This is an account of a personal experience of a small (40 inhabitants) expatriate community, which is engaged in a diamond-mining operation about 800 km up-country in West Africa. The post involves providing both primary health care and a community medicine service to an isolated community workforce (approximately 500 workers) and their families (approximately 2000 people) within a specificially defined area. All, expatriates included, live in mud huts with jungle straw roofs, use deepbore latrines, have community central messing. The territory is vast open space, mountainous (2500-3000 feet above sea level) bush savannah. Communications are minimal (no telephones, but daily radio) and letters move in and out weekly. The expatriates seek to carve out for themselves a life-style, in terms of cultural and self-adjustment; while the doctor attempts to maintain physical, mental, emotional and environmental This is indeed difficult, for in addition to his own self-adjustment, he has also to fulfil his role within the community with the limited means of mud hut, tin-roofed clinic and minimal staff and facilities. This is virgin medical territory where, expatriates apart, Western medicine is new to the populace. Experience here and in similar locations brings to mind a crucial aphorism: beware of creating a state in practice of too much medicine, too little health. The countryside is that of virgin savannah bush, consisting mainly of elephant grass and trees, with clearings by rivers, where small villages have grown up. The xoad to the community location was virtually made passable by the operation; and there is no infrastructure of water, electricity or sewage/rubbish disposal in the surrounding villages, and no pre-existing medical care facilities except b u s h doctors. The nearest hospital is at least 4 h away by bush track if this is passable and the rivers low enough to be forded by vehicle. The climate is seasonal, with a classical wet season from June to September with approximately 100 inches of rain. Day temperatures range between 70 and 90 °F; and night temperatures between 50 and 70 °F; the humidity is variable and often 90%, and dust haze persists in the dry season when the bush fire risk is high. The territory is river and swamp, between the ranges of hills; but in the valleys the soil is good and potentially productive but domestic, food-producing animals are few. It is within this concept that the operation built its camp of mud huts, mess and headquarters, with the workforce and their families in another camp approximately 1 mile