September 25

12C o/c. Rain shower earlier and it was 15C when we got up.
Up early to get Mari to the airplane (6 am).
Looks like we will be getting more rain a bit later.
Did the Haggis dinner last night, it was great as usual.

John found a farm a few miles outside the city where help was needed to attend to a dairy herd.

  In the fall they both attended university, Jean to study nursing and John with no real goal in mind in a program that had majors in geography and history.

  They received letters almost every month from their parents and sisters. The trip down the length of Africa was without incident although it appeared that the heat and two storms that they passed through caused some discomfort. The trip actually lasted more than a month but they finally arrived at the port of Moqadishu. They were met by a Colonel of the British Army who had been assigned to escort them to their mission which was located some one hundred miles inland along a branch of the Seebeli River. In addition to the village where the mission and hospital had been built, there were several more villages scattered along the tributary all about a days walking apart.

 Their accommodation was in a Somalian style quite comfortable and the church while having no pews was impressive. The hospital turned out to be two rooms under a thatched roof, there were five beds, and a very limited supply of antiseptic, bandages and medicines. There were no operating tools and their order for what was needed was anticipated to take almost three months before it arrived.

  The villagers were friendly although quite shy. There were rumours of unrest but whatever trouble there was appeared to be somewhere else.

  The twins had settled in and Margaret in particular found little difficulty in going barefoot and fitting in with the village children.

  The months passed, the letters kept arriving at both destinations. Time as usual eventually lessened the feeling of apartness and they all moved onward in their lives. The following spring when University got out, Jean and John purchased airline tickets to Cairo, then boarded a coastal steamer that traversed the Red Sea then around the Horn of Africa and down the Somalian coast. The trip lasted two weeks in total.

  On their arrival at Moqadishu they sought out the British Army camp and were lucky enough find the same Colonel who had escorted their parents the year before. He arranged for transportation and sent along an armed escort. Arrangements were also made to bring them back after three weeks.

  The reuniting was a joyful affair, Jean helped in the clinic almost daily, John quickly became friends with one of the local tribesmen who took him out on some hunting forays. He took to the heat and the excitement of the chase like a duck to water and within days had learned to shoot adequately and picked up the rudiments of tracking.

  All too soon the vacation came to an end, the escort arrived and John noted that there was additional armament stored in the army land-rover. On the return trip to the coast their four man escort seemed edgy and constantly scanned the jungle around them.

  They re-boarded the same steamer of a few weeks earlier, steamed back to Cairo then flew home to England.