First Day at the Hospital

This post is two weeks behind, but my internet access has WAY gone down since I arrived. I'm also not sure how much information I'm supposed to divulge in a public forum about these hospitals. So I have to edit my posts a little more, which means they take even longer...

                We left TCDC in the morning (a bitter-sweet farewell, and an intimidating step towards independence, as we’ve been together in a group for a whole month now). Got dropped off at 12 at our house in the doctor’s compound of the largest hospital that EWH services in Tanzania and full of wazungu medical students from all over Europe. Our housekeeper, Frida, was there, and she showed us around the place (it’s big and beautiful, with a little kitchen, a large sink for clothes-washing, two small bathrooms (one with a heated shower—two months in a row? My, I’m lucky), a dining room, sitting-room, and four bedrooms. There’s a tiny porch in back and a huge front- and back-yard (has two mango trees =) ), which was a tremendous relief to me. I was afraid of the culture shock going from a place as green and lovely as TCDC to a big hospital right by a sizeable city. Living in a place with only buildings would be a trial by fire, I think. But we have a daily fifteen minute walk from the compound to the hospital, and the entire way is by a waste field with a row of flowering trees, with Kilimanjaro’s snow-capped peak visible to the north and choirs of birds singing constantly over each other the whole time. It’s very nice. Frida shows us where we can buy food (a ten-minute walk down to a dirt street of market stands, stores, and little pubs/restaurants), and tells us that the power is out but there’s a gas stove we can use—except the fuel canister’s empty. This is a surprisingly alarming situation: I thought the absence of power would be no big deal, but I hadn’t anticipated not being able to cook. Or boil water. We work out the logistics with the housing coordinator (who’s on vacation, but answers her phone) and get that all straightened out and go buy groceries. After a very late lunch, we walk up to the main gate and ask for the engineering compound, with a motley combination of English and Swahili that the guy at the gate understands well. He walks us there and a fundi offers us a seat while we wait for someone to talk to. We meet the secretary for the head of department and find out that the hospital closes in half an hour, at 3:30 PM (that’s unexpected), and the head of department will not be able to see us in that time. He doesn’t seem like he knew we were coming, but maybe the information didn’t get passed on. We’re told to return the next morning at 8:30 and sent away. So we wander around the grounds (KCMC’s a big place), trying to get the lay of things, and then head back home. (Our big accomplishment of our wandering is the discovery of the computer room. Apparently we can get internet free here, although the guy who runs the place says that that’s a special favor to us for being his friends. Heheh, cool beans.) But we forgot some important groceries for our dinner and have to go back to the market strip again—when we meet up with a med student from the United States who recommends to us a restaurant down the road, it’s late enough that we give up on cooking and check it out. On the way back we get the groceries (spaghetti sauce and pasta noodles) and are shocked at the price difference. We paid between 1000 and 2000 /= for a pre-made dinner…9000/= for the pasta and sauce, unmade, with no meat. *raises eyebrows* That motivates cooking for yourself. Turns out pasta is a pretty wazungu-style meal, which we enjoy thoroughly the next night, but that if we want to save money by cooking for ourselves, we really need to cook Tanzanian-style food, which means beans, rice, and lots and lots of veggies.

                The most interesting part of the night is when I go to take a shower, realize I forgot my towel, and find that I can’t unlock the door to the bathroom to go get it. After jiggling the key back and forth for five or ten minutes, I resign myself to having to publicize my situation and call Christine over to see if she can do something from the other side. There’s not a whole lot she can do without the key, which is too big to fit beneath the tight edges of the door, so she goes and gets Fred. The two of them try picking the lock, but I’m positive that the jammed mechanism is in the sliding bar of the lock. They take apart the door handle (while I twiddle my thumbs on the inside—if a key won’t fit through, a screwdriver certainly can’t), but can’t access the slider. We examine the bathroom window, but the screen is nailed in and anyway, there are bars in front of the glass. Fred suggests breaking down the door. I suggest we call the housekeeper first. “If we can’t do anything about the lock and we’re engineers, I’m sure she can’t,” Christine points out. “Yeah,” I say, leaning my head back against the wall and then realizing it still has wet paint on it from earlier this afternoon. “But if we have to start tearing her house apart, at least we could get permission first.” We call the housekeeper’s number, but it’s almost ten by this time and she doesn’t answer—probably asleep. As a last resort, we call our coordinator, Lora, and ask for advice. (Great, now it’s really public. I’ll never hear the end of this.) She tells them to get the security guards down the street. So my two lab partners head off down the street and I remember vaguely the pot of water I set to boil on the electric stove—hmm, at this point, over an hour ago. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if there was a kitchen fire while they all were gone? The security guard wakes up Mama Frida, who gets her husband, and so it’s not long before there’s a big group in the house clustered around the other side of my unusual prison. Frida’s husband takes a big knife and wedges it in the door, releasing the pressure on the lock while I turn the key. Magically, inexplicably, the catch releases. Yay! I’m free! We try the key again, with the door open. On the outside, it works perfectly fine. On the inside, it will lock—and then not unlock. Interesting. Mama Frida apologizes and I laugh it away. Thanks, guys, for helping me out. The adults all leave and I head over to the kitchen to check on the water. “I turned it off before we left,” Christine says. Oh, ok. Good. “It wasn’t boiling?” “No.” After more than an hour on the stove, I can still stand to touch it with my fingers. Stupid. This isn’t going to work. I start looking around the kitchen for other options—oh look, a tea kettle—and come across the knife again. “I didn’t know we had a knife.” Christine looks over. “Me neither. It’s good that he came in here. I’d never have thought of trying that.” I turn the knife over in my hands. He wedged it open as I turned, so that the jamb could slide out of the lock… The key didn’t turn when the door was wide open. I look at Christine. “How could that possibly have worked?” She shrugs. I put the knife down and move the hot water over to the gas stove. The good news is, I didn’t have to spend the night in the bathroom, without a towel. And we didn’t have to break down the door.

