Present location: Freetown, Sierra Leone.

All went smoothly and we arrived safely.
Our bags are slowly unpacked. Our bodies getting used to the prickles of the tropical heat.
Well, at least for me the weather has been good.
The scene is welcomingly different and sometimes difficult to understand.
But mostly pleasant.
Only pictures will speak a lot more than my mere choice of random words.
The streets are always crowded, peddlars of all ages and kinds. Name it, you'll find it.
People have been kind, generous and amazingly helpful.
God bless their soul.
Our house is not great but not too bad.
And we badly need the car to arrive soon on top of the fact that I need to learn how to drive.
Which I will, despite internal morbid fears. I shall prevail, so I think.
Work is coming soon, for both of us. Him sooner, me hopefully soon enough.
I didn't come here to laze about. I came here with a purpose.
In all, we are well. Good. Slowly and surely absorbing, tasting and indulging in every detail we see, hear, touch and smell. Our insights will be enriched, our lives possibly changed.
You will see in time.

ps: pictures will come soon enough. I hope you remain patient.

Yesterday I read an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (every Monday, I get to read article selected from The New York Times for the above-mentioned newspaper) on the lack of painkillers in much of the developing world. The article entitled 'Lack of Painkillers and Fear of Addiction Leave the Poor to Suffer' goes on to illustrate how people in the developing world have no access to the use of painkillers because often these people who are suffering simply cannot get morphine. In that regards, many are left to die in unimaginable pain and agony.

In Sierra Leone for instance, it is not so much the poverty or the lack of supply. It's the fear of addiction. It seems doctors are afraid that by providing patients with painkillers like morphine, there is the potentiality for addiction. This is in turn creates the possibility for a cycle of crime, addiction and so on. Indeed there is a grey line between the need for morphine for pain relief for those suffering and the potentiality for addiction. Still, it is almost inhumane to deny painkillers to someone who is clearly suffering every single day.

The article also interestingly pointed out how much of the world medical narcotics are consumed mainly by those in developed world like the U.S, Britain, Australia and Germany. It seems they consume about 80 per cent of the world's medical narcotics while those in the developing world consumed slightly about 6 per cent.

Thing is, morphine is neither expensive not short in supply. But it is routinely denied to most poor countries. There is also the tendency to believe most of the developing world are only ravaged by diseases such as AIDS, malaria and so on but what we tend to forget is that equally as many are suffering from diseases cancer and the equivalent. And in places like Sierra Leone with only about 100 qualified doctors, most diagnoses are discovered in the late stages. In cases like that, death is almost certain.

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me:
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me and
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain;
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

Christina Rossetti

Tapas reading music notes.