“I spent my days in Old Fangak treating the children that kept turning up in our Emergency Room, which, like most of the rest of the hospital, was nothing more than a muddy, mouldy, intensely humid tent. Many of these kiddies arrived comatose with severe malaria, having seizures and showing signs I’d only ever previously seen in medical textbooks. And I spent my nights sweating, swatting at the mosquitoes that bored their way like noisy, vampiric little ninjas through the multiple barriers of insecticide-treated net, then weapons-grade repellent, then my skin, and listening for (that is, hoping not to hear) the radio crackling into life with ‘Dr Lachie, Dr Lachie for ER’ – the summons to strap on my headtorch and stomp back through the mud in my gumboots to see what new sickness the swamp had brought forth.” From the Introduction