Massive (but brief) Update

                Events that have gone on during the four weeks at KCMC:

WEEK 1—

June 21—30-hour flight to Tanzania begins.

Most interesting part: Besides meeting the other EWH students and getting to explore the Amsterdam airport (doubtless more interesting because I was so loopy with sleep loss), I sat the last leg of the trip with a woman who’d survived the Rwandan genocide while pregnant and with a small child.

June 22—Arrival at TCDC after dark.

           Most interesting part: Being welcomed by our host parents and getting to know who my roommate was going to be. Seeing their clean house and feeling stunned by their generous accommodations.

June 23—First day of class—intensive Swahili training (greetings).

Most interesting part: Learning the proper way to say hello was a relief. I also got to meet Kisanji and Ritha, both very memorable teachers—the former because he’s always goofy and cheerful even though he’s the oldest there, and Ritha because she’s young and beautiful and polite and encouraging.

June 24—Second day of class—full day of technical training.

Most interesting part: Getting Larry’s overview of what kind of work we’re going to be doing in the hospitals: he really hammers home on our need for ingenuity in a country where spare parts and users manuals are not available. Also comparing with classmates what sorts of things surprised us about our host families when we first arrived: bucket showers, having a maid, being always first to get food at dinner, having six hours between meals, using squat-a-potties, how welcoming everyone is, having electricity sporadically available. In the evening, Lotte and I sit on either side of little Joachim and point to objects in his picture books and try to learn their names.

June 25—Saturday; opening social. We do a coffee tour where we get to walk around a coffee farm and then clean, grind, and roast our own coffee. Then we eat lunch and go on a walk around a lake that’s supposed to have caves where local Christians worship. The “caves” are actually small and dirty cliffs with prayers painted on wood or written on papers and either hung on trees or wedged into the rock. The only thing cave-like about them is the way tarps are spread from the cliff to the side of the path so that people can sleep there if they need a long time to pray.

Most interesting part: The view of Mt. Meru from the lake, the children who followed us on the coffee farm, the birds I got pictures of and the mango-guava-avocado juice they served us with lunch.

View of Mt Meru from Lake Diwala

June 26—Sunday. Went to church with our host family, which is Pentecostal. A longer, louder, and more energetic service than I’m used to, all in Swahili. Afterwards, a brief and unexpected sojourn in the Arusha market while the family goes back for the afternoon/evening session, during which Lotte and I both get scalped by a merchant there. (I bought the adapter I needed even though it wasn’t great quality, even though it was Sunday, even though I was guessing that I was probably paying a little bit too much for it, and ended up kicking myself over my shoddy purchase for the entirety of the next three days.)

Most interesting part: the gorgeous gospel music the choir sang. Plus getting to spend all day with Lotte. =)

June 27—Classes start, regular schedule. We split into three groups: in mine is Spencer, Trent, Aubrey, Hersh, Rune, Matt, and Larry. Mama Ritha is our teacher.

Most interesting part: I love Mama Ritha’s teaching. Also, we see huge storks in the trees.

WEEK 2—

                June 28—Classes continue. I compose my first sentence all by myself at the dinner table—this is where almost all my vocabulary comes from and what it centers around.

                Most interesting part: Lotte sees a monkey through the bathroom window in the morning.

June 29—More classes. Swahili in the morning and technical training in the afternoons. I begin to feel jaded by Larry’s emphasis on the hard realities of the situation at our hospitals. On the other hand, I feel put-out by Lora’s blithe way of handling my anxieties—as though she knows I’ll be fine but doesn’t bother to tell me in advance what I need to do to be fine.

Most interesting part: I go to the gym with Rasmus for my first attempt at exercise in goodness-knows-how-long. I’m very weak and out-of-breath. Rasmus suggests it’s the altitude. I hope so, otherwise I’m going to be a sludgy puddle when I get back to taekwondo.

June 30—Again, same old same-old.

Most interesting part: talking with one of our host brothers, Michaia, as part of my homework assignment. We start by talking about the snake he found coming out of the toilet near the gym; then we talk about what a rhino thinks of a person—“Maybe they think that the head is a tail. Maybe they think toes are eyes”—then he describes a horror film he saw until bedtime. Little Joe pouts over in a corner, jealous of the attention.

