Mount Blanc: spring flowers, cheeses and friends

A long weekend in Haute Savoie was energising with three contrasting days of walking culminating in one of the best walks I have ever done. 

I was with Les and Vera, staying in their flat in St Gervais, Haut Savooie, France. Friday was a cool cloudy day. We met up with local friends, Hubert who owns a book shop and art gallery in Sallanches, his brother in law who is a wiry long distance walker just returned from doing the Trans Europe walk to Santiago de Compostella.  and Angelika, a retired management consultant. We walked up though the forest to a refuge where we had a coffee break. We climbed up further  and could see the icy fingers of the glacier de Gowesance before having a long descent into a huge glaciated valley with a summer village on the valley floor. We then descended through the trees to the starting point. That evening we had supper with Hubert and his extended family. He lives in a chalet like home and I enjoyed the evening sun on Mt Blanc from his verandah.  The conversation was mainly in French but Angelika translated difficult bits for me.

On Saturday there was heavy, heavy rain and even the market stall- holders in Sallanches were dispirited.  I shopped for cheese, looking for my favourite local sheep cheese, which has a thick wrinkled white rind enclosing a strong cheese and a other local Beaufort type cheeses made with herbs.  We lunched in a café and watched the opening stages of the Tour de France in Corsica where the sun was shining and the landscape was hot and dry – it felt climatically and geologically a long way from the Alps.  The rain cleared a little by the end of the afternoon and we went on another walk through forest by ski runs up to Col De Jeuillet Mist hung over the treetops so it felt an enclosed world. On our return we looked round an ancient hut and farm buildings from the forest dwellers long ago.

On Sunday we walked a circular walk. We started with a steep ascent up to a bowl carved out by glacier and water with steep sides and a refuge on the valley floor and clearly a popular weekend destination with campers.  It was north facing so it was cool and all in shades of grey. We then climbed up the side of the bowl so that we would come out on the south face. This was a steep climb and we went into the snow line. Then we came out onto a beautiful grassy south facing platform with a breathtaking view of the green valley with forest, Alpine habitation and Mount Blanc with few clouds drifting around it.  It was the most perfect place for a Sunday picnic of bread, cheese and French radishes. Angelika prepared these elegantly by scraping the red off the radish and for pudding we nibbled fresh cherries.  We then had a beautiful descent, first a long traverse across a scree slope, Here the rock was bare and one could see the ancient sediments piled up. We then walked across fields of summer flowers with alpine orchids, blue grasses, different gentians and yellow dandelions. We ended with a long walk through a forest with a cool darkness and streams. Skye, the dog even after 6 hours walking wanted sticks to be thrown for her.  I enjoyed the contrasts on the walk, the snow and rock on the shady north face and then the abundance of the summer flowers in the sunny sections.

Haut Savoie feels traditional and mountainous and I think about farmers living lives of transhumance moving up to their summer huts; I wonder how much that happens now? The buildings provide stroking contrasts. Many locals like Hubert and Angelika live in traditional chalets and these are still being built.  But the towns are dominated by modern blocks of flats built for the winter tourist influx of skiers.  The block where Les and Vera have their flat is a huge 1920 Art deco tyro building with an amazingly intricate glass porch. But it seemed sad that no modern chalets being built, iI would like to see modern chalets which could create interesting contrasts.

Geneva looked lovely in warm summer evening light and I reminisced about swimming in the lake.  My flight was delayed and I reached home well after midnight, it was a struggle to get up for work the next day.

Diana Lockwood

July 2013

Toronto- “New York on Valium”?

I visited Toronto after a gap of 21 years and enjoyed the new buildings but also enjoyed the gentle welcome of Canadians.

I was last in Toronto 21 years ago when I did an attachment at the General Hospital at the height of the HIV epidemic pre ART treatment. This time I went for an international conference on neuropathic pain, a complication that we now recognise that leprosy patients often develop after their antibiotic treatment. So I was there with friends from London but also my friends Omer and Vivek from Sudan and India respectively. This was their first visit to Toronto and it was interesting seeing Toronto through their eyes.

