Question: do you like working in Africa with different cultures or is it harder , and do they have the same equipment as us in the UK ?? xxxxxx

Helen Fletcher answered on 15 Jun 2011:

hi! I love working in Africa with all the different cultures. I have worked in The Gambia, Senegal, Zambia, Ethiopia, South Africa, Kenya and Malawi. I knew NOTHING about African culture before I went there and am amazed at how different the different countries are. I work in Cape Town in South Africa which is so developed and sunny and warm you think you could be in a city on the coast of Spain! The lab there is better equipped than ours (so is the lab in Kenya!). In The Gambia they have one set of traffic lights in the entire country, it’s a tiny and not well developed. There is a small coastal region which has lots of tourist hotels and the research unit is right among the hotels. There is no higher education in The Gambia so very few Gambians work as scientists (other than at the lowest level) which doesn’t seem fair to me. In Senegal we work with the virology and immunology lab at the le Dantec Hospital in Dakar. The Senegalese scientists are amazingly clever and working with them is the same as working with a lab based in Paris or Germany.