You would not necessarily expect a lecture on the development screening
of infants to be a particularly entertaining event, especially when the
illustrious guest speaker was having to work through an interpreter. In
this case, however, it was the translation which was provoking spirited
audience participation. John, a Romanian-born doctor based in Australia,
was acting as interpreter. He has excellent English, and all would have
been well if most of the listeners had not also spoken the language. As
it was, his every sentence tended to provoke heated debate on the precise
wording which would best convey the subtle nuances of Frankenburg’s wisdom.
Frankenburg made frequent use of screening for the congenital metabolic
disorder of phenylketonuria as an analogy. Phenylketonuria is a hard enough
word to get out at the best of times, and John had only to hesitate a moment
for half a dozen alternative translators to be finishing his sentence for
him.

If I had expected the Romanian people to be subdued or regimented after
the years of the Ceausescu regime, events such as the Frankenburg lecture
soon taught me otherwise. Perhaps it is a reaction to the sudden freedom
to express dissent, but the simplest thing seems to be an occasion for heated
argument. A shopper standing in a queue was unfortunate enough to knock
something breakable off a shelf, and within minutes the whole shop had divided
into two factions, one supporting the irate shopkeeper and the other the
embarrassed customer. And as for politics, the whole scene is in ferment.
The most dramatic manifestation of political unrest last year was the miners’
incursion into Bucharest to demand the resignation of the government (I
live near one of the scenes of rioting, and discovered by experience that
a whiff of tear gas is an effective, if drastic, way of clearing a head
cold), but there are more peaceful examples, from the literally dozens
of newspapers of every shade of opinion, to the patchwork of posters in
Piata Universitatii.

Now, while this spirit of freedom is no doubt healthy, it does bring
problems of its own. Take, for example, the university professor whom I
was helping to write up a grant request to the European Commission for academic
links with Western Europe. It was easy enough to talk through the needs
of his faculty. The professor was seeking expert help from opposite numbers
in Western universities to update the curriculum, along with the literature
and laboratory equipment that would need. But when asked the crucial question
of how many of his 30 departments would go along with the plan, the professor
hesitated. ‘Perhaps 50 per cent,’ he said.

The problem is that heads of university faculties can be voted out by
their own staff – as indeed can directors of orphanages and other institutions.
Trying to impose change where too few staff are in favour is a quick way
to lose your position. I suspect this is one reason behind the behaviour
which sometimes appears inconsistent to frustrated do-gooders from the West.
It goes something like this: Eager Expert holds some preliminary meetings
with Institution Official. IO expresses enthusiasm for EE’s ideas and promises
to put them into practice. Time passes. EE inquires about progress, and
is perplexed to be given a string of reasons why it is not possible right
now. But IO’s about-face need not be due to any capricious change of mind;
it could simply be that he or she overestimated the degree of cooperation
obtainable with those below. It is a bit like the random or ‘Brownian’ movement
of smoke particles, where the course they follow looks inexplicable until
you know that there are a multitude of invisible particles acting on the
larger ones.

Leadership by consensus is not just an ideal here – it is a necessity.
And at least if you understand the necessity you can try to plan for it.
The proposal we finally thrashed out began with a programme of exchange
visits for the heads of departments. Most of them had never been out of
Romania before, and the professor was optimistic that a first-hand encounter
with Western medicine would go a long way towards convincing them that their
departments could benefit from a rethink. With that initial hurdle out
of the way, it should be possible to develop a model for change within the
faculty.

From what I have seen, I think the path of development here will be
bumpy and punctuated by some explosive debates. But the general direction
is upward.

Sue Birchmore is a project officer in Romania with the charity World
Vision International.

‘Let me ask you a bad question,’ Florin said. ‘If you have only a little
money for Romania, do you give it to orphans, or education?’ I hedged: ‘Often
there’s no choice, because the donors have given it specially for one thing
or the other.’

Florin wasn’t having that: ‘No, no cheating! You have to decide.’

‘Well – if you give money to feed orphans today, then you have to feed
them again tomorrow. But education helps people to manage things for themselves.
So education, I suppose,’ I suggested.

‘Then why do people in the West give money for orphanages and not education?’

‘When people see pictures of orphans on the television, they want to
³ó±ð±ô±è.’

‘It’s hard,’ Florin said, and lapsed into moody silence.