As well as attending the conference sessions I skipped out to wander around and look at the new architecture. There is a fine new opera house, a beautiful light glass and wood structure with world class acoustics, next time I'll get a ticket for an opera. There was also a new semi-sunken circular Glenn Gould concert hall. I also visited the textile museum, a little known Toronto gem and recommended by a local. They had a fascinating exhibition called “Shiny” about ways in which cloth could be shiny ranging from silk threads in kimonos to glittering India scarves and mirror work. This was accompanied by a piece made of cast offs such as ring pulls which itself parodied the advertisements of major food chains, Macdonalds and Herseys the sweet makers.

In the evening I took Omer and Vivek round the downtown and we experienced the visual power of the huge black Mies van der Rohe towers built in the 1970’s and now contrasted against a huge white tower from the Bank of Montreal opposite. Underneath the black towers was an exquisite collection of Inuit art and we admired whale bone vertebra carvings, igloo art and abstract sculptures. We then walked along the down town, going into the opulent 1920’s Mellon building which had gilt lifts. The city hall complex has an amazing contrast of old and new buildings;the old City Hall is high Victoria art and reminded Vivek of Victoria Terminus station in Mumbai with abundant carvings and flourishes. Nearby is the new city hall which looks like a space age edifice with two semi-circular columns rising up around a circular glass atrium. We ended up in a jazz bar listening first to a young trio in their mid twenties playing the free early evening session. Later the definitive band came on, an octet of grizzled playing blues with a sax, trumpeter, piano, bass guitar and two singers. They were all in their 60’s or 70’s and i imagined they had been playing soulful blues together for decades. Omer and Vivek were entranced by the novelty of the experience and had never heard live music like this. Maybe the young trio will be playing together in 40 years time.

The Toronto streets were empty as we walked to the conference on Saturday morning which amazed Vivek who lives in a 24 hr city Mumbai. I was impressed by the cleanliness of the streets. At lunchtime Omer and I went to a subterranean food hall where there were 20 different outlets selling take way food and one could choose almost any kid of food, one day we had Mexican tacos, another Lebanese falafels. We sat on a scrap of grass between the high-rises to eat our enormous portions.
Being up the CNN tower was more fun than I had anticipated. We gazed out over the vastness of lake Ontario but also traced our steps around the city and identified the buildings we had looked at on ground level.

Toronto feels very multicultural, our hotel was in Chinatown and we ate Chinese food adapted for Canadian palates. I was taken out to the airport by a Pakistani taxi driver who was a Muslim from a persecuted sect in Pakistan and felt he owed his life to Canada, although it is easier to work as an taxi driver than an accountant.

On my bus ride in from the airport I had chatted to David Briggs world famous organist who previously played at Hereford and we reminisced enthusing over the Welsh border country. He is now at Toronto cathedral and busy trying to raise money for a new organ there. He had enthused over the cultural life of the city but also described the city as “New York on Valium”. I now see the comparison, Toronto is a quieter gentler version of America.

On reflection i think that being in Canada is nice entry to N America. It is gentler, more welcoming to visitors and lacking the aggression of New York or Chicago. It also has architecture and culture but on a lower scale.

Why read Annie Matthews?

Once you start you are hooked by this novel about a woman born in 1858 whose life encompassed  Victorian life as a governess in Holland and then an Edwardian life as a hotelier in Scarborough.   The author, David Lockwood, was deeply impressed by his grandmother’s life story which she told him when they were together in Winchester during the second world war. He grew up in the hotel in Scarborough and had observed her at her hotelier work. He also had a deep knowledge and understanding of the Victorian and Edwardian eras and so he gives her life a novel like context.  He depicts places and dresses and customs with a poets eye.  It is a compelling book to read, once started one wants to know what happens to Annie and her family.  It took David ten years to write the book, in his retirement and initially it did not find a publisher. My mother Willy Lockwood then published it in 2011.

You can buy Annie Matthews from Dr W Lockwood-Mom, 61A Camden Rd, Brecon, LD37RT

For more information about Annie Matthews  visit www.dnjtravelsblogspot.com

Annie Matthews

Annie Matthews, My remarkable grandmother.