July 1—Trip to Mt. Meru Hospital, our first hands-on, real chance to see a hospital and what it’s like to work there. We don’t even get to see the inside—there’s a pile of equipment sitting in the dust outside one of the walls and after standing around uncertainly for a little while, we put down our toolboxes and hop to it. There are two wheelchairs with bent or missing wheels which can be combined into one working one, and a bunch of hand-held lanterns with dead rechargeable batteries. I find two water heaters with heating elements that are rusted beyond repair, and then Larry suggests that I go around to the different groups (one working on blood-pressure cuffs, one on an oxygen concentrator, one on a bunch of carts/wheelchairs/trolleys that were brought out once the excited staff saw the first working wheelchair) and make a shopping list of all their needs. Since we were told not to bring anything we didn’t want stolen or destroyed, I’m just glad I brought a pen; I tear a scrap of paper from my planner and write everything down and give it to Larry. “Give it to Lora,” he says. “Why are you giving it to me?” Lora asks. “I’m not going shopping. They can do it.” She sounds almost petulant. I freeze, list in hand. Maybe she thinks we’re being lazy, or far too timid—maybe she knows something we don’t, something that tells her that we are capable of shopping on our own. But I don’t know it. Heck, I’m at the stage where I can say “Toilet—where?” without a verb, or “I like food! Thank you very much!” How am I supposed to ask for three meters of 24-gage wire and two male outlet heads for an extension cord? Without getting harassed or lost? “If they do it, they’ll be gone all day,” Larry answers, and Lora gives in. Me and Spencer follow her on a long walk down the street, into town, and I find out that in most of the shops, people speak very good English and generally quote you the actual selling price. It takes us a few hours, and I’m glad that big Spence is there (bold and American as he is), because he’s not afraid to go up to people and start talking to them in English. I keep feeling mute because I can’t speak Swahili and I’m afraid to assume that people can speak English, so I ask a few questions myself and mostly just fund the purchases Spencer asks for. We get back long after lunch is over and I get to see a creative demonstration of the functionality of the oxygen-concentrator that little Spencer and Amogh have just fixed: We find a stick to catch on fire, blow it out, and while it’s still glowing, hold it up to the outlet tube and see if it lights back up. It’s imprecise, but it works! Congratulations all around. My lights sit sadly in the corner. There is no replacement battery for them.

Most interesting part: when Spencer held the flaming stick too close to the oxygen tube and accidentally made it a mini flame-thrower. When he stomped it out you could see his footprint in the melted plastic. Fortunately once it was cut off, no one could tell the difference. XD

July 2—Trip to Ngorongoro crater! I showed you pictures before. =)

Most interesting part: Um…I dunno; I don’t think there was really anything interesting that happened that day. *wink* Can you believe—we totally saw LIONS! And elephants! And zebras and antelopes! (so pretty!) And hyenas and ostriches and warthogs and wildebeest and bison and hippos and even a rhino, a cheetah, and a jackal. Watching the scenery change from green and tall to dry and grassy on the way up was pretty cool too—sometimes you could see some Maasai herders in the distance. On the way home, we were driving as it was getting dark, and partway through one city we hit a cow. Or really, the cow hit us; I think we stopped in time. But this guy was driving his cow with a stick (as cowherders are wont to do) and started running across the street with it into oncoming traffic. The poor cow was blinded by the headlights and barreled straight into us; then wheeled off and dazedly ran into the side of a different car. The man whistled at it and kept running; as far as I could tell, the cow kept trying all the way up the street, probably hitting car after car. o_0

July 3—Fast Sunday. I worried about trying to explain to my host mother why I didn’t want to eat for a day, but she knew exactly what I meant. Stayed home and had myself a little scripture time; it was the only day that felt like a real Sunday and it was a wonderful break.

Most interesting part: In the evening, Lotte and I took a walk down a path through a small woods and a cornfield right outside of TCDC. We met two different groups of people in the cornfield, which was pretty funny. We saw several picturesque little parts of a creek, lots of butterflies, and some astoundingly fluffy Colobus monkeys.

July 4—Kisanji is my group’s teacher, starting this week. It’s the 4^th of July, but we don’t get any days off until next Monday. However, another group of American students does—the GPA girls, who kindly invite us to their bonfire in the evening for smores and roasted bananas.

Most interesting part: Swaying in time to the songs that the GPA girls played on their ukulele, facing the campfire and looking up at the stars. (The stars are different here. There’s one string of them that meanders across the entire sky, and I have yet to identify the Southern Cross). The girls are very friendly and have amazing voices. I love campfires.

July 5—Aubrey’s birthday, and her host mom has offered to throw her a birthday party. First, though, I have to find a way to get passport photos, as the ones I brought for Lora aren’t the right kind. I get my first dala-dala ride with Ash-girl and Angela to Makumira, where I get my pictures and also get to see their home-stay. Then I decide to walk back home and get a good look at the scenery (and maybe some exercise). The sun drops as I walk and I enter the TCDC driveway when the sky is a moody twilight: walking alone in the dark was probably not my best decision of the trip. After dinner I join with some other students for a taxi ride back to Makumira (dala-dalas don’t run that late) and help Angela hand-wash her socks before I actually join the party. =)

Most interesting part: Um…walking back home alone was a dangerous thing to do. I have a far more detailed and intense version of this story written down if anyone wants to read it. ^_^

Also, we built a variable power supply in lab, and I about flipped. “We use this, like, EVERY DAY in school!” Other, non-ECE students: “we do?” Oh, shucks; you know how happy I am about my major, this just makes it better and better.

July 6—Trip to Tengeru Market. As part of our curriculum, our teachers took us to a market, gave us a thousand shillings, and told us to try to buy as much as possible for what in America is the equivalent of $0.66. I got some carrots and oranges (a good-sized pile of carrots for 300 /=, four oranges for 100 /= apiece) and then went to find Lotte to ask about buying Mama Resti the sugar bananas and small watermelon she requested. I can’t find her. I consider joining a different group of students, but realize that I’m not going to speak any Swahili that way. I hear that Lotte is exploring the clothes section of the market—a part that I didn’t know existed—so I head over to try to find her. While the fruit and vegetable market is packed—sometimes you have less personal space than a group of freshman on the C-1 bus (that really makes you want to check for your wallet)—people are a lot grabbier in the clothes market. “Mzungu!” “Come here, my American friend.” Don’t touch me. I pull away and move to a different side. I’d really like to buy a khanga—they’re the traditional fabrics women use to wrap around themselves here—and a friendly, non-grabby man with excellent English offers to assist me in translating the words that run around each khanga’s borders. Well, first he invites me for a drink. I don’t drink and I haven’t got a whole lot of time left, so I refuse. I get the impression that I’ve done something incredibly rude, but after a moment he recovers himself, and takes me around to all the khanga stands. I can’t find a good combination of colors and words, which is funny: all the ones that I like turn out to have wedding invitations on their edges. I don’t know what time I’m supposed to be back at the bus—12:15 seems like the time by which we’d have to be going, but I don’t want to be late so I start heading back at 12 or 12:04. Except, just at the edge of the market, the man wants me to check out one last stall before I go… Ten minutes later, Kisanji shows up at my side, to remind me that it’s time to go to the bus. I finish my purchase and disentangle myself to follow him back—and realize that he’s not moving on to make sure anybody else knows. Which means I’m the last one. Which means I’m late. And if I was so late that they sent a teacher back into that crowd to look for me…goodness gracious; what time was I supposed to be back? Turns out the correct answer was 12, sharp, and I feel really guilty about it.