It is hard – in fact, it’s the classic aid dilemma. Pictures of sick
babies are the easiest way to persuade the public to reach for the cheque
book to provide immediate relief, but long-term development is the best
chance for ensuring that future babies won’t become sick. The two needn’t
be mutually exclusive, though. On a few happy occasions they manage to combine
with beneficial effects on both sides.

The example which came to mind was in an orphanage I had visited the
week before. In line with good development theory, assistance had been provided
in the shape of two practising psychologists, rather than as hand-outs of
material goods. The psychologists were each working with a caseload of around
seven children, and teaching the orphanage staff, both by instruction and
example, how to help developmentally delayed children to make progress towards
a more normal condition and so eventually go out into society instead of
being consigned to a home for ‘irrecuperables’.

This assistance/interference had met with varying degrees of enthusiasm
from different staff, from warm to tepid and even distinctly chilly. Then
came an offer from a group of young people from Holland; could they come
and redecorate part of the orphanage? The group included some skilled fitters,
electricians and other such useful people. They were well organised and
were prepared to send an advance party some months ahead to assess the situation
and plan the campaign. And they would pay their own way. It sounded like
a good bargain.

They arrived, pitched their tents in the orphanage grounds, unloaded
the immense store of materials they had brought in their hired lorry, and
set to work. With cheerful efficiency, they plastered, they painted, they
installed light fittings, they overhauled the laundry equipment, they laid
vinyl flooring. . . They also donated unimaginable quantities of washing
powder, nappies, baby lotion and other such scarce commodities, meticulously
accounted for.

As the work unfolded, the attitude of the staff thawed. By the time
the group was preparing to leave, they had not only begun to lend a hand
with the decorating, but even clubbed together to buy leaving presents for
each of them – a not insignificant gesture on an infirmiere’s wages.

So how does this connect with the long-term work of the psychologists?
Well, the vital thing from their point of view is that some of the credit
for getting the work done has rubbed off on them. The volunteers may have
been an independent group, but the contact was made through the same organisation,
so as far as the staff are concerned they’re from the same firm. And the
things they achieved were very much wanted and appreciated. The place is
altogether more pleasant to live and work in, morale has reached unprecedented
heights and the psychologists are included in the general glow of satisfaction.
And, of course, it’s easier to stimulate children and enthuse staff in a
clean, comfortable room than in a musty hole with peeling paint and a bare
concrete floor. It’s easier to inculcate good hygiene practices with functional
facilities for washing clothes and to encourage good nutrition when the
kitchen is properly equipped.

Will it last, though? Bluntly, no. The paintwork will eventually need
to be renewed, the laundry equipment will break down and the store of soap
powder, vast though it is, will at some point in the distant future be exhausted.
In the meantime, though, our dauntless psychologists can carry on their
work with a much-improved prospect of cooperation and a decent supply of
clean nappies. With them on site to keep the precious items like baby-lotion
under lock and key, there’s not too much risk of the goods going astray,
and with the new sense of pride among the staff, we can even hope that the
premises may be better looked after in the future.

I still think that in a straight contest between education and hand-outs,
education wins hands down. But if you have the luxury of choice, a bit of
each can be a big help.

Sue Birchmore is a project officer in Bucharest with the charity World
Vision.

Dust certainly is a problem here. Our office is a converted house on
the junction of two major roads. Trams rattle past a few feet from the windows,
and ageing Trabants and Dacias cough out exhaust fumes. Opening a window
to avoid suffocation in the summer heat lets in a fine haze which settles
everywhere as a gritty black layer.

The fact that the city is full of building sites doesn’t help. Patches
of waste ground awaiting redevelopment and half-finished blocks of flats
are everywhere. Why they’re still half-finished is a tricky question. Some
tell me it’s that many of the workers have returned to the countryside to
work on the land allocated by the government – others say it isn’t clear
who they belong to now, so no one is taking responsibility for the work.

At all events, no one has any great enthusiasm for tower blocks (they’re
a symbol of the old regime’s policies), and it looks as if they will stay
as they are for the time being, adding to the dust cloud. You have to keep
a sharp lookout walking in the street; a couple of times I’ve only just
managed to dodge a bucket of water sloshed out on the pavement by a shopkeeper
trying to lay the dust.