 David Lockwood

This David Lockwood’s magnum opus.  It tells the life of his grandmother built up from the stories that she told him when they lived together in Winchester during the second world war. When the hotel business went bankrupt the family moved to Winchester to join Annie’s daughter Kit and her husband John. During the war they lived in a rented house whilst his uncle John Barlow was serving in India. David enjoyed his grandmother’s company and stored away her stories for future retelling.

The story starts in London with Annie’s mother, Marianne, going to Yorkshire to marry a school master Benton. They had a fresh, young love that Is depicted rather romantically. Annie’s mother is soon pregnant and then has three children, Annie, William and Edith.  Annie is the oldest and is shaped by the hardship that engulfs the family when her father dies of TB. She is 9. Her mother then takes jobs to provide for her family, first she works as a nurse in Stanley Royds asylum, then she takes a position as assistant matron in Wakefield prison. This job comes with a house so the children grow up next to the prison but also under the benevolent eye of the prison governor. Annie is bright and able and does well at school soon progressing to become a pupil teacher. However sacrifices are made for her brother William. He always wanted to be a sailor and rebels at school even the boarding school for Yorkshire boys that his mother found for him in London.  When he was 16 Marianne paid for him to have a commission in a ship and go to sea.  His mother was enormously proud of him and his sea chest, his sailor uniform is captured beautifully in a photo but he then never contacted her again.  Later there was news that he had deserted his ship in Australia, which would have caused Marianne shame and  embarrassment.

Annie develops her own career as a teacher. She did not have formal training but was offered a position as an English teacher in a girls school in Leiden.  She is keen to travel and moving to work in Holland seems to have been an accepted way of broadening one’s horizon   She seems to have thrived in Holland and David conjures up the Leiden canals vividly. He also captures the way in which she grew and learnt to teach whilst at the school. He also captures the constrictions that can exist in small schools. She acquired an admirer, a very eligible bachelor nobleman. He sees her at a dance and then pursues her with flowers and letters, but these are intercepted and there is an angry scene when the school heads accuse her of undignified behaviour. She in turn was furious that her letters were opened. She also builds u a deep friendship with a Dutch pastor and his family. He seems to have taken a deep like to Annie and they went on long walks and had deep philosophical discussions. She was so close to this family that when Francois Haaverschmidt  became very depressed Annie is called to talk to him and encourage him, later on when she was escaping from an unwanted courtship in Germany she fled to the sanctuary of their home.  After a few years Annie had learnt all she could from the school and had outgrown the narrow work environment so moved on to Germany to work in a very wealthy family there. With the family she went to the mountains and also travelled on the Rhine.  She again acquires an admirer, this time a senior military man, brother of her employer. He makes advances and she then flees back ti the safety of the Haaverschmidts. in Holland.  From here she goes to Den Haag where she works for the von Prens, another wealthy family with a young daughter Kitty.  Here Annie matures into a beautiful woman , as part of the family she enjoys the lifestyle of a wealthy continental with dinners and balls in Paris, Brussels and Den Haag. Here the master of the house falls in love with her and this time she reciprocates emotionally. This unattainable love produces huge tensions for them both. Von Pyrn’s love is visible when Annie developed diphtheria and almost dies and is saved by the application of a chinese herb to her throat which enables her to breathe.  However she realises that she cannot stay in Den Haag and so she joins her sister Edith in Scarborough, Yorkshire. At this point Annie is still not married and we are 450 pages into the narrative.

