About

“A Midwife Musing: Midlife Experience in Africa” collects my thoughts on volunteering as a midwife academic and clinical support person in Tanzania with the Global Health Alliance WA (GHAWA), and my travel and life experiences while there.  I hope it will help anyone who follows the same path avoid the pitfalls. 

You can read my daily posts on past, present and future travels. Join me on the A Midwife Musing: Midlife Experience in Africa, add my musings to your RSS feed or send me a message via my contact.  I am not the most technical person in the world so please forgive my stumbling efforts.

You won’t find the town I was born in on any current map.  It was a mining town called Broken Hill. Not the one in Australia!  It is now called Kabwe, and is a small town in the Copperbelt of Zambia.  My parents moved to Africa from the UK when my sister was a toddler.  We spent many years moving from tiny towns like Mpika to small cities like Lusaka.  My taste for travel was cultivated as every 3 years or so we would drive down the African continent on some rather interesting roads to Cape Town and then set sail back to the UK and Ireland for a number of months before reversing the trip.  Our British and Irish cousins thought we were quite exotic – some even wondered why we weren’t black!  I’m sure they imagined plush colonial settings with some large black man, wearing a crisp while uniform, head donned in a fez waiting on our every whim.  The reality was quite different in the main.  As with many white children I was shipped off to boarding school aged 11.  This entailed a 3-day train journey via steam train to Grahamstown in South Africa.  How I loved the sound of the wheels clacking on the railway lines.  I transferred to school in Bulawayo Rhodesia in 1970 and we relocated there as a family in 1972.  It was on the train trip back to school on 18^th January 1972 that I met the young man I was to later marry.

I am not a total stranger to health care in Africa having trained as a nurse in Rhodesia after leaving school.  However my training was very British circa 1950.  I never saw the real Africa in the hospital I worked in.

My husband & I had a yen to have a travel year.  We moved to the UK where were based for the next four years.  We lived like hippies for months in our Kombi while we travelled Europe; made the most of Sir Freddie Laker’s cut-price airline to get to the USA and Canada. Four years later we travelled back to the now named Zimbabwe via Egypt and Kenya en route to our new home in Western Australia.    By this stage I was qualified as a midwife.

My parents gave me the travel bug at a very young age, and I have lived in Africa, the UK and Australia but travelled through Africa (mostly south of the equator), Europe, Ireland, some of the USA and Canada, New Zealand, China and Hong Kong, Indonesia, Borneo, and Singapore. I love travelling and meeting new people. 

My greatest challenge now is learning a bit of Swahili but I have language block.  It least I can say hello "habari" and please "tafadhali".  So........

Unataka mimi bahati na mradi huu!