                Most interesting part: My past thirty-six hours have not been spectacular. Stage two of culture shock hits me hard and I cry to my roommate that I’m too freakishly naïve to handle Africa. Why don’t I have more common sense?

July 7—Class. I walk with Lotte and Rasmus to Usa River to get money from the ATM there and to see his house.

                Most interesting part: lots of Tanzanian houses to look at, made from everything from patchwork scraps of tin to clay-chinked sticks. Also a gorgeous view of Mt. Meru.

July 8—Trip to Mt Meru Hospital. This time, I stay behind while almost everyone else leaves to go shopping. I don’t fix anything big, but I feel more productive than last week. =)

                Most interesting part: A lady comes up to me with a broken digital blood-pressure cuff. I solder on a new battery pack and have the fixed version ready within a few hours. That makes me really happy—yay, progress!—hopefully I affixed the battery pack on sufficiently sturdily. ^_^

July 9—Start of our three-day-weekend! I go with 15 other students to Tanga beach by bus.

Most interesting part: The conspicuous lack of bathroom breaks during a nine-hour bus ride. (I was scared to drink more than two sips of water the entire ride.) Also, I gave peanuts to a crying child who was lying against his mother’s shoulder as she sat in the aisle with her head underneath an adjacent woman’s handbag. I felt like it would have been nice to trade places after a while, but it seemed infeasible…

July 10—Tanga beach! Our hotel was Peponi Beach Resort—and true to its name, it was a paradise. The Indian Ocean sparkled, the bandas we stayed in were big and had flush toilets and hot water between 5:30 and 7; the food was AMAZING and so, so cheap. We went on a snorkeling trip that included long and lazy sailing ride in a traditional dhow to an island that only materialized after the tide had gone down a little ways. If you’re ever in Tanzania, you have to go here. HAVE to. The cost of my entire trip—food and snorkeling included—was less than a single plane ticket to Zanzibar. That’s how incredible it was.

                Most amazing part: Besides the exotic delight of sitting on a sandbar where the waves washed up over your feet from both sides at once; besides my fascination with the dhow and the deliciousness of the fresh seafood and the eel I found next to a red and white starfish that looked like a Chinese pagoda, my other favorite part would have to be walking along the beach for over an hour late at night. The stars were incredibly bright, so that you could see every foreign constellation (if only you could recognize them), and the moon was so full that we didn’t use any flashlights. You could see the waves and the rocks and the coconut trees, all by moonlight, and your own clear shadow. Really beautiful.

July 11—Bus ride back. About the same as the first, except this time I got to sit by the window, which was much preferable.

                Most amazing part: The epic mountains visible almost the entire way back. Could have been out of Lord of the Rings.

July 12—In class, taught by Mama Ellyn this week.

                Most amazing part: With the imminence of our departure upon us (one week and counting), I start getting concerned that we’re not going to cover all the material I think is necessary to learn. I can say I like every specific food our host family has ever set on the table, I can construct a fairly long sentence describing the sequence of errands I ran in a day, but my ability to say what I want to say is limited by 1) my access to a dictionary to aid my minimal vocabulary, and 2) the amount of time it takes for me to deconstruct my sentence into its simplest possible format. I start asking my teachers during breaks about prepositions and locatives, passive tense and subjunctive (urk—intermediate level material, sorry, Jenna) and Swahili equivalents for useful words like “so” and “if,” “that” and “while.” To my surprise, the grammar for all these (which, in English, would be different cases requiring different grammar constructions) is pretty minimalistic—it tries to use a single tense and/or vocabulary word in as many possible cases as possible. Which is easier for me, although imprecise. Suddenly I start making a lot more connections and progressing grammatically in leaps and bounds.

July 13—Class again.

                Most amazing part: I’m trying to learn how to cook from Mama Resti. I stir the sauce for the meat one night and watch her make the vegetables. Also, overheard:

                James, trying to arrange a dinner for Thursday. “Is anyone allergic to anything?”

                Hersh, with a totally straight face: “Pollen.”

July 14—Class. Lab involves a visit from an engineer (Rebecca) who came with last year’s EWH program and decided to stay in Tanzania to work at a fluoride water treatment company. The rich volcanic soil of Kilimanjaro is full of fresh minerals and fluoride washes out of them into local waterways, causing disabilities and dental problems. She gave a really interesting talk about how she and the professor who invited her are using bone char to filter water and attempting to spread the technology throughout the countryside.

                Most amazing part: All the EWH students came together to make a dinner together: a sort of chili with ground beef and beans, guacamole, chapati (for tortillas), rice, and a little bit of mango. There was so much food, and it tasted incredible! We had more than we could eat, even with all our teachers joining us, so we invited some of the GPA girls back over to eat with us and had a really fun (and delicious) evening.