In Scarborough  she takes up a position as a companion to the alcoholic Mrs Matthews and meet her son Frank who is just setting up a hotel business. Annie sees a solid man in Frank and marries him. It does not have the passion of her love in Holland but it does have the steadiness of Yorkshire. She thrived developing the hotel. supervising staff. Having just the right words for guests., They also had Hds three children, Kit, Nancy and Alan. But whilst at the hotel she was encouraged by Frank to just spend as she wanted. She seems to have initially been responsible but then enjoyed spending large amounts on furnishings and clothes. She was always immaculately dressed and seems to have dwelt on the details of every dress in her descriptions to David. They became prominent members of Scarborough society, Frank becomes mayor   Frank then developed an oral cancer and after several local removals needed more extensive surgery and went to London and  died shortly after a major operation in 1926. There had been no succession planning for the hotel business  so Alan, the son,  was  called back from his engineering career to run the hotel. He had no aptitude or enthusiasm for this unwanted burden.  But even worse he failed to control the finances. Annie had always been permitted by Frank to buy what she wanted and to decorate the hotel in the latest fashion. The combination of the Depression, poor management and high expenditure e lead to the hotel failing. In 1938 the business went bankrupt and the family moved down to Winchester. Here they lived with Annie’s daughter Kit who was married to an Indian Army officer John Barlow. The families moved in together, this created disastrous tensions between john and Alan which were partly relieved when John rejoined the Army at the outbreak of war. The family stayed in Winchester during the war, Nancy worked in Winchester College as an assistant matron and David and Annie spent much time together.  In 1940 soldiers from the Dunkirk evacuation flooded into the city, Annie was as practical as ever and bought and distributed note paper to the troops so that they could write home. It was during this time that she talked to him about her life, She must have done so with a vividness that captured his imagination. She then developed heart failure and died in Feb 1948.

The book is two novels and a memoir.  David must have been entranced by his grandmother’s tale of her life which she related to him after the closure of the hotel and the move to Winchester when they became very close and supported each other during the war. The Victorian tale tells how she had to make her own way in life because of her father’s early death and she became a governess; she worked hard and rose up her professional ladder from a small ladies school in Leiden to being the governess for a very rich family in Den Haag. She was clearly very adept at learning languages, she was fluent in Dutch and German. She was also clearly very personable and in each place families took her to their heart, the Haaverschimdts in Holland and then the Van Prens in Den Haag. At the latter she enjoyed the late 19 century life of balls and dinners in The European capitals. But she was also vulnerable and in each family seems to have been too close to the man of the family and had was passionately in love with van Pren and it seems that it was reciprocated. But as a Victorian woman she would also have been very aware that even though she was a highly regarded governess she was still a servant.  This would have been one of the forces pulling her back to Yorkshire.  The Edwardian tale is of a woman who made a decided choice in her marriage and then became a successful hotelier. She was successful because of her ability to manage a large organisation which she did with charm. She had an excellent design sense and the hotel must have been a beautiful place to visit, also she made the guests feel welcomed. She and Frank were obviously stalwart members of Scarborough society. But she was excluded from the financial side of the business and also there was no succession planning , when Frank died the family were surprised although his throat cancer had been becoming more difficult to treat.  

David writes fine evocative descriptions of the places where Annie lived and he imagines conversations which must be built on what his grandmother told him. The book is strongest in the Victorian and Edwardian sections when he is describing her life as a governess and then as a hotelier. He also always has affine sense o f the clothes that she would have worn and evne how she would have moved. The bankruptcy of the hotel is glossed over and poorly described.  The book which is rich in detail in the first two thirds is much weaker in the last section and it does feel  unfinished.

Review by Diana Lockwood

April 2012

Delhi May 2013, life, death and the ending of links to a past age.

On this visit to India (May 2103) I experienced life and death through theatre, a service in a monastery and the passing of an old friend.

The celebrations of life started with the colourful exuberance of the Chamanlal theatre awards ceremony which I attended with Kris and Joy Michael. Joy has been a stalwart of the theatre in Delhi for decades, nurturing and promoting it. She instigated these awards for lighting and costumes so that people other than the actors would be acknowledged and was the recipient herself a few years ago. The presentation was in the modern Siri Fort theatre which has a wooden clean lined interior. People were delighted to see Joy, bowing deeply to her and ushering her to a front row seat, to her irritation. After the awards there was a Bollywood extravaganza of music, dance and film with dancers in yellow and orange costumes and loud music. The theme was “searching for meaning in life” with songs about love and loss, including Sufi songs and film clips of pilgrims at Mecca. Laser beams shone out illuminating solid blocks of blue around the audience. Indian contemporary and ancient culture was celebrated with modern tools. It was glitzy and fun.

