Amade is back at work and in extremely high spirits. In his words, ‘the devils have left him’, and he’s in rude health again. He had a permanent headache for a few days, and under orders from us, finally went to hospital. You are very likely to leave the hospital a lot less well than when you arrived. It is easily Ilha’s grandest building with a bombastic neo-classical entrance, flanked by two equally over-stated wings, which in its heyday attracted ill people from as far as Kenya, two countries north. Now of course it is abandoned and home to chickens and squatters, with the staircases missing and ceilings open to the sky. Only the southern wing functions as a hospital still, with nurses begging visitors for cash, and beds only for the most unwell.

Amade tested negative for malaria there, and they sent him away with a tiny envelope of white pills that were all different and unmarked. He said they made him a lot worse and had stopped taking them. Since I took his temperature once with the thermometer we brought, he has been back for more a few times, sometimes hinting, sometimes asking outright for his temperature to be taken again. It has always shown normal. This time, we sat expectantly as usual until it beeped, and it was really quite high. A second test showed he had malaria, after a few days of misdiagnosis and no treatment.