Richard Wesley

Wow, bit of an epic trip to the hospital with a bunch of orphans today. It appeared quite a nice catholic setup with clean-ish buildings and a fairly well run out patient department at least. The doctor was much as could be expected though, fairly grumpy, bossy and unfriendly, but at least apparently very busy. The real issue was eight year old Stephan's reaction to having some blood taken for a CD4 test (counting white cells). I expected the little guy to be a pro at it, even if nervous. He took my hand on the way to the lab and I chatted away about this and that. Once inside though things turned bad with wailing and crying and squirming. But that's not so bad. I got Immaculate who was also up for some blood to go first and chatted about it some more with Stephen, and started to think I had cracked it. Then it was back into the hot seat and melt down again. However this time the lab technician said and did things I can't repeat here, I'm still in shock I think. In the

The full update, for those interested, is that I am now project supervisor for an orphan sponsorship project based in a little town of Belo, in the middle of the north west region of Cameroon. The project is under an local outfit called Berudep, but is run sort of independently, with the main aim of the game being 100% of sponsors funds reaching their target orphan. A little website I set up gives you the general outline and also a look at the orphans involved and their wonderful names.... Immaculate, Precious, Elvis, Godwill.... check it out for yourself: sponsor-an-orphan.blogspot.com So far my job has involved sorting out the numbers, that is the rather involved and complicated accounting system here, but also getting out and seeing how things are in the homes of some of these kids. There is a wide variety, from Stephen (see the previous post on jiggers), to Joy the little baby, to Immaculate who is twenty and learning to sew. The traditional set up here is very rural, basically sub