Two nights later I joined them again to celebrate Ascension Communion at a closed monastery on in old Delhi. It had been a hot day and it was pleasant to stand on the grass in the monastery gardens and observe the monks leading the service. About 100 people there, Delhi’s Anglican congregation and the service was lead by a corpulent priest.  The monastery is a simple two storey structure with a central library filled with religious and historical books. The monk’s cells are simple rooms as is the chapel which had no decorations. The garden was glorious filled with summer flowers and surrounded by large trees. Two monks had died recently, father Amos renown for his simplicity and absence of possessions, one of his Muslim friends said ”he who filled us died empty” and thousands of people attended his funeral. The other was Ian Weathrall who had grown up in India and served with the Indian Army (1942-7). He then became a monk in a closed order in Delhi (1953). He had been an active priest doing social work with the poor and people with leprosy as well as serving on the board of St Stephens hospital and college, two premier institutions in Delhi. Mark Tully wrote in his obituary that he enjoyed a good party. After the service we ate rice standing on the lawns.  I really I was connecting with a older thread of Delhi life, there were still strong links between the church and London, the monks had the Church Times and The Spectator for reading so I wondered what their impression of life in the UK is. But the order has few new monks, there are now only seven and I wonder how long this institution can last.

I often stay with Jasjit and Mataji Mansingh, mother and daughter when I am in Delhi. Mataji was 107 and on this visit she was close to death. She had an infection and had stopped eating and drinking. Her daughter Jasjit who has looked after her for the last decade wanted to keep her at home but her son scooped his mother up and took her in hospital saying that he wanted everything done for her. When I visited she was barely conscious with drips attached and a monitor beeping her heart rate. It seemed sad to depart this life in hospital, especially for someone so religious. She had sat quietly in the garden so often. I said goodbye to her as I was departing and she died two weeks later in hospital. Over the last year Jasjit has been researching Mataji’s life and uncovered a rich history. Se was born in Lahore and after college in Delhi had gone to London on a scholarship for girls that rotated between the different religious groups and in 1926 was allocated to the Sikhs. She had studied psychology at University College London and been awarded a Ph D in 1932. It is difficult to imagine what it must have been like being a female Indian student in London In the 1920’s, was it exciting but daunting, was she lonely? Was she linked to the campaign for Indian independence movement was in full spate then and did she active for women’s emancipation. Her PhD was on “Attention span during short periods of work” even now this is topical as we acknowledge the disruptive effect of browsing on the Internet.  During her last decade she retreated into religious observation and I only ever saw her reading religious texts and I never knew about her London studentship until Jasjit unrolled her Ph D certificate last year. She rose at dawn to watch the TV broadcast from Amritsar and wore huge headphones which contrasted incongruously with her white widow’s salwar kameez.  She rested in the garden a last time for an hour on her way from the hospital to the crematorium. Jasjit aged 76 has done a magnificent job looking after her mother and I hope that she will be able to travel and enjoy her freedom from domestic responsibility.

I was in Delhi for a meeting of the Leprosy Mission (TLM) international scientific committee and to also finish the analysis on the azathioprine trial that we did to try and improve the treatment of leprosy reactions. The trial has taken up many years with the planning, execution and now analysis and write up. Colleagues from other Indian labs working on leprosy came to the meeting. It was good to see the enthusiasm there, because the elimination campaign has also frightened people away from doing leprosy research. This has created a gap in skills and knowledge, the headship of JALMA, the national Indian leprosy research institute has been taken by someone with a background in HIV and he is busy learning about leprosy. The headship of the TLM research lab in Delhi is also empty and has been filled by Sen Gupta who retired from running one of the other labs 10 years ago. Whilst it was nice to see Sen Gupta’s enthusiasm it illustrates the gap in leprosy research leadership. So there are still lots of challenges ahead.

Although it was the hot weather in Delhi with temperatures up to 40 C the trees were in full leaf still. In New Delhi so many of the streets are tree lined that the whole city feels green. 