July 15—Hospital trip to Seliani, where Lotte and Audrey will be working all next month. It’s a privately owned, Lutheran hospital, much quieter and cleaner than Mount Meru and with beautiful gardens and grass. Some of the GPA girls come with us to help with translation. Here is my last chance to learn about machines first-hand, so I fix a light and bypass a burnt-out fuse in a broken transformer, but mostly I walk around and look over people’s shoulders as they work on oxygen concentrators, compressor motors, and other, bigger equipment. After we get back, there’s a short traditional dance at TCDC with drums; we watch it and Ash-girl says she’ll teach us all to shake our hips like that if we want. ^_^

                Most amazing part: Finally did my first real engineering fix! I bypassed the broken fuse with a really thin piece of wire. It’s imprecise, but if there’s a lot of current, it should blow. That made me happy.

July 16—A busy day! I went with Larry and several of the other students to an orphanage (the Usa River Children’s Center) in the morning, visited Mama Resti’s clothing shop in the afternoon, then spent the rest of the day at the Maasai market in Arusha admiring the traditional handicrafts and buying souvenirs. In the evening we went back to Arusha to go clubbing—an experience which I didn’t yearn for, but which the others said was not to be missed. Jen found two Tanzanian girls and asked them to teach us how to dance (since Ash wasn’t there at the time), and they were really good dancers and really nice and really good about leading us away if a man was dancing too closely/awkwardly behind us. So it turned out to be fun.

                Most amazing part: I liked the Maasai market; I bargained all my souvenirs down to below the store-keepers’ lowest prices. Heheh, I got good at making them exasperated with me, but I spent a lot of money and got a lot of stuff, so I think everything turned out well. Another interesting part: watching men with long, beaded-shell necklaces and red/blue checkered Maasai robes spooning with mzungu women. That was weird.

July 17—Went to Arusha National Park on another safari, after stopping by Rebecca’s house for an hour first to see the water treatment plant. Felt bad about it being Sunday, but it was so green and beautiful.

                Most amazing part: Saw lots of giraffes, more zebras, some gorgeous flamingos (you think they’re goofy and awkward, but that’s only because in the zoos you never see them flying) and a tiny, adorable dik-dik.

July 18—Class with Mama Ritha again. She’s really proud of how much I’m learning. =) In technical training we take apart lots of working machines, which makes me feel more confident that I know how they work.

                Most amazing part: Lotte makes dinner for the family tonight. It’s really fun, because she makes the family feel like the guests, we get to talk with Esther (the maid) more than ever before, and Lotte even says a prayer in Danish over the food, even though she’s the only non-Christian there. It was a lovely, lovely meal.

July 19—Final day of Swahili class, including a test. Which was easy.

                Most amazing part: “I wish I could have you for intermediate Kiswahili,” Ritha said. “Not just me—any teacher would be happy.” Aw, thank you!!!

July 20—Last day at TCDC. It’s a little sad. But they make it fun. We say our farewells to all our amazing teachers, including Larry, who has to leave a month early due to a family emergency. *sadness*

July 21—Move to our new hospitals: I’m working at two hospitals, near Moshi.

More later!

Jara

               

Week 2: In Which I try to Redeem Myself from the Mundaneness of my Last Post

           My most recent update, if I may flatter myself, was after the standard of J.R.R. Tolkien: It might have had the makings of an engaging story, but the excitement was certainly buried in the details. =P The good news is, now that I have my backdrop set, I can move forward with the adventures! And there have already been many. For my busy friends, I again bullet-point (sorry, all the bullet-points are long, feel free to skim)—but the most exciting part of this post is, I’ve decided to include lots of pictures. It may take two hours to submit, but I hope you enjoy!

·         Adventure #1: the wildlife

 My first day at TCDC, I was excited to realize that Africa isn’t really all that different from the United States. Sure, it’s a constant 68 or so degrees, and the trees are taller and smooth-skinned, with gray branches like the archways of a cathedral, but still, they’re all friends to me.

The trees remind me of this painting I saw in the Chapel basement, by Cory Ench. Haha, I wasted one of my pictures on something that’s not from my trip. ^_^

 

I found mimosa, lantana, and wood-sorrel. My family has a pot of kalanchoe outside their front door. I know banana trees, even if they’re not US-native plants, and I recognize a host of imports to Floridian gardens, like Tradescantia (pallida and zebrina) and Bougainvillea. There’re white plumeria and canna lilies and I’ve seen Aloe vera growing wild and tall. Those of you who know my odd habit of eating plants I find in the dirt will realize how stunned I was to also find a real, live green-briar, on a pass through the woods. You gape, but I swear it was so. ^_^ Families plant roses in their garden beds and the grass looks like grass anywhere, although probably lusher and more green than the grass I currently have in my front yard. The sun wasn’t even out, so I didn’t need sunscreen or bug spray or anything.

It wasn’t all stunningly familiar; there was a huge African tulip tree with huge, red-orange flowers curving up to the sky with lacy yellow edges. I found out that the reason we have avocado every day for lunch and dinner was because our host family has an avocado tree growing right in their yard. And the banana trees…well, they’re banana trees. You know them, you love them, you see them and you know you’re not in Kansas anymore.

              

 Another plant I don't know the name of.

