"The Jungle Doctor" is Jari Vainio's memoir of his time as the only physician at the mission hospital in Katondwe in deep rural Zambia in the late 198"The Jungle Doctor" is Jari Vainio's memoir of his time as the only physician at the mission hospital in Katondwe in deep rural Zambia in the late 1980s. It reads like a story of first love: the exhilaration and passion of the first immersion in the beloved, in this case the village and the hospital... the wonderment and the efforts to understand and adapt. Dr Vainio is completely open to the villagers and his neighbours, has zero foreigner's standoffishness. His body, soul, work and mind are firmly there. Over the course of his work and the book he learns more, about the dark sides (conservative ideas that propagate untreatable HIV, thefts by friends, snakes) as well as the exciting and interesting (history, nature, generosity), and like a married man, he never questions his commitment. About halfway through the book he starts writing about how the physical strains, mentioned at first in passing as inconveniences, are starting to break him down. Getting pulled out of bed nightly for medical emergencies. Recurring malaria cycles with anemia and neurological side effects. Armed violence spilling over from the civil war in nearby Mozambique. Paranoia about contracting HIV and AIDS. Corruption and political mismanagement. Bureaucratic ineptness and callousness by his employers, the Finnish government and an NGO. He self-diagnoses PTSD but in the early 90s this wasn't something taken seriously and he gets no support. He doesn't state it straight out but from what I know of living under long-term stress, even something as "simple" as not being able to sleep through the night for months on end... I'm imagining him going a bit crazy, paranoid, snappy, oversensitive. Imagine parents of small children who wake them up three times a night, in the grip of a brutal malaria headache, jittery about the gunshots in the distance, having to get up after not sleeping and heading to the hospital to diagnose and treat dozens of difficult medical cases a day. Thus Jari Vainio, except instead of babies crying for milk at night it's complex bone fractures and crocodile bites that disturb his sleep. Jesus! Meanwhile Jari doesn't hold back on committing to Katondwe: he gets a plot under traditional land rights and starts building a farm, he has animals, he has friends, this is his place. He learns to understand the culture and describes night-time healing ceremonies, "days of the dead", promising young students he finds work for, the personalities of his dogs and adopted monkeys, sleeping on the verandah above the river, the fleshy red flowers of the flame trees. There's also plenty of local gossip and delightfully gruesome hospital descriptions. As his volunteer contract draws towards its inexorable end, after Dr Vainio has extended it as much as he can, the reader feels the impossible tear: he can't stay, but how can he leave this place that's so much his, and he its? At that point I was slightly surprised because Jari hadn't dwelled nearly as much on why he loves Katondwe as on what pisses him off about Katondwe. In this the book feels very real, unaffected. I've concluded that it's because it wasn't written worrying about readers or market segments or three-act structure (although the three-act structure is there). There's no "on the one hand scorpions, on the other hand sunsets." He doesn't go out of his way to describe the beauty and joy to try to "make up for" the difficulties, probably just like all our heads and diaries focus more on the petty grievances than on the glory. I sense that it's because this is his life, one whole with good, bad and indifferent elements all mixed up in one. The end isn't a divorce but a bereavement. ...more
This book has it all: humour, insight, authority stemming from hard-earned experience, solid useful advice, and excellent anecdotes from the National This book has it all: humour, insight, authority stemming from hard-earned experience, solid useful advice, and excellent anecdotes from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and their spin-off co-operatives. It is an excellent book for those of us interested in sustainable economic development. It's a reflection on 30 years of work towards economic autonomy for South Africans by the author, who worked on the NUM's economic development initiatives from the mid-80s onwards. Philip describes the different iterations of their attempts to make sure that mineworkers had an income after being laid off from the mines. At first, during hard apartheid, these mass layoffs were often perpetrated by the white (and international) mine owners in retaliation against the miners' attempts to unionise and organise. The union took responsibility for their members' livelihoods and tried setting them up in workers' co-operatives. Even though the situation was dire and the entire system agains them, Philip recalls the sometimes comic events with good cheer and humour that had me laughing. The union's strategies had to change several times and Philip charts these different approaches too, describing why they did or didn't work: different types of co-operatives, small enterprise development, enterprise development centres, registering as an NGO, market development (a neoliberal approach that basically pitted the organisation against the people it was supposed to support) and crafts and fruit processing for the tourist sector. Most of the income-generation ideas that float around NGOs are evaluated here, from experience, not theory, coming from a place where the support organisation was working with the mineworkers' own resurces (not outside funding) and hence had no margin for error. Philip also brings up history and economic structures, naturally, since they influence poor people's attempts to earn a living in fundamental ways - for example, if you are a small bakery making make biscuits, in you are competing against a state-subsidised giant corporation with access to credit, cheap inputs, advertising and a far-reaching distribution apparatus. This is also something that many NGOs ignore when suggesting income-generating activities for "beneficiaries". I can't recommend this book highly enough for development studies students, aid agencies, NGO employees, people running co-ops or other enterprises in the solidarity economy, and anyone interested in South Africa. ...more