Having breathed the air, it comes as no surprise that, according to
Romanian government statistics, cancer, particularly lung cancer, is the
second highest cause of death in the country. The Minister of Health delivering
a report on the state of the nation’s health in parliament is, I suppose,
a sign of the new openness and commitment to change; examining the causes
is a good first step to tackling a problem.

The government’s assessment of the situation is that the major factors
behind ill health in Romania are pollution, poor nutrition, and the run-down
state of the medical system. The minister said that only 35 per cent of
locations monitored for air pollution came within the acceptable standard,
but he hardly needed statistics to convince anyone that the air is badly
polluted.

My first thought, though, was that smoking could be an even more important
cause of ill health than air pollution. Cigarettes are on sale along with
imported coffee and orange juice on all the street stalls, and a high proportion
of the population seems to smoke. If you buy something using dollars, you
may well be offered cigarettes as a handy currency substitute for your change.
A Romanian colleague explained that since the revolution, imported cigarettes
have become relatively cheap, with a variety of brands on offer, making
smoking one of the few reasonably inexpensive luxuries available. People
who had given up the evil weed have been tempted to sample the new choice.
If that’s the case, perhaps smoking-related diseases will be showing up
more in the future than the present.

Smoking could also be a factor in the most common cause of death – heart
disease – and the third most common, respiratory diseases. Fourth in rank
come road and domestic accidents, and the only mystery here, looking at
the state of the cars, the style of the driving and the fact that seat belts
seem to be considered cissy, is why they aren’t higher up the list. I’m
told that after the revolution no one was in the mood to bow to any regulations,
including traffic laws. The spirit of freedom seems to be starting to be
tempered by the survival instinct, and things are becoming more orderly
again, but I’ve had a few breathtaking moments on the roads.

Inadequate nutrition is another health problem which is only too obvious,
seeing what’s available. In the summer, fresh vegetables are heaped to overflowing
on all the market stalls, but in winter they’re mostly unobtainable. Meat
comes and goes; I’ve seen a butcher’s counter in a large store with nothing
but half a dozen chunks of nondescript meat and row upon row of tinned sardines.
Fruit is mostly limited to domestic produce in season; a friend from England
brought with him a bag of oranges and was stopped several times in the street
by sharp-eyed shoppers wanting to know where he bought them. Even more importantly,
the cost of foodstuffs has rocketed following the liberalisation of prices,
and wages haven’t kept pace. For the average Romanian, maintaining a balanced
diet is becoming more difficult than ever.

As for the health system, gaps are only too evident – shortages of drugs
and essential items such as surgical rubber gloves, a hospital without X-ray
facilities and an ultrasonic scanner which works only sometimes, not enough
trained medical staff. . .

The Ministry of Health has declared its intention to introduce a strategy
based on the WHO’s ‘Health for everyone by the year 2000’ programme, restructuring
the system with the stress on primary health care and preventive measures.
As a small step in this direction, we’re planning to set up a primary health
care project in the Clu region, cooperating with the Ministry of Health
and local medical facilities to set up community-level clinics in areas
without adequate medical cover. As an organisation, World Vision has plenty
of experience with primary health care in Third World settings, but whether
the model will translate successfully to Romania remains to be seen.

The government aims to create a mixed system of public and private health
care, financed by taxes, fees and insurance. To this end, under the European
Community’s PHARE programme for Eastern Europe, a team of specialists is
to carry out a study on how to implement a health insurance system. For
the sake of the Romanian people, I hope the result is something workable.
They coped stoically for long enough with a health service which was being
systematically tied under the previous regime; now they deserve something
better.

Sue Birchmore is a project officer for the charity World Vision.

Analysts may have been worrying for months over the possibility of a
hard-liners’ coup against President Gorbachev, but none of us had really
imagined the inertia of a political mass as large as the Soviet Union being
moved so suddenly. The expatriates’ reaction was mostly simple shock, and
apprehension about what it may mean for Eastern Europe, but among at least
some Romanians, I saw real frustration and anger.

The frustration came from those who had made a deliberate decision not
to try to leave for greener pastures. Here, as in Britain, the drain in
brains goes mainly West in planes, and quite a number of educated Romanians
have settled in the US, Canada or Western Europe. Several people I’ve met
have a relative working in computers in Paris, or a friend in engineering
in Germany. After the 1989 revolution, it became easier to leave; for those
who chose not to go, out of a genuine belief in the possibility of change
and a desire to help in the reconstruction, the abrupt halting of progress
in the USSR – with the worry that hardliners elsewhere may take courage
from it – was a bitter blow.

