African adventure

SOMETIMES a book so delights a reader that they have to share the good news. "I had the book 'What For Chop Today' dumped in my lap last night at 10pm and had to force myself to put it down some time after 1am. It is that good," was the message e-mailed to me by a York book-lover last month.

"Very down to earth - very funny - very human, and yet brings across all the hardship of charity hospitals without dragging you through the guilt trip."

It is the sort of endorsement that any author would kill for. What's more, the praise is justified: the first book by Dr Gail Haddock is all these things.

What For Chop Today? is a journal of her first few months working in one of the world's poorest countries, Sierra Leone.

Her two-year trip finished nearly ten years ago, but the vitality of her account lends immediacy to her traumas and triumphs.

Dr Haddock, who is a partner in a surgery in East Mount Road, York, may have caught the travel bug from her airman father.

She went to medical school in Edinburgh and, after working in India and New Zealand, opted to settle in York as a GP. Half of her probationary year was spent at a surgery in Front Street, Acomb, and half in Tang Hall Lane.

Sierra Leone was sandwiched in between. A more different world from wealthy, healthy York would be hard to imagine.

Dr Haddock had always wanted to apply her medical skills in the developing world. She chose Sierra Leone from four options offered her by aid charity Voluntary Service Overseas.

Why?

"It was in a hospital and there were three doctors in the hospital. That would be a bit of support," she explained. "From that point of view, it was the job description, rather than Sierra Leone, that did it."

With commendable candour she adds: "I didn't even know where Sierra Leone was. I thought it was in South America."

So she embarked on a steep learning curve. Sierra Leone, she discovered, was the second poorest country in the world, with 25 per cent infant mortality and a life expectancy of 42 - and that was before civil war ripped it apart.

Dr Haddock took a course in surgery for non-surgeons in Birmingham, where she practised her stitching on sheep's intestines. But nothing prepared her for what was to come.

At first it wasn't so bad. The volunteers arrived in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown. They spent two weeks there practising the local language - a pigeon English called Krio - and lazing on the beaches. Then Dr Haddock was despatched to her posting. A seven-hour drive brought her to a hospital in Serabu, in the south. It was in darkness. Electricity was only available for a few hours a day.

This is where the real adventure begins.

What For Chop Today? tells of Dr Haddock's daily battles with a lack of basic facilities, her own inexperience, local bureaucracy and customs and all manner of itinerant, often vicious, wildlife. It can be heartrending: the choices of who lives and dies are made so much starker in a brutally-deprived area.

And it is often funny, the humour mainly coming from the local people themselves.

"They were very relaxed and laid back, friendly and welcoming. They had a great sense of humour," said Dr Haddock.

One of her lowest points came when rumours of a rebel invasion led the authorities to shut the hospital. Patients were simply thrown out.

"The day we had to close the hospital was pretty bad. People were pulling at my hands or my skirt and begging me not to leave," she recalls.

But there were also moments of real reward. "My first caesarean section gave me my first buzz. Before that I had been pretty ham-fisted."

She only began working on the book when she was back in York. "When we went out there, I had this big idea I would write a novel in my spare time. Of course I didn't write a thing.

"When I got home I had so much to say, I started writing it down." She always loved writing at school, but lost the habit.

"At medical school, you don't write in sentences at all, it's all short notes and multiple choice questions. I think I wrote about two essays in the whole of medical school. I hadn't written sentences for about 30 years."

In between the first draft and publication, Dr Haddock married, moved house, changed jobs and had two children.

News of the terrible civil war in Sierra Leone, which has cost 50,000 lives, has led her to fear for her friends out there: she already knows that Serabu hospital has been burnt down. "After I had been there for a while, I started to make really good friends with the local people.

"I don't know what's happened to all of them. I know one's joined the rebels, and a couple of others have been killed. That's quite distressing.

"All the years building up the hospital, and it's just gone. I can't imagine there's any up-country medical resources at all now."

Her African experience has certainly left her with a changed attitude to the National Health Service.

"There's no doubt we expect a lot more. The problem here is these drugs are available but we can't have them for years and years.

"Over there I could do something or I couldn't do something. Now I feel very powerless because I can send someone up to the hospital, but I can't control the waiting list."

What For Chop Today? by Gail Haddock is published by TravellersEye at £7.99