Similar to other reviewers, I read this novel years ago and it's stayed with me. I find myself remembering scenes from it to "illustrate" news and repSimilar to other reviewers, I read this novel years ago and it's stayed with me. I find myself remembering scenes from it to "illustrate" news and reports of displaced people. Zameenzad does a fantastic job of describing horrors and atrocities from the matter-of-fact point of view of a young boy. The narrator never questions what's happening, doesn't lament his fate or compare his life to the way it should be in a just and peaceful society... that's up to us the readers. I vividly remember the scenes where the soldiers have a threesome in the forest, where the kid gets a chance to "wash with joy" in a luxurious bathroom, where the only way he can consecrate his friend's death is by drawing a cross on his chest in his blood, and the twist on the novel's title where (spoiler alert) 12-year-old Hena takes a sugar-daddy in order to save the whole gang of friends. ...more
Often, while reading "Ghana Must Go", I got a sense of déja-vu, of having read this before... and that was distracting. The black family in the old clOften, while reading "Ghana Must Go", I got a sense of déja-vu, of having read this before... and that was distracting. The black family in the old classy house in Boston's university nucleus - On Beauty. The weird non-speaking twin dynamics, orginating from the surgeon father - Cutting for Stone, with one twin being an otherworldly, inexplicable creature. Come to think of it, the "gifted third world surgeon trains in the US" also appears in Cutting for Stone. But maybe that's just my problem with seeing parallels between books. Overall this novel is excellent and interesting. Having never been to West Africa, I especially liked the descriptions of Nigeria from a Ghanaian's point of view. I understand that Ghana and Nigeria have a similar neighbourly dynamic to e.g. Tanzania and Kenya, and Zambia and Zimbabwe, with one of the pair seeing itself as the laid-back and nice one and the other one as cut-throat and plain rude - whereas the other neighbour sees itself as dynamic and go-getting and the other as lazy and feckless. I still remember the line "she thought the Nigerians enjoyed being angry"... I didn't think the pivotal scene (where the dad reacts to his humiliation, I'm trying to avoid spoilers here) is realistic. I even asked friends whether they thought a man would actually react like that. I found it hard to imagine, but they said yeah, it could happen... so well... read it and see what you think! ...more
Verghese was an unknown author for me, so this was a very pleasant surprise. The strength of Cutting for Stone is in how vividly it evokes the places Verghese was an unknown author for me, so this was a very pleasant surprise. The strength of Cutting for Stone is in how vividly it evokes the places and situations it describes... the Ethiopian hospital, the life of a junior doctor in ghetto USA, even the Eritrean bush. I've lived in Addis Abeba so maybe that helped, but I can still see the hospital and street and living quarters before my mind's eye, more than a year after finishing the book. I have to confess that I also enjoyed the gruesome (sometimes grotesque) ailments that the Ethiopians in the 70s turned up with. So recently! (And I bet the health situation in the countryside isn't all that different even now.) Most of the book's characters are also exciting and well-rounded. Having said that, the novel was a bit weak on the love stories - I didn't find two of the three very plausible. But on the whole it's brilliant: urgent, detailed, colourful, surprising and well-structured. ...more
Nice description of Central Africans in Paris but the plot doesn't really go anywhere. Nice description of Central Africans in Paris but the plot doesn't really go anywhere. ...more
This is mostly fun but a bit tedious nonetheless... It has a meta-structure of the novelist's own (?fictional?)diary notes interspersed with novel chaThis is mostly fun but a bit tedious nonetheless... It has a meta-structure of the novelist's own (?fictional?)diary notes interspersed with novel chapters, where you see the writer recycle characters and situations from his 'notes'. He also gives away the twist of the story in the second chapter. On the plus side, the many vignettes are enjoyable and the descriptions are often innovative and poetic. It's a series of wonderful, magical-realist description of the edges of southern Africa but it doesn't quite hang together. My main annoyance with this novel was that none of the characters have a voice of their own. It's supposed to have multiple narrators but they all sound the same. "The Book of Chameleons" was a more gratifying read....more
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