The flow of educated people following the relaxation of travel restrictions
has not been entirely one way. I know two child development specialists
of Romanian origin, one of whom had settled in the US and the other in Australia,
who came back to Romania to work in institutions, if only for a limited
term. They have commitments in their adopted homelands, and will return
at the end of their contracts, but their contribution is not insignificant.
Western medical education, fluent Romanian, and an insider’s knowledge of
the culture are a combination no other imported experts can offer.

It was the new openness to change and progress towards democracy which
prompted these people to come and contribute towards the development of
their birthplace; if there are any serious signs of a reversal to previous
conditions, I doubt whether they will consider it worth staying.

I couldn’t even start to speculate about the final shape which the fallout
from the Soviet Union will take here in Romania. For the sake of all the
genuinely committed medical, scientific and other professionals who have
remained or returned here, I hoped it wouldn’t put a brake on the progress
which is being made here.

And then came the signs that the resistance to the coup inside Russia
was stiffening. Even more significant from our parochial point of view was
the fact that the Romanian government had condemned the coup – its first
major international test of the democracy passed with flying colours. People
began to look more cheerful.

While I was visiting friends, one of them plugged in the hair dryer
to listen for the BBC World Service (she claims it improves the rather dodgy
reception), and came bouncing in to announce that the tanks were leaving
Moscow. The coup leaders were fleeing, said the BBC, ‘like Ceausescu’. It
was almost the only reference to Romania we had heard in the overseas media
for the three days in which our whole attention had revolved around the
events in the news.

Or in my case, half my attention, the other half being centred on the
more individual problem of a cracked filling in a back molar. My affliction
manifested itself at about the same time as President Gorbachev was finding
himself declared a case of political sickness, and while the world hunted
for ways to thwart the hardliners in Moscow, I was hunting for dental treatment
in Bucharest. It’s not that the city isn’t adequately supplied, but, like
the rest of the health system, dental care here suffers from elderly equipment
and outdated practices and I wanted to be sure of safe and gentle handling.
I finally made contact with a suitable dentist, but the room with the drills
was locked and the person with the key absent.

It’s an odd world in which an issue involving many tons of military
hardware is resolved more quickly than one involving a fraction of a gram
of dental amalgam. Altogether, it was a strange sort of week, and we were
all rather glad when it was over.

Sue Birchmore is a project officer with the charity World Vision, and
is currently based in Bucharest.

My own gruesome stories relate mostly to springs and wire. Doing a quality
audit tour of a wire supplier’s factory, I remarked on some swifts – monster
cotton-reels for winding wire on to – festooned with red emergency stop
cables and warning signs like a safety-conscious Christmas tree.

My host explained that a worker on night shift had once got a corner
of his overall caught in the wire, and had been wound up before the nearest
man could find the stop button. ‘Broke almost every bone in his body,’ he
said with gloomy relish.

In the same works, a patch of new brickwork over a doorway marked the
place of another mishap. Fork-lift trucks are fitted with a sort of unicorn
spike for carrying coils of wire, a spike which can be swivelled upright
for trundling from place to place so that it does not impale the workforce
on the way. A driver in a hurry had tried to negotiate the door without
lowering his spike. ‘He won’t do that again,’ my guide commented.

Making wire can be a hazardous business; so can using it. Springs are
inoffensive little components to look at, but they’re capable of some nasty
tricks. One of the worst hazards is brittle spots in the wire, which are
undetectable until you start coiling, whereupon they break suddenly and
viciously, releasing all the energy it takes to deform a piece of high-tensile
steel with a diameter of anything up to 2.5 centimetres. One unfortunate
coiler I knew lost a finger that way.

Another surprising hazard is hot metal. Good working practice puts components
freshly out of the heat-treatment oven in a designated area, with a warning
chalked on the container, but in a real-life works you can spot the old
hands grown cynical with experience. They spit on things before they try
to pick them up. The absence of sizzle means they can be handled safely.

Even when the components are finished, testing carries a fresh set of
hazards. We had in our lab a large but temperamental tensile tester, capable,
in theory, of breaking wire of up to 16 millimetres diameter. One day the
lab technician called me in and pointed sombrely to a fresh hole in the
floor.