On this visit to Delhi I experienced links with history, Mataji and Ian Wethrall were links to a recent but two very different worlds.  In the present there are the continuing challenges of leprosy work.

London June 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/06/father-ian-weathrall

Mumbai: Philanthropists and Historians

Experiencing the philanthropy and history of this city through leprosy

I ended my October 2012 Indian trip with 5 days in Mumbai. My Sudanese student Omer is doing a project on neuropathic pain in leprosy patients here and I needed to have a supervisory visit and was joined by Andrew Rice, my Imperial college collaborator, he is new to India. I visited Mumbai on my first visit to India in 1975 so i have observed huge changes as Mumbai has transformed into a colourful megapolis. Over the last twenty years i have been staying with Doreen and Supi Krishna but they have now relocated to Ipswich to join their children. I felt acutely adrift from my usual routes to their flat in South Mumbai and nearly went in the wrong direction. Omer was keen that his supervisors should not slum it so we stayed in a fine art deco hotel on Marine Drive. This is one of the nicest vistas Mumbai looking across the huge bay to the peninsula with the governors house. AT night the chain of lights looks like Manhattan. In the morning lycra clad runners (male and female) pound along, plugged into iPods and heart rate gadgets, but behind them people sit on the sea wall meditating and doing complicated nose breathing exercises.

Omer is working at the Bombay Leprosy Project (BLP) which is an NGO based in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum and caters for patients with leprosy. The clinic was founded by the late Dr Ganapati, an inspirational and passionate leprosy doctor. His successor Dr Pai has looked youthful for 25 years and has a quiet passion to improve the lot of leprosy patients. The clinic is deep in the slum, over one of the main drains. Patients wait outside and many are seen in the semi open air under a huge awning. That day many had come specially to be seen by the London doctors and had either neuropathic pain or other immunological complications. These patients came inside with their families and we saw then in a large crowded room with little privacy. Andrew had previously only seen patients with me in London so this was an introduction to leprosy in the field. I saw several patients with severe recurrent inflammation (ENL) because the BLP is one centre in a global collaboration that i am trying to establish. I sat with one of the younger doctors at BLP seeing these complicated  patients. He had trained in Russia but is now back in Mumbai training in dermatology and working in leprosy.  I was interested in the slum because  I have just read Kalpana Sharma ‘s book “Rediscovering Dharavi” where she describes how people migrate to the slum. They are well organised and provide a vital part of Mumbai’s industry and services, including making  all the sweets and chikri in Mumbai.

The next day we gave a seminar on leprosy at Mumbai’s oldest medical school but before we started we had a historical tour from Shoba Pandya  a retired parsi neurophysiologist and one of our  collaborators. She is a wonderful guide, she breathes Mumbai history and we walked around the medical school looking at the parsi benefactors with their sculptures on the buildings. A vast Italianate bronze of the founder Sir JJ broods over the entrance hall. This is a government hospital and the conditions are reasonably clean. The BLP has been focussing on educating medical students in Mumbai and we had a surprisingly good turn-out of students and trainees on a Saturday morning. Afterwards we lunched in the simple hospital canteen and everyone reminisced about their time as a student- which covered about 40 years.

 Omer has found living in Mumbai difficult; it takes a long time to get projects going. Finding somewhere to live without commuting vast distances is also difficult and the Mumbai landlords are rapacious.  On Saturday we went to The National Centre for the Performing Arts to see stand up comedy. The performers called themselves “not the East india Company” and instead of telling Irish jokes joked about the Sindhis, one of Mumbai’s immigrant groups who are fat and hairy.  It’s a mark of Mumbai’s affluence that there were jokes about man boobs. Skin colour was also joked about, notably vagina whitening creams.  On Sunday morning we walked around Bombay Fort area, one of the oldest parts of the city and we spotted a couple of old Methodist churches, in one the women were singing a Swedish carol that Andrew recognised. The Maidan is a large grassy area in South Bombay and since Mumbaites are used to coping in small spaces they can play about 50 simultaneous cricket matches on a space that elsewhere would hold two matches.  It was another eye opener for Andrew, a cricket enthusiast and he sat watching the matches and gave Omer an introduction to cricket. That evening he knew at least three ways of being out, only 4 or more to learn! So we may have left Omer with some tools for increasing his enjoyment of being in Mumbai.

