’d react when he realized we were actually going with the sole purpose of seeing dangerous animals and so asked him what he thought of the situation as we were sitting watching some lions lolling about a few metres from our open-topped car. ‘Well’ he said, shaking his head, and with a glint of fun in his eyes ‘this is extremely serious, we are unlikely to make it out alive’.