‘When we broke the last specimen,’ he explained trenchantly, ‘one of
the bits come out and took out a lump of concrete, and I ain’t going to
break any more of them.’

Mind you, by his own account, it wasn’t his closest brush. In days gone
by (before I was in charge, I hasten to say), he had found an unmarked flask
of clear liquid while tidying up. Without thinking, he pulled out the stopper
and sniffed. What it was we will never know, but he couldn’t breathe. Fortunately,
the factory nurse was able to revive him, but it was a cautionary lesson.

I’ve led a pretty harmless existence by comparison – nothing worse than
a few cut fingers and a mild allergy to stainless steel – and I’m happy
to keep it that way. But I can’t help listening with fascination to others’
accounts of turbine blades failing under test and coming to rest half a
mile down the road, rings getting caught on machinery and taking fingers
off with them, and carriers on automatic plating plants slamming into workers,
with crushing consequences. They become a sort of morbid mythology, growing
in gory detail with each retelling. But perhaps, after all, they serve a
purpose; they remind us that steel is a lot harder than flesh, that unseen
hazards like toxic chemicals and electricity can lurk where least expected,
and that planning ahead to forestall accidents isn’t just a matter of professional
standards but of life and death.

Sue Birchmore is a project officer with the charity World Vision.

The idea was to let an assorted team of engineers with various backgrounds
and levels of experience tackle a simulated emergency and learn from our
mistakes without lives depending on us. REDR, the Register of Engineers
for Disaster Relief, descended on the Bolton Abbey Estate for three days
to set up Yorkshire’s first refugee camp. Armed only with some simple tools,
wood, ropes, and a couple of telegraph poles (courtesy of British Telecom),
we had to plan a water supply, design a camp layout, and bridge a beck masquerading
as a bottomless gorge in time for the arrival of the first survivors straggling
up the valley.

There was an existing bridge – old and unsound – which had to be demolished.
First, though, we had to rig up a temporary substitute to allow us (and
passing hikers) to get across. To be honest, I’m not sure I would have had
the nerve to cross our rope bridge if there really had been a raging torrent
hundreds of feet below. As it was, the dry weather had left the beck low
enough for some planks in the mud at the bottom to provide a very satisfactory
crossing until the new bridge was in place – but we slung the rope bridge
anyway by way of demonstration. The new bridge was actually already provided
for us by the estate, as a sort of life-size model kit in oak, instructions
not included; we had prepared our own designs as homework, but we could
hardly spend the whole weekend sawing.

It was all good fun – but why put a crowd of already qualified engineers
through a training exercise? Well, the business of REDR is to place able,
qualified engineers into relief situations. But it’s one thing to carry
out assignments in your own field of expertise, with the help of fellow
professionals and surrounded by all the aids modern technology can provide.
It’s quite another where you may well not have any of these resources to
call on, and may be expected to tackle problems outside your experience.

Yorkshire isn’t quite the mountains of Turkey, but the REDR planners
had done their best to throw at us the kind of problems you encounter in
real life. Some of the instructors posed as locals, not necessarily speaking
English or the truth, which made even finding the places where we were supposed
to rebuild a ford or tap a stream for piped water an exercise in itself.
It was hard physical as well as mental exercise at that: access was by foot,
taking in some pretty stiff gradients. Then, having arrived sweaty and footsore
at the stream proposed as our water source, we had to assess its suitability,
with minimal data and tools.

Quite deliberately, we hadn’t been warned about this particular exercise
so we weren’t prepared with instruments or water flow figures. We were provided
with an Abney level, so we could assess whether a route for a pipe could
be worked out avoiding any uphill stretches; but how to work out whether
the volume of the stream was enough for our camp?

In theory, you should be able roughly to guess the speed of flow by
timing a twig floating downstream. I carry a steel tape rule everywhere,
so we could measure the depth and breadth for an estimated cross-sectional
area and multiply by the speed for the volume flow rate. In theory. In practice,
the twig generally twirls about a bit then settles down to rest in a calm
spot behind a stone. Either that or it takes off like a torpedo in a localised
region of rapid flow which, if assumed representative of the whole stream,
gives a flow rate an order of magnitude higher than anything remotely plausible.
The best guess came from someone who had a plastic carrier bag with him.
Locating a small waterfall which concentrated the flow, he simply timed
the filling of the bag.