I had Sunday lunch with Jehanghir Sorabjhee, physician who worked at HTD many years ago and now provides an infectious disease service in Mumbai. He is also passionate about Mumbai and has photographed the city from the air and gave a spellbinding talk in London comparing old and new photographs of the city and documenting change. He must have amazing mental maps of Mumbai. He is now researching a book on the hidden green spaces of Mumbai and so is now travelling at ground level. Also at lunch was a Parsi retired child psychologist, Dr Barucha, who trained at the Tavistock clinic in the 1960’s and there met and married an Irish psychologist. Since then they have lived and worked in Mumbai and their younger daughter Temi worked for me as a foundation doctor in UCH last year. So it was nice to talk to her father who is still working and full of zest.

It was interesting being with someone seeing India for the first time. Andrew is a well read live wire who poses streams of questions. He had also lectured on pain at the Tata cancer hospital, part of corporate India and with world class standards. So he saw the range of health care in India from NGOs through government to corporate private. We explored what motivates doctors to work in the Indian NGO sector, why does Dr Pai work in The Bombay leprosy project without a huge salary. In India gurus such as Dr Ganapati and Dr Antia are inspirational and influence the course people take in the professional lives and people will make deliberate career choices to live out  . Before we had the NHS there would have been similar figures such as the doctors working in the East of London who served an impoverished population with little financial reward. I am very lucky to be working in the NHS without the burden of tuition fees and able to follow my muse.  

Mehta describes Mumbai as a “maximum city”, an appropriate epithet for a city that is tough to live in but also has citizens that are passionate about their city and so promote its development in industry, education and culture. Even the public gardens are full of elderly citizens walking and keeping up. In Mumbai one also experiences the contrast in India between the poverty of Dharavi and the wealth of Colaba.

Jan 2013    

Rediscovering Dharavi. Kalpani Sharma. Penguin India  2000

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found  Suketu Mehta  Headline Review 2005

Addis Ababa in January: Music, politics and leprosy

On a brief visit to Addis I combined work with hearing two good bands and then soaking up the art and history of repression under the Derg.

January is a good time to be in Addis Ababa, the skies are clear blue with cold nights and warm days. I had a week long monitoring visit to Saba, my research fellow there whom i have written about previously. And as usual I managed to combine work with going to two concerts and a new museum about the Red Terror, the vicious repression that occurred under the communist Derg Regime.   

Saba has yet again moved. Her latest house is a colonial style bungalow with a row of servants quarters behind it. She let Gaby her husband choose the house and wall colours so the house is a vivid pink and the walls bright green. Gaby has moved back from Nairobi and is setting up engineering projects in Ethiopia and the books in the study are about camber surfaces and road drainage, and I suspect that he prefers the precise detail of engineering to the vagueness of aesthetics. I enjoyed being part of an Ethiopian household, and celebrating saints days is a large part of life. That week  St Mary was celebrated and the chanting in the church started at 4am, and pilgrims carrying lights thronged the churches. At home the maids had a coffee ceremony and brewed strong coffee in a black coffee pot on coals and burnt incense with grass on the floor, a special loaf of bread was cooked to celebrate St Mary and a candle was lit. The ceremony was also a welcome for the nurse Alem who had gone home and a welcome to me.  In my blog 2012 I wrote about the cook’s hopes for her son to have a university education. These are now being realigned because her son has become a father. He was working at the ALERT leprosy clinic whilst sitting his university entrance exams and had a romance with the other clerk and soon she was pregnant. She needed a caesarean section and the young husband then had to bring sutures to the hospital to replace the ones that had been used for the delivery. The young couple are starting life with very few possessions. Saba put an advert on the Addis social site and was touched by the response she had from “ferangis” who had baby things to donate. It is nice that people chip in with their possessions but it also illustrates the huge need for health and social services. A new born has such a fragile life in the dangerous environment of the Addis Ababa slums. Everyone in the clinic is also encouraging the young man to still try and do his exams and get further training.

