It had to happen. I've had a normal week. Nothing abnormal (apart from the African Union meeting causing the traffic to grind to a halt) has happened.

Last Saturday was "Field Day" at Bingham and I had to be available for first aid duty. I told them that doctors are rubbish at first aid but they didn't believe me. Anyway, I confidently marched out into the melee of kids and parents thronging around our front door (we live opposite the school field) thinking that serious injuries were highly unlikely when I was beckoned over to the high jump area where a 13 year old had clearly broken her wrist. The fortuitous presence of a consultant anaesthetist led to a rapid transit to the care of a British orthopaedic specialist. I'd had previous experience of this hospital as a young lad at the school had broken his wrist a few days before and is in plaster. The rest of field day went off with little more than the odd graze and sprain. Thing happen in threes don't they? Keep reading!

Four mornings a week I travel across the city to the SIM HQ building where my clinic is based, and on Tuesdays I do a clinic here at Bingham in a room in the office building. It gets quite challenging when you are trying to read unreported x-rays of a lad's wrist and decide what to do with him whilst unannounced a teenager comes into your room with a bad migraine and vomits all over the couch. And that's in addition to the several people in the corridor vying for your attention. Did I mention I have no nursing support? You get the picture.

The trip across town in Haile's taxi is rarely without incident. I've gone on about the roads, but not about the ravages of polio. On a daily basis I am seeing numerous severely disabled people with shrivelled limbs struggling around along the edge of and not infrequently in the middle of busy roads. They bottom-shuffle on pieces of old tyre; they have tatty flip-flops on their hands as well as their feet; they hobble along using old sticks and bits of tree branch for support, and sometimes are in old and damaged wheelchairs. One young woman was walking like a baboon – on hands and feet with her legs straight, the highest point of her body being her pelvis. Both she and the dozens of people milling around her were behaving as if this was completely normal.

(I’ve just stopped to tuck my trousers into my socks. We have fleas on the floor in here and I don’t want any more bites. Just thought you’d like to know that.)

Haile the taxi driver can’t always pick me up so sometimes he sends Yohannes, He’s a jolly fellow with a little English and a big sign on the dashboard of his taxi that says: “Please fasten your seat belt”. There isn’t  a seat belt. (Yohannes has one though – that’s legal). The seat moves rather disconcertingly and Yohannes’s taxi struggles more on the hills than Haile’s.

The clinic functions like any good walk-in GP clinic in the 70s would. I am seeing mostly Ethiopian staff and their families and I have an interpreter when required but a lot of Ethiopians speak very good English. On Friday I saw a 10 year old schoolchild who had been ill for a week - he was extremely polite and complained very little. His dad said they hadn’t come to see me earlier because he wanted to finish his school exam week, so he’d put up with his raging tonsillitis until his exams were over. In the course of the consultation I noticed he had an accessory digit hanging by a small stalk off his right little finger so I asked about this – again, he just puts up with it and has done so since birth. (It was about the size of the end of a normal little finger). I shall remove it for him next week. I reflected briefly about how differently both the tonsillitis and the finger would have been handle in the UK - neither would have been tolerated like this.

One morning as I was about to head off to the important “tea time” at 10:30am (it’s a cultural thing) a dad came in saying “is the Doc in?” I was – only just. I stayed and saw his daughter who had fallen the day before and guess what had broken her wrist. Off she went to the orthopaedic specialist. Three in ten days.

I’ve discovered a cultural practice this week that I knew nothing about, which I think the government has tried to clamp down on in recent years. I have looked down a lot of adult throats and I’ve noticed several missing uvulas (the dangly bit at the back). Ethiopians and Eritreans are concerned that if a baby gets a bad throat the uvula will cause them to choke to death. So in the first few weeks or years of life a traditional healer using a pair of scissors or a piece of sharp wire will cut the uvula off. My clinic nurse had this done when she was about four and remembers it well, as you can probably imagine.

Two afternoons a week Haile takes me to Language School and on the way attempts to teach me some of the stuff I should have learned by now. It’s a humbling experience to be learning a language at the level of a three year old.

Chris and I have each been needing a haircut for a couple of weeks, and the balance of opinion suggests getting it done in the hairdressers at the Hilton Hotel is the way to go. Word went around we were going there on Saturday so in the end seven of us went; five needing the hairdresser. The twice yearly African Union meeting needs the Hilton to put up some of the dignitaries, so the usual tight security is even tighter to the point that we were not allowed to drive in through the front gate. We found our way round the side of the hotel to the staff entrance where there were the usual smart hotel security employees ready to check our vehicle for anything suspicious. Exactly how suspicious could three Brits, two Australians (one sporting an impressive grey beard) and two small Ethiopian boys look? Anyway, I wound down the window so Security Man could look in. Sporting a wide grin he asked: “Everything OK? No guns, no bombs, no hand grenades?” “No” we innocently replied, and in we were waved. We walked up to the entrance where there’s an armed policeman with an ostentatiously held rifle plus an airport style security gate (although they’ve never made us take our shoes and belts off or threatened a body cavity search) just as the Ugandan dignitary was driven off in his/her limousine with a police escort. Thanks to the African Union folks the hotel hairdressers were not busy and within the hour all five of us were neatly shorn.

On Saturday evening there was a knock on the door. One of the staff wanted to ask me a question regarding a small worm they had found after going to the toilet which was presented to me on a tissue. Yes, I agreed - definitely a worm!

On Sunday we enjoyed a lovely church service at IEC, apart from the fact that the entire auditorium stank of sewage. “I think there has been a toilet explosion” remarked Daniel in his usual dry, matter-of-fact manner. Daniel’s from Germany.

Welcome to normality.