Shots Across the Water, page 20
After I moved to Bristol, I kept getting bouts of fever every six weeks. I went to a GP who said it was the recurrent malaria and that I would need to get used to it. I wasn’t happy and my business partner suggested I visit a local herbalist. He listened to my story of malaria and made up two herbal liquid concoctions for me to drink over the next month. I have not had the malaria fever since, although I do have a tendency to have headaches. I became a fan of herbal medicines.
If you are interested in what happened to me next, I had an unconventional but successful career as a social entrepreneur, starting up, growing and leading 12 businesses, charities and co-operatives. You can read all about my 40 years as a social entrepreneur in my book Creating Social Enterprise: My story and what I learned, available on Amazon.
I have been back to Morocco three times and Egypt once. Other than that I’ve not returned to Africa. I never made it to Swaziland (now called Eswatini) but my youngest daughter went to an international sixth form college there for two years. So at least one of us made it there!
For those of you who like data, here are the figures: I travelled 14,359 miles overland from Tel Aviv to London, of which 12,642 miles were in Africa. The journey took me through Israel, Gaza (not technically a country yet), Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan (a new country after 2011), Uganda, Kenya, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), Central African Republic, Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, Morocco, Spain and France. The vast majority of this was on foot, on lorries and in shared ‘taxis’. I took four train journeys and one ferry journey on Lake Aswan, and hitched a ride on a cargo boat on the Congo River.
It was a journey that changed me forever. Little did I know as I returned that I had absorbed an approach to life and values that would mark the rest of my life and career. I am so grateful for the opportunity to travel across so much of the continent of Africa, a journey that would be much harder today.
Thank you for reading my story.
Patrick Nash, Shots Across the Water