That was my first day. “Look how familiar everything is! It’s like home, but maybe taller and greener!” The second day, my roommate and I wondered how we had possibly managed to miss the giant birds in the trees. They’re big and they’re noisy and they leave painted white splatter in circles below their branches that are four feet across. They hunch their shoulders like vultures but Larry says they’re a type of stork. They soar heavily through the sky, their huge bodies like fast-moving blimps and their feet trailing awkwardly behind them—Larry says they use them like rudders.  They look like they’re eight feet tall with a wingspan that would stretch across my room, but Larry says they’re only half that size and would never come above your chest. I don’t know if Larry is much of a naturalist. ;-) Sometimes they caw, sometimes they screech, sometimes they coo or clack their beaks together with a sound like a loud woodpecker. I can never tell if the sounds outside my window are monkeys or cats or gigantic stork-birds. ^_^ I found a feather underneath one of their trees (outside of the shower zone). It reached from my elbow to my outstretched fingertips.

The next day, in the morning, Lotte came back from her turn in the bathroom to tell me she’d just seen a monkey. I jumped to the window and saw a black tail slide up a tree and jump to another one like a squirrel. A little later I saw it again, picking at a fallen avocado and trying to figure out how to peel it. Apparently monkeys (kima, in Kiswahili) are not just fans of bananas, but also avocados and carrots. Mama Resti tells me that they only pick the ripe ones, and if you ask them they will throw some down to you. (At you, I revised internally. Still, charming.)

Next day was Saturday. We went on a relatively unmemorable hike around Lake Duluti (there was water, and there were trees, but mostly there was still dust), and I saw a squirrel. If the monkey was like a squirrel, this squirrel was like a mouse. It was tiny and brown with a bushy tail; it probably would have fit in my hand. It jumped to a trunk and disappeared before I could pull out my camera, though I did think it was worth a picture. I also got a silhouetted picture of a kingfisher, small but distinctive over the lake. Then on Sunday Lotte noticed a gecko about an inch and a half long on our wall. I couldn't catch it, but I got a picture before it escaped under the dresser.

 Gecko. I think. About life-size.

 Monday’s new animal was particularly fantastic, because I got to touch it. =) I found a chameleon crawling from the grass onto the sidewalk in one of the school's courtyards, during chai break. It was scared of me but I managed to pick it up and it was quite well-behaved. I held a chameleon! And terrified it. It was adorable. =) =) =)

Tuesday was my first break in my streak of exotic animal sightings, unless you count some very interesting bugs. But I went on a safari last weekend, and that makes up for everything. =) We saw everything from zebras to wildebeest to ostriches, jackals and antelopes and gazelles, plus an amazing close-up of a giraffe (twiga) and an elephant (tembo). We saw hyenas and warthogs, bison and hippos. We even saw a rhino and a cheetah, very far off in the distance. It was absolutely fantastic! A few snatches of Ngorongoro Crater:

The view of the crater from above, right before we descended. The white spot on the left is the salt left behind by the lake, which is mostly dry during this time of year.

Ngorongoro is, I believe, the world’s largest caldera. Huge mountains surround the valley on all sides, effectively hemming in the animals so that you can get a great safari year-round. The drive up took about three and a half hours, which took us from the green, forested land of Usa River down through flatter, yellow plains with herds of cattle and termite mounds interspersed with rough-hewn dry gullies. The cement buildings with corrugated tin roofs gave way to patchwork cabins tacked together with cardboard, wood, and metal, sometimes with no windows and questionable roofs. Then they disappeared altogether, and the only homes visible were round, grass-and-mud Massai homes and the occasional cement structure. The one thing consistent was the dust, which came in through the windows of the vehicle and clogged the nostrils, even before we ever got into the valley. Inside the park, we started up one side of the crater and down the other. Everything was really beautiful then, green and steep like a jungle; even the dust turned pretty, going from gray-brown to a reddish color. Would have been even more beautiful if it had stayed mostly on the ground. ^_^

 The Massai tribe is of cultural interest to a lot of tourists. They’ve chosen to live the agricultural lives that their ancestors have been living for thousands of years…with some modifications. A little extra money from sticking clubs and necklaces through the window of tourist safari vehicles and finagling for cash never hurt.

Before we even got into the park, we saw this guy by the side of the road. He stared at us for a minute, then lumbered away. I really wanted to see one, so this was awesome!

Going on a safari!

I was worried, before we got there, that there wouldn’t be any animals around. After all, it’s winter here, so it’s the dry season, and we weren’t going in the morning or the evening, when I’m used to animals coming out. But they were everywhere! Take a look at this:

Look at these animals! Everywhere! We had wildebeest and zebras standing around really close and scattered nonchalantly everywhere.
 

The zebras and wildebeest were by far the most common, but upon our entrance into the valley we say a whole bunch of Thompson gazelles and several warthogs too.

In Kiswahili, zebras are called "striped donkeys." I think that's funny.

Bison. Some of my best pictures were through the binoculars.

A female ostrich. You can tell because it's all gray instead of black with a pink neck.

We saw several lions. Our first pair was a male and a female, way off in the distance, sitting lazily and watching all the prey grazing. We took lots of pictures, thinking it was the only chance we were going to get. But this guy was sitting in the shade of another person’s car—I think it was eating food that they were throwing to it—and when they started the engine, it got up and wandered slowly back over to its parents, who were probably thirty yards away. Simba, in Kiswahili.

Wildebeest, lying around. “We’re not interesting, you’re not interesting…Good day.” ^_^

Absolutely incredible! We were almost out of the park when we happened upon this guy, eating his dinner twenty feet from the road. Probably the most amazing sight of the day!

We’d just left the park when we saw a whole slew of monkeys. This little guy jumped down from the ledge and couldn’t get back up without, erm, help from his mother. ^_^

The funniest thing is that since the trip, I’ve seen monkeys almost every day. Lotte got an amazing picture of the kind that climb the parachichi tree.

 

The other day, Lotte and I went out on a walk through a nearby forest and corn field, and saw a completely different type of monkey. White and black with long, long haired tails.