Then there was the planning of the camp layout. My group split into
two for this one, leaving half at the base camp with the drawing board,
while the rest of us went out to examine the stream which would serve as
the water supply until our pipeline from the hills was operational.

On the way, we began to notice some suspicious features on the land
designated for the camp; tufts of grass clinging to fences, and damp patches,
in spite of the dry weather we had been having. Elementary, once we started
to think about it; prone to flooding, and not at all a sensible place to
dump 7000 souls for what could end up being a long stay. We trudged back
to base to deliver the news to the stay-at-homes.

They had done an admirably thorough job, taking account of the UN guidelines
on the amount of space per person, arranging dwellings in groupings of 20
or so with latrines strategically placed, and providing stores and space
for recreation; they were not at all amused to be told that the whole lot
needed to be moved up the valley to some nice, gently rolling fields we
had located safely above flood level. Assuming, that is, that the locals
who owned those fields could be cajoled, commanded or bribed to allow their
use. It’s great to have a sound grasp of theory, but observation, common
sense and low cunning are equally vital.

To be an engineer is a useful thing; in disaster relief, it helps to
be a linguist, a woodsman, a diplomat, a mountaineer and a psychologist
as well.

Sue Birchmore is a project officer with the charity World Vision.

‘You ought to cut down on those,’ Joe – a doctor – told him. ‘Too much
fat in your diet’s bad for you.’

‘Ah!’ Harry replied cheerfully. ‘I’ve been eating like this all my life,
and it never did me any harm!’

‘That,’ said Joe, ‘is exactly what the villagers say about drinking
from their old ponds.’

It was one of those moments when you suddenly see something from a different
perspective.

The trouble is, when you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to drill a well,
put in a hand-pump and train local volunteers how to maintain it, frustration
can set in if you discover later that the villagers aren’t drinking the
water. I was part of a team evaluating the progress of the project, and
one of our findings was that in some of the villages they weren’t using
pump water for drinking because they didn’t like the taste.

Actually, they have good justification for their verdict on palatability.
Some of the ground water has quite a high iron content. Leave it to stand
a while and it forms a reddish scum; it’s unpleasant to drink, and stains
utensils. The problem was duly noted some time ago, and the introduction
of low-technology iron extraction units was planned, but it’s not that easy.

Some units have been successfully used in Asia, but there’s no automatic
guarantee the same design will be suitable for rural Ghana, particularly
if you want to use locally available materials to make it. A proper study
needs to be done before leaping in with a programme of installing equipment,
and that costs extra money. Since the extraction of money from donors is
rather more tricky than the extraction of iron from water, for the time
being the water still tastes of rusty nails, and getting people to use it
still relies on plain persuasion.

But then, who are we to feel superior about it? We in Britain have had
the message drummed into us for enough years now that we ought to eat less
fat and more fresh fruit-and-veg – but how much notice do we take? Every
time someone does a survey of eating habits, the improvement seems minimal
– more wholemeal bread and low-fat spreads, perhaps, but more fried chicken
takeaways by way of compensation. We feel a little more guilty about our
junk-food diet, but nationwide there hasn’t been much more than a token
movement towards healthier eating.

The trouble in both cases is that the link between cause and effect
is neither simple nor obvious. Not everyone who eats meat three times a
day and chips with everything dies from heart failure; not everyone who
drinks from a contaminated river gets diarrhoea. Problems caused by bad
eating habits can take years to show up; equally, you may not know you’ve
picked up guinea worm until months after drinking larvae-infested water.
Even when you know the connection, logical reasoning somehow doesn’t seem
so compelling when you are actually confronted with the choice between a
chocolate bar and a carrot-or between good-tasting and bad-tasting water.

Changing habits as fundamental as eating and drinking is difficult for
all of us. I suggest that the next time any development worker or health
educator feels inclined to be impatient or patronising towards an apparently
stubborn or stupid client, they should take a critical look at the contents
of his or her own lunch box.

Sue Birchmore is a project officer with the aid charity World Vision.

Computers are a prime example. When computer-aided design first hit
the drawing office, it was regarded with deep suspicion. After a while,
though, someone discovered that by zooming in on a small part of the drawing,
you could add little extras which are invisible at normal scale. Thus draughtsmen
could make their personal mark in the form of, for example, stick figures
bicycling along the lines of the drawing. The technology had become fun
and was no longer threatening.