The last Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died in Austria Aug 2012 after a long undisclosed illness but he is achieving sainthood at home.  His face looks down everywhere from vast hoardings and he is credited with every aspect of Ethiopia’s economic, and social and sporting development. One poster described him as the leader of the Ethiopian renaissance. The deputy prime minster has taken over but does not appear to enthuse people as Meles did. Several vice presidents have been elected, maybe as a way of keeping tabs on him. Ethiopia played Nigeria in the Africa Cup of Nations football. The streets were silent as people were entranced by the match, lucky ones watched in the centre of town on a huge screen, close to us an enterprising resident had hung a white sheet above the street and the TV was being projected there, the cops were even redirecting traffic so that the street was safe for the viewers. Sadly Ethiopia lost to the Nigerians with their goalie and then even his substitute being sent off and the match had to pause whilst a replacement goalie jersey was fashioned.  

Saba and I had a cultural Sunday afternoon seeing modern art and then history at two new museums. At the Museum of Modern art we saw a retrospective of one of Ethiopia’s modern artists, Gebrekristos Desta, he started work in Hailie Selasies reign and continued under the Derg. He depicted oppression through abstracts, the famine through white shrouds and the surveillance through large eyes looking down on scenes. His work was not appreciated by the Derg and he applied to Germany for asylum but it was refused, even though he had trained as an artist in Germany. He then found asylum in the US and died in a small flat in Oklahoma. This retrospective was a poignant reflection of the artistic response to oppression but also showed how artist can be abandoned by the people they think would protect them. The Germans have now built a beautiful new museum named after him, perhaps as atonement. After absorbing this poignant work we went to The Red Terror Martyrs Memorial museum, which depicts the genocide perpetrated by the Derg. The museum has been set up by the relatives of people who disappeared then. The museum traced the history of the revolution and showed how the early optimism at having deposed the emperor soured. The Derg regime, headed by Mengistu became one of the most vicious regimes, people were tortured and killed in their thousands, especially students. There were large photo-board displays of students nearly all of whom died. The killing fields on the edge of Addis were depicted by stacks of skulls and other cases had the personal objects of prisoners shoes, note books. It was reminiscent of a Holocaust museum. Our museum guide had been imprisoned for 7 years. When he was released he felt unable to go home and hid working in the household of an Italian diplomat. It was very moving to be taken round by someone who had been oppressed. He said that he did not want revenge but he did want people to remember the horror. Since then i have read the book “Beneath the Lions Gaze” about the oppression that occurred during the Derg. That book captures the horror of the torture and the effect of the Derg on families.

Music was another theme of the visit. We heard an Ethiopian jazz band at the crowded jazzamba cafe in the old part of the city.   An Ethiopia sang soulfully about being rejected in love and then. We also heard Farka Toure, my favourite Malian guitarist with his band. They played a rousing concert in the Ethiopian national theatre. They wore long white robes with blue jackets . Local Addis musicians joined them on stage, one female saxophonist played an amazing number with them, she just blew her heart out clearly very fired up by the occasion.   The national theatre was packed, Saba commented that she had no idea that there were so many white people in Addis.

I spent time at the hospital seeing patients with complications of leprosy. One 20 year old had need so much steroids to control her reactions that she had developed osteoporosis and had severe back pain from collapsed vertebrae- something commoner in 90 year olds. We are also enrolling patients from the clinic in Addis into a global network of patients with ENL. I also have a Ethiopian PhD student, Edessa Negera  starting work on these patients later this year. Saba is also planning to stay in Ethiopia for another 5 years and that gives a feeling of stability to the project.

So it was a good visit. Saba and i worked hard and made progress on our various projects, through her household i felt the realities of life in Addis. In the hospital i saw patients who remind me why we are trying to improve the treatment of leprosy. I also enjoyed new aspects of Ethiopian history and culture.

Diana Lockwood

Apr 2013

Beneath The Lions Gaze