Arrival at Chitokoloki

On Monday evening, we finally arrived at our destination: Chitokoloki Mission Station, with its 180-bed hospital.  We had a largely successful visit to Immigration HQ in the morning, beginning at the crack of dawn as we tried to beat the crowds.  We joined the front of the queue at 05:50 and as predicted the line of people was long and sprawling when the working day began at 08:00. Following that, we were able to travel onwards so returned to our accommodation to pack up all our luggage and food shopping.

 

Following a rut-strewn route through the Lusaka suburbs, we arrived at Flying Mission Zambia, where the mission’s plane was stationed.  We were impressed to find a beautifully kitted-out hangar, and set about weighing our luggage – with some difficult decisions to follow about what got left behind for the time being.  We then loaded up our Cessna 206 and got strapped in for the 2.5 hours of flying west over hundreds of miles of beautiful swamp land and forest.  North-Western is the least densely populated of all Zambian’s 10 provinces, with a total population of 727,044 people spread out across 125,826 km² (by comparison, Scotland has a total land area of 80,240km²).

 

Stuart had chatted to our pilot Chris over the preceding days about his youthful enthusiasm for Microsoft Flight Simulator and on the flight across, he got a fantastic couple of hours of flying lessons, trying to get a feel for visual flight rules.  It provided Chris with a degree of autopilot!  It was pretty thrilling for Stuart to take control for most of the cruise, descent and final approach to the landing strip. Jess closed her eyes at the end!  But all was well, with even the trays of eggs happily surviving the landing.

 

We were met at the airstrip by a large delegation of mission station personnel, who all turned out to greet the new arrivals.  We felt very blessed by the warm introduction, but we immediately had to switch to work mode as our medical superintendent David McAdam took us to our new house via the hospital to review a 6 month old baby boy who was really sick with malaria but also had a distended abdomen with dilated bowel loops on his abdominal X-ray: it didn’t seem to entirely fit with malaria, but we couldn’t find the ‘target sign’ on ultrasound that is typical of intussusception, our main differential diagnosis.  Intussusception is a condition mainly seen in children where the bowel ‘telescopes’ or inverts inside itself, causing a bowel obstruction and requiring urgent surgical treatment.  The child seemed really sick with (proven) malaria so we decided to treat that and review the following morning.  More to follow.