So we live in Africa. May be you think that our lives are exciting. Well, you are right....and wrong.

We live in a world where most faces are black, but some are white, where most people speak foreign tongues, but the majority can manage a smattering of English, where the sun shines most of the time, but when it rains, it rains very hard and we love it. And I am a veterinary surgeon.

I had lived on and off in East Africa for some 4 years before returning to the UK for a brief spell. There feet became itchy and souls restless, so my wife, Laura, and I decided to take a three week break from a bleak British winter and search for pastures new. We had met a PhD student in Cambridge by the name of Reiner Schneider-Waterberg; he had suggested that his newly independent home country of Namibia was in search of fresh blood and in need of professionals. We greeted the idea with enthusiasm, but had to admit that we would battle to find the country on the map. The gods smiled, and we found work for both of us as well as schooling for the children. Our total worldly possessions were condemned to a very rough six-week sea voyage, and I had to get my brain into gear to sit the Namibian Veterinary Council's entrance exam. As I entered a grand room for an interview with no less than eight very distinguished South West Africa old timers, I heard a distinct chuckle. It was only some months later I discovered that the laughter was as a result of a bet that had been taken between the majority, Afrikaans and Germans, and the one Council member of English extraction: "I bet he will be wearing a suit and tie"?!

During the last seven years we have had our fair share of excitement. Our veterinary clinic is very mixed, handling everything from budgies to elephants. Otjiwarongo literally translated from Herero means "place of the fat cattle", and indeed the majority of our work is with the cattle farmer. The country is split into the communal and commercial farmlands, and as private vets our work is primarily with the latter. Commercial farms range in size from 5,000 to 50,000 hectares, with the stocking densities being low as one animal on 25 hectares in some parts of the country. And everything depends on the rain...O, the rain. From October onwards eyes are turned to the skies. Waiting, waiting. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn't. If the rains fail, it has a ripple effect on both the economy and the morale of the whole country. As times become harder so too farmers look for other ways to make ends meet. Many have turned to wildlife utilization, either through tourism or hunting. And as the farmer looks to the game to keep him alive, so, as vets, more of our work becomes involved with wildlife.

Africa is a continent of surprises; and one soon learns to be ready for the unexpected. On one bright sunny day I was to fly up to a farm an hours flight north of our hometown. It was a Monday morning and I had to drop the children at school on the way. As we took off from the school airstrip a strange low bank of cloud settled far off on the horizon. I thought little of it. The work was to collect five cheetah, a mother and four cubs, which had been terrorizing the farmer's sheep and goats. He had trapped them, and they were to be relocated to the home of Africat, a non-government organisation dedicated to the conservation of cheetahs. Having darted all the cheetahs and taken them, anaesthetized, to the aircraft, we loaded them up and were just climbing out when the what-had-been-far-off-cloud suddenly appeared as a huge bank of dust between where we were, and where we wanted to go. Cheetahs as a general rule are good air passengers, but on this particular occasion they decided to cause problems. As my dedicated assistant tried to keep them asleep in what had become very turbulent conditions, I tried in vain to find a way around this bank of dust. Visibility was zero from the ground up to at least 15,000ft, and the bank stretched as far as the eye could see both to the east and the west. To try to fly through it would have been suicide, so our only option was to turn tail and run as fast as we could back to where we had come from. As we touched down the runway was engulfed in sand so thick it was hard to walk through it. The cheetahs were off-loaded into make shift holding cages until the following day when the weather had cleared.

Then there was the time when we had to drive five lions through the night from the Angolan border to the home of Afrileo a lion conservation project just south of the Etosha National Park. We had converted a horsebox into a four-compartment trailer, with three young lions on the top storey and two very large males on the bottom. The smaller ones we allowed to wake up during the trip, but the big daddies would have broken out of their confinement very quickly had they become fully conscious. There is a fence running the full width of Namibia from east to west in a line parallel to the northern boarder of Etosha, which prevents the movement of all animals from north to south (part of the national control of foot and mouth disease). At the places where the road crosses the fence there are control points at which all vehicles are searched. As we came to a halt in the early hours of the morning three very tired and somewhat irritable officials asked what was in the horsebox. "Five lions" was the polite answer. "Hey, it's late, and we are tired. What is in that horse box?" we were asked again. The same reply was repeated. At this point one official decided he had had enough of this messing around and flung open the front horsebox door, only to come face to face with one half asleep, half awake 400-pound male lion. We were rapidly told to proceed on our way!!

We have removed 'piles' from a baboon's backside, and replaced a leopard's broken canine tooth with a Dracula like fang. We have operated on animals as varied as the majestic marsh eagle, the warrior-like hyena, the bizarre aardvark, the powerful python and the aggressive honey badger. Some of our patients are as large as the rhino, others as small as a three-day old dwarf mongoose. All of them are a challenge in their own way.

Recently I was called to a very African incident in which two white rhinos had been shot by poachers, their horns removed and the carcasses left to rot in the sun. The rhino, be it black or white, has been the focus of extinction-level poaching for many years. In spite of tremendous efforts and vast amounts of money this prehistoric creature will probably be condemned to the history books in the not too distant future. Initially I was asked to carry out post mortems on the dead rhinos by the police (a.k.a. the Protected Resource Unit) in order to gather evidence for later prosecution of the poachers once apprehended (they were caught 2 weeks after the event). However having dug the remains of a bullet fired from an automatic weapon from the brain of the one, we discovered that the other was lactating, and that a very small calf had been sighted in the vicinity. So the chopper was called in and we started looking. After two days and many hours in the sky this very small creature was found and caught. It had been without mother's milk for over three days; dehydrated and hypoglycaemic it was not in great shape. The next forty-eight hours were long ones. Numerous intravenous drips, and an array of drugs were used to keep the 3-month-old calf alive...but it would not drink. Tempers were getting frayed and patience becoming an ever scarcer commodity. At five o'clock on the third morning I had just about given up, when grabbing the rhino's head in one hand and the bottle of artificial milk in the other, I verbally offered this poor creature a choice: "Drink or die". It chose the former. Today Shika (meaning to 'hold fast' in Swahili) is a robust young lady drinking 30 liters of milk formula a day, and going for walks in the African bush with her 'foster-mother', Elka (the farm manager's wife), just as one might take a poodle for a stroll down Kensington High Street.

And sometimes, as in all walks of life, decisions have to be made which are not easy. A well-known tourist lodge with a large game camp in which five lions have lived for many years awakes one morning to discover that the electricity has gone down and there is a hole in the fence. Three large lions, a male and two females, are on the wrong side. The bush is thick, very thick. The nearby town with 20,000 inhabitants is less than a kilometer away. Only one month earlier lions had attacked and eaten a foolhardy caretaker on another lodge. And these lions are of the worst kind; half tame and half wild they have little respect for human life. We were able to recatch the two females, but the large male was too elusive and too dangerous to be left at large. The only option was to shoot him.

Most days I wake up and go to a routine day's work like anyone else, and then again, sometimes I guess I don't.

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