Home visits a la Gambiense
People diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB) are sent to regional health centres for management, as it is more logistically convenient and avoids duplicating the work of other organisations. However the MRC carry out lots of TB research, so the only way to follow up patients is to go look for them! Today I joined the latest leg of the search.
We navigated dusty alleys through potholes and mud puddles, past stalls painted brightly with images of fruit and news of English Premiership football scores, using directions like 'it's the twelfth compound after Big Tree' and discovering that Big Tree was a four-forked junction. Each compound is a collection of mud huts where several families live together. As this is a polygynous society where each woman has, on average, five children, the residences are breeding grounds for TB and makes them useful study units.
Droves of excited toddlers, stridant livestock and a stripy kettle (?!) greeted us at each stop. Even when we found the index person through 'snowball contacts' it was difficult to find a place to talk to him confidentially or quietly. We conducted one interview on a footstool, by a teenage girl who was grinding flour. The pestle (similar to this) was almost her height. I'd have loved to take photos of these scenes from typical Gambian households, and if I could give the subjects a copy they would've been overjoyed. One boy was glad to see us simply so that he could show his tattered monochrome photo of a distant relative to someone new.
We navigated dusty alleys through potholes and mud puddles, past stalls painted brightly with images of fruit and news of English Premiership football scores, using directions like 'it's the twelfth compound after Big Tree' and discovering that Big Tree was a four-forked junction. Each compound is a collection of mud huts where several families live together. As this is a polygynous society where each woman has, on average, five children, the residences are breeding grounds for TB and makes them useful study units.
Droves of excited toddlers, stridant livestock and a stripy kettle (?!) greeted us at each stop. Even when we found the index person through 'snowball contacts' it was difficult to find a place to talk to him confidentially or quietly. We conducted one interview on a footstool, by a teenage girl who was grinding flour. The pestle (similar to this) was almost her height. I'd have loved to take photos of these scenes from typical Gambian households, and if I could give the subjects a copy they would've been overjoyed. One boy was glad to see us simply so that he could show his tattered monochrome photo of a distant relative to someone new.
Comments