In the office where I work now, word processors were until recently
a novelty for many of the staff. But this changed with the publication of
the Alternative Phone List, created by running the office’s list of names
through the spelling checker and selecting at random the alternative spellings
which it proposed. Thus my colleague Justin Byworth became Gushing Bywords,
while Derek Davies was transformed to Dirk Dallies. Alas, the verb ‘to sue’
is included in the spellchecker dictionary, while ‘Birchmore’ left it lost
for alternative words, so I have no alias.

Photocopiers are another source of anguish for the technologically naive.
Users are usually content simply to press the button and get a legible copy;
paper jams cause immediate panic, and refilling the toner hopper is definitely
Someone Else’s Job. But after a while, more interesting variations can be
discovered, such as repeated enlarging to monstrous proportions, superimposing
one copy on another, or creating photomontages. I knew for certain that
our office had conquered the last traces of nervousness when, following
the theft of several passport photos, a print entitled ‘Teenage(ish) Mutant
Hero Project Officers’ appeared on the notice board.

Programmable calculators are old hat now but I’m old enough to remember
when they first became affordable to those only slightly wealthier than
me. One such friend demonstrated his competence on his machine by persuading
it to flash up the numbers 7735.1 and 710.0553 in sequence. Turn it upside
down, and you have the wholly untruthful message, ‘I SELL ESSO OIL’.

Playful behaviour must have some evolutionary advantage, or it wouldn’t
have developed. In the modern workplace it seems to be a considerable asset
in adapting to new technology; by playing games with the latest bit of kit,
we explore its capabilities and develop expertise without inducing panic.
In a healthy learning environment, anguished cries of ‘What do I do now?’
and ‘Why’s it done that?’ are rapidly replaced by exclamations of ‘Look
what I’ve just made it do!’.

That, at any rate, will be my excuse to the boss the next time she comes
in and finds me using the computer graphics facility to draw someone a birthday
card.

Sue Birchmore is a project officer with the charity World Vision.

One thing I have noticed is that a disproportionate number of ideas
come into my head just before I drop off to sleep. I’m not alone in this;
Lewis Carroll went as far as designing a device he called a ‘nyctograph’
specifically for the purpose of writing down ideas which came to him in
bed so he wouldn’t have to get out into the cold.

‘Any one,’ he sagely wrote, ‘who has tried, as I have often done, the
process of getting out of bed at 2 am in a winter night, lighting a candle,
and recording some happy thought which would probably be otherwise forgotten,
will agree with me that it entails much discomfort.’

Carroll’s device for avoiding such discomfort consisted of a grid of
squares cut in cardboard, in which the writer marked characters of a special
‘square’ alphabet of lines and dots.

Some time ago, 91av featured an exercise in problem solving
for readers to try in their sleep. The aim was to provide material for research
into how some people manage literally to dream up the answer to puzzles.
You deliberately contemplate the problem you want to solve before going
to sleep, and your unconscious mind mulls it over, delivering the answer
(often cryptically encoded) in a dream. My attempt was a failure. The verbal
puzzles remained as complete a mystery to me asleep as awake, but as for
the spatial reasoning problem (how to make four equilateral triangles from
six matchsticks)-the answer popped into my head just before I fell asleep.

Presumably it has something to do with the brain being in a relaxed,
contemplative state. There seems to be some perverse mental law which says
you can only get at the answer to a problem when you’ve stopped bothering
about it. I’ve learnt, for example, that the best way to get at the name
that I’m desperately dredging my memory for is to say ‘What the heck’ and
start thinking about something else. Very often, it will pop into my consciousness
some time during the following few minutes.

It’s the same with puzzles. My crossword-loving husband has got quite
used to me pondering a clue for a few minutes before shaking my head, declaring
I haven’t the faintest idea, and then promptly delivering the answer.

Having accepted the fact that I can seldom come up with an idea under
pressure, if I’m asked to produce one I generally request time to think
about it. This is not strictly accurate; actually, I need time to not think
about it.

