A history of love that's out of Africa

THE scorching sun baked the ground under her feet as Jo Vallis stood at her father's grave and finally allowed a life of suppressed anguish to melt away.

The gentle lilt of African voices filled the air around her in a moving choral tribute to the father Jo both loved and resented, who had followed in his own father's footsteps to bring help to one of the world's poorest countries and whose final resting place beneath Zambia's dry soil she had never even seen.

It was supposed to be about filling gaps in her own life. But her farewell to her father 30 years after his death, was only a start . . .

Today Jo is packing her bags for her second trip to Zambia. This time she will be joined by her 22-year-old son Paul, the fourth generation of her family to set foot on the dry earth of Chitambo where her family roots are anchored.

Together, with former First Minister Jack McConnell, they will be among a group of Scots presenting to the hospital there with a new ambulance bought following fundraising in her home town of Penicuik where Jo, 54, lives with husband Richard.

But that is just one element of a twisting road that has led Jo back to Chitambo. "I'm not religious but I feel there is something there that is moving me towards Chitambo," she admits. "So every time I feel that it's time to draw a line underneath everything that has happened, there's something else that pushes me closer to it."

It was a random chain of events that pushed both sets of her grandparents to Africa, her mother's parents to Chitambo, her father's to neighbouring Malawi.

"My mother's father, John Todd, was a man of rare qualities, a fearless pioneering adventurer," she says. "He studied medicine at Edinburgh but he became a First World War pilot – an ace with 18 strikes to his name. Not many survived, so he was quite something."

He took his first wife, Helen, to Africa and the Livingstonia Mission Hospital in Malawi but cancer struck and the couple returned to Scotland where she died.

"The urge to go back was strong, though. He remarried and went to Chitambo, close to where the missionary David Livingstone died and a hospital that had been founded by his relatives," says Jo. "He helped part-rebuild the hospital in 1953 and laid its foundation stone. His photo still hangs in the doctor's office."

While he helped save lives at Chitambo, Jo's father's parents were fulfilling their own calling as missionaries to Africa. "Granny and Grandpa Currie were dad's parents – granny was a tall, dignified character who trained as a nurse at the Deaconess Hospital in Edinburgh, a stone's throw from my own office in Hill Square.

"She went alone to Malawi and was carried up the coast on a mashila or a hammock. Her first job in Blantyre was to measure the depth of the graves.

"She met Grandpa Currie there. He was a missionary printer who took the first press to Malawi."

While Jo's parents, Hamilton and Isobel, were born hundreds of miles apart in Africa, they met in Glasgow where he was studying medicine and she was training as a nurse. Their shared African childhoods, a family history of missionary work and a united respect for the continent drew them first to South Africa and then to Zambia.

"I was six months old when they moved north," says Jo. "We lived in a place called Mwenzo near the Tanzanian border in northern Rhodesia. It was magical."

But then came an event that would shatter Jo's world – the horrific death of her mother.

"I was seven when she died in childbirth," she recalls.

"My father was her doctor. He tried his best to save her, tearing open her chest and doing open heart massage. She died anyway.

A chasm of grief opened and we were split asunder." Indeed, Jo, her younger sister Marion and two older brothers, Dave and Doug, were divided – the girls sent to Renfrew where her mother's parents had returned after their work at Chitambo and the boys to boarding school.

Their unsettled childhood continued when their father married an Australian domestic science teacher, Libby, and arranged for the girls to go to boarding school 350 miles north of Chitambo.

Jo recalls a challenging relationship with her stepmother, and her father. "I was resentful and naughty," she recalls. "My father tried to get me to apologise for my behaviour and I refused."

She was 17 when sent back to Edinburgh to study – a culture shock. "I was cast into a strange, alien culture. I didn't even know how to use a public telephone. And I never saw my dad again."

Her father died at Chitambo three years later after bouts of malaria. "He was about to retire to Scotland but the local chiefs sent him a ceremonial axe and a letter saying: 'We hear you are leaving us. Rather stay and die among us'. He did just that.

But his death was a distant unreality to me."

At least until 2003, when Jo – who works in medical training – and Marion, a GP in New Zealand, and their younger half-sister Zanna returned to Zambian soil for the 30th anniversary of his death and to visit, for the first time, his resting place.

They were met by locals who remembered them as children and who gathered around them at their father's grave for an impromptu, emotionally charged memorial service. "There was a massive sense of coming home," says Jo. "I thought it would have changed beyond recognition. It hadn't changed at all. It was so familiar, like putting on an old shoe. I thought this is why I am, this is why I am the way I am."

It could have been an end to the family's links with the tiny, poorly equipped hospital. Instead Jo returned to Penicuik to be confronted by events that drew her closer to Zambia, from the G8 summit and its focus on African poverty to an ad in a local newsletter appealing for people to launch a fundraising group for Africa.

Next Saturday, the Penicuik for Africa-funded ambulance will be driven to Chitambo marking the highlight of the hospital's centenary celebrations – with the great grandson of the man who rebuilt it at the wheel.

"I'm just hoping that this time I'm emotionally prepared for Chitambo," says Jo.


AMBULANCE RELIEF FOR WORLD'S POOREST
TRADITIONALLY dominated by the copper mining industry, Zambia began sliding in the 1970s to a level of poverty from which it never recovered.

Its foreign debt exceeded £3 billion in 2000, HIV/AIDS is widespread, and a growing population is putting a strain on the economy.

Average per-capita income is less than £400 a year, making Zambia one of the world's poorest countries.

The need for an ambulance at the hospital in Chitambo, near the Bangweulu Swamps, was highlighted by a visit in 2006 by Jo Vallis' brother, David Currie, a neurosurgeon in Aberdeen.

Delivering £1000 of cash and equipment raised by the Penicuik for Africa fund-raising campaign, he reported back on the dire situation.

The delivery of the ambulance on Saturday is the result of an incredible fund-raising effort in Penicuik, helped by two anonymous donations totalling £15,000.