                Then, the next day or two, I saw more monkeys in someone’s yard. I reached for my camera, then shrugged and let the monkey dash away without trying to take a picture of it. Why take more pictures? There are always more monkeys. XD That’s how crazy this place is, hahaha…

                Oh, look at me, one bullet point finished.*googly eyes* But definitely one of the coolest ones! =D

A Typical Day at TCDC

You’ve been waiting for an update. On tenterhooks, I know. I meant to give you my week one update around, you know, week one, but week two is just about to end and here I am, my post barely in progress. My apologies. By way of explanation, I will describe a typical day at TCDC:

6:45 AM – Wake up. Brush teeth the old backpacking way, squirting water from your water bottle through your toothbrush. We’ve got a lovely bathroom all to ourselves, with running water, a flush toilet, and a real shower that even has a heater (will increase the water from ambient temperature by ten or fifteen degrees). Luxury. That does not mean that the water is potable, however. The other students mock us because we have it so good—no outhouses and bucket showers for us. Heheh. *feels privileged but also embarrassed*

7:00 AM – Breakfast. This is a small meal, of white bread with your choice of peanut butter, honey, butter and jelly. Drinks include coffee, tea, or hot chocolate; milk, water, or juice. (We’re hard on our host family. Lotte is lactose-intolerant and I don’t drink tea or coffee. They were kinda surprised. ^_^) The first few days we were offered corn flakes to assuage our Western palates, but our mediocre enthusiasm and gentle persuasion led Mama Resti to begin serving us bananas and fried egg instead, sometimes with little red sausages on the side. Bananas—there are more kinds of bananas here than I even knew existed: yellow banana, potato banana, plantain, sugar banana, a kind of banana that’s apparently really good to make banana beer—my favorite is the tiny sugar banana, which despite its name, is tasty not because it’s sweet but because it’s also tart. Mm. There’s enough time between breakfast and class that we usually have time to do our homework in the morning.

8:30 AM – Swahili class starts, an easy five-minute walk away. Our class is split up into three parts, each with its own teacher, for maximum personal time. The man I met on the street that first day turns out to be one of them. His name is Kisanji, and everything with him is “bomba bomba.” My teacher is Ritha, who’s much younger and very beautiful; with her everything is always “safi” (clean, fine). She’s an excellent teacher, able to deliver Swahili to us at a lightning pace, but what really entrances me is how gently she explains Tanzanian culture to us. By the end of the first day, she had me hanging on her every word, as much for the delivery as the instruction. What examples can I give of the charming way she speaks? Aah…

It’s the first day, and we’re learning greetings. All eyes are on her; we’re exhausted from our flight the day before but we’re paying pretty good attention. “In Tanzania,” she says, her vowels clean and “r”s either rolled or nonexistent, “greetings are very important. You may spend five minutes greeting each other. How are you? How is your family? What are the news of the day? We do not go on until we are finished greeting. We are very polite.” This phrase, this politeness, comes back up a few more times. There are seven short verbs in Swahili, but only six of them are commonly used. There is kula, to eat, kunywa, to drink; kuja, to come, kwenda, to go; kuwa, to be, kufa, to die. And kunya, to piss. “Say kunywa,” Ritha says. “Kunywa. Do not forget the “w.” If you forget the “w,” it means what you do when you are at the toilet. We do not use that word. We are very polite.”

“What do you say if you have to pee, then?” one of the kids asks.

“We say, ‘go to the bathroom.’ We do not say what we are doing there. It is not my business what you are doing in the bathroom.” There’s a low chuckle from the class.

It’s an inadequate example, but if I write down everything I remember until I get it right, I’ll be here all night. I have a Swahili quiz tomorrow, so I really ought to move on.

10:00 AM – Chai break. We walk over to a pavilion for a half-hour break for masala tea with milk, coffee, or hot chocolate, accompanied by either popcorn or tiny, red, roasted peanuts. Every day, there’s someone who expresses surprise that I don’t drink tea or coffee. And every day, I explain that it’s a part of my religion—a health law, if you will. “Ok,” they say, but they don’t understand. It really sets me apart. Everyone here drinks tea, coffee is one of their biggest crops, no one has heard of Mormonism (the closest Stake Center is in Nairobi, Kenya), and what in the world is unhealthy about a cup of chai in the late morning? The honest answer is: I don’t know. I believe in Mormonism, so what it requires of me, I promise to do. If it weren’t so, that masala chai looks like it’d be pretty tasty…

12:30 PM – Lunch. Most students live off campus in Usa River or Macumira, so they bring their lunches and eat together. Lotte and I walk home and eat a hot meal prepared by Mama Resti. There’s a gas stove in the kitchen, but she says it cooks food too quickly; it tastes better if she uses the charcoal one. The food includes rice with carrots or peas (wali), beans (maharage), with some other starch (white sweet potatoes, potato bananas, normal potatoes, cassava with a coconut sauce to make it sweeter, thin fried bread called chapati, a solid porridge made of corn flour called ugali), a bowl of meat with vegetables (nyama na mboga, which can be beef, chicken, or fish cooked with carrots, peas, or green peppers), a bowl of cooked vegetables (either cabbage with pieces of carrot, or a stew made with okra and bitter tomato; sometime some more carrots or peppers or beans are thrown in), a plate of fresh vegetables (either sliced cucumber and tomato, sliced cucumbers with mayonnaise, cucumber and onion and apple with mayonnaise), and avocados fresh from the tree in their yard (parachichi). Almost always there is also some sort of fruit, either bananas or watermelon (ndizi au tikitimaji). With all these many dishes to eat from, I never go hungry. The food is excellent. I know why they have a chai break, though. With six hours between breakfast and lunch, the blood sugar needs a boost long before lunchtime.