Whole books have been written on the subject of ideas, problem solving
and creativity. Edward de Bono’s volumes on lateral thinking deal with the
concept of ideas in general, but lots of writers on, for example, engineering
design, management, and creative writing touch on the practical aspects
of problem solving. Some advocate brainstorming sessions, others, disappearing
for a game of golf. I find leaving the problem for a while and doing some
cooking is the most effective, with the added bonus that even if I don’t
produce an idea, at least I produce something edible.

Perhaps the new generation of computers will shed some light on the
problem. The principle of a neural network in a computer, if I’ve understood
it correctly, is that the network is composed of many simple processors,
each linked to all the others to mimic the brain’s neurons and synapses.
If such networks really do simulate the brain, could it eventually be possible
to produce a creative computer? If so, perhaps the process of it generating
a brilliant new notion could be recorded.

The difficulty will be in achieving the requisite creative mental state
in the neural network; has anyone any good ideas about the computer equivalent
of a relaxing game of golf?

Sue Birchmore is a technical writer.

It’s a very good health centre – it has maternity and child health facilities,
a small inpatient ward for emergencies, a training programme for village
health workers and so on – but not, you might think, the most appropriate
development project. However, there’s a reason for it; the women.

As long ago as 1981, the women of Salawa started to get militant about
the lack of health facilities in their village. With support from the local
chief, they formed themselves into an official group, chose a site and started
preparing it. They used their farming tools to break stones – several tonnes
of them – for the foundations.

Eventually, through a church contact, they approached the relief and
development charity World Vision, which agreed to contribute 75 per cent
of the money needed. The villagers had to raise the rest themselves. When
I visited in June, to assess the project and write up a report as a representative
of World Vision Britain, the walls were going up.

All power to a very determined group of women. But still I had to ask
myself whether it wouldn’t have been more responsible to have persuaded
them to opt for a cheaper health programme and concentrate on agriculture,
reforestation and water supply.

Frankly, my sympathies are with the women. If I had to walk 20 kilometres
uphill, heavily pregnant, to give birth at the nearest hospital, I’d see
a health centre with a proper maternity unit as my priority. And if anyone,
however well intentioned, tried to tell me that they would help only with
other activities which they considered more important, they would get a
pretty short answer. Help me with what I want, or go help someone else!

But the interesting thing at Salawa is that the health centre has sparked
off all kinds of other developments. For a start, working as a group towards
a self-chosen objective, with guidance from a World Vision community worker,
the villagers have gained skills in planning, organisation, negotiation,
raising and handling money, and dealing with government departments, all
of which will be invaluable for whatever they choose to do in the future.
Then, as they held meetings to discuss the health centre, other issues started
to surface.

Water was one of the first of these issues, a logical progression once
it was recognised that a safe water supply would make a major contribution
to health. Once again, the women got out their hoes and started preparing
a site for a dam. The Ministry of Water Development was consulted, and plans
drawn up for a gravity-fed piped water system. The money will come mostly
from UNICEF, but the responsibility for labour during construction (and
maintenance once finished) stays with the villagers.

With health care and water supply provided for, the questions of deforestation
and agriculture came up. Time to consult the agriculture and forestry ministries
– with the result that indigenous species of trees have been planted around
the health centre site, an 8-hectare plot has been set aside for a tree
nursery, and zero-grazing areas have been allocated. Later on, there are
plans for a demonstration garden to teach anti-erosion farming techniques.

In the meeting room adjacent to his office, the chief showed me the
plans which the villagers have drawn up. Or, more exactly, painted up. They
come in the form of two large and graphically painted boards: ‘Present Salawa’
shows thatched huts beside dirt tracks, surrounded by bare, eroded soil,
while ‘Future Salawa’ is a scene of lush green fields, tin-roofed houses,
a health centre, a community centre, piped water, electricity pylons.

Overambitious, perhaps, in practice, though, the members of the project
committee I talked to were quite realistic about how long it could be before
even a small proportion of their aspirations are realised. As the chief
sagely remarked, if you want a finish, you must make a start.

A favourite story which one of my colleagues cites goes like this. Some
development workers asked the people of a poor village what they most wanted
for their community. A football pitch, they answered. A football pitch?
In a place where child mortality was high and waterborne diseases were rife?
But the villagers were adamant – they needed something to keep their young
people occupied. They got their football pitch. And having worked together
to get it, they went on to tackle the problems of water supply and health.

Appropriateness, I have to conclude, is in the eye of the user.

Sue Birchmore is a technical writer based in Birmingham.