1:30 PM – Technical training. Every day we learn a little about a new piece of hospital equipment and then practice soldering and/or building useful supplies like LED flashlights or variable power supplies (we made one! And it worked! =D) to help us at our hospitals. It’s a little strange to hear the things which will likely go wrong—most of them require little to no engineering background to fix. Being able to solder is a good thing, but the main problems Larry keeps mentioning are problems with mismatched power supplies, user error, loose connections, dirty filters, or leaky tubes. Do they really need us to do these things? Apparently so…hmm. =\

4:30 PM – Chai break. Again. Maybe.

5:30 PM – Class ends. Go to the bar to hang out with the other kids, stay in the classroom to take advantage of the power cords and internet access, or head to the gym or outdoor basketball court for a workout. Or find a last-minute logistical concern that has to be taken care of before dark—deliver your laundry to the workers at TCDC, walk down to Usa River to withdraw money from the ATM, take a dala-dala down to Macumira to get passport photos printed. Homework? What of homework? What I really want to do is write home. When the connection is so slow and the power so sporadic, this takes much more time than you’d think. (Twenty minutes to upload a single blog post because it had one picture in it…)

7:30 PM – Dinner. Same style as lunch, probably different options. This food is so delicious! By the time it’s been six hours between lunch and dinner (apparently they normally eat right before bed, actually—they moved it up for us), you get hungry. Only one complaint: the food is pretty heavy. No non-stick pans on top of the charcoal stove, so everything has a lot of oil in it. It hasn’t made me feel uncomfortable or sick like the greasy cafeteria food did, probably because of the good fiber in the veggies and beans. But with my extremely sporadic exercise regimen and tendency to be sitting indoors all day, in class, I feel like my athleticism is slipping. (Lora says she gains wait every time she comes down here. Great.)

10:30 PM – Bed. Give or take. Some days later, some days earlier. Depends on how tired you are, if you did all your homework, if you actually bear through with your computer, or if you play point-at-the-picture-book-and-try-to-name-the-objects with little Joe, Baba Josef’s grandson (who’s got amazingly good English skills). And now it is actually 10:30. And I need to be in bed.

Meh, this is all pretty rote; probably not that interesting. But time is short, and precious, and my sleep is much to be desired. Good night, and a further post soon (hopefully).

           Before I go—a picture of Lotte eating some samaki (fish) from a restaurant. Doesn’t it look delicious? To eat it, they gave her a spoon. ^_^

Karibu Tanzania!

           After some consultation (with myself), I’ve come to an executive decision to organize my blog posts in such a way that even my busiest friends can bear to stop by for a few minutes to see how I’m doing, while those of you who want more details can willingly subject yourself to the torrent of my enthusiasm. Behold:

Week 1: in brief—

·         I made it to Africa.

·         I’m not dead. Yet. 

           Believe it or not, that second point was nontrivial for a few hours the day before I left. I opened my bottle of malaria medicine to take my first dose and discovered they’d given me 40 malaria pills instead of 90. After a short panic attack and several calls to closed offices and pharmacies, we got ahold of a doctor’s home phone and sorted it all out, so my death sentence was repealed. ;-) 

A little more detail on the first point, for those who want it:

My itinerary took me to Tanzania via Boston and Amsterdam, my first trip to Europe within living memory. (A response in advance to the nitpickers in my family: not your living memory. Mine. Mine’s the one that counts. =P) I arrived in Amsterdam at 5:30 local time, dazed with sleep loss. For perspective, the flight from Boston to Amsterdam involves the removal of six hours from your day, taken from the time between dinner and breakfast. 9_9

My first impression of Tanzania was smoky air and a warm night. I couldn’t get a good visual because it was 7:30 and dark. But there were more trees than I expected, and the smell in the air and the non-air-conditioned airport brought back memories of third-world Nicaragua immediately. It was a reassuring touch-point of familiarity. We dropped our medical equipment off at the Training Center and met our host parents there. They greeted us with a hug and interspersed with their excellent English they probably said “Karibu” (“welcome”) every other word. My roommate, Lotte (the only girl of the five students coming here from Denmark—I’m so lucky =) ) and I probably have the best accommodations of any of the others: we live right on the compound, a five minute walk away from the Training Center, and the family gave us our own personal bathroom with hot running water for a shower. *jaw-drop* The generosity and luxury is unimaginable. 

The Training Center (TCDC) is beautiful! It’s large and modern-looking, with smooth, white-washed walls and big windows; lots of [African] power strips and wireless internet; a bar and cafeteria and piano and even a gym. It’s entirely surrounded by lush, green grasses, bushes, and trees, many of them in flower or in fruit (and many of which I recognize as imports to Florida gardens, which is fun), and the weather has so far been constantly cloudy and about 68 degrees Fahrenheit. I love it!

Classes have started, and the first day we did nothing but go over Swahili greetings. I can’t tell you how reassuring it is to have something I know I can say right! This chapter is the only one that I read through before I arrived, but when I started meeting people I found that the only word I actually felt comfortable saying was “asante” (thank you)—and after saying nothing but that over and over again, even that began to feel wrong. My first day, on the way to the training center, a man met us on the street. He greeted our host baba (father) and then turned to us. “You say, ‘Shikamoo,’” he said with a big grin showing behind bigger glasses. “Shikamoo!” I said promptly, and he responded graciously with “Marahaba” and continued on past us. I knew that word! “Shikamoo” comes from Arabic, and means “I pay you my respects”—it’s said to a person who’s older than you. “Marahaba” is the way to accept them. But in the moment when he arrived, I didn’t know what to say—it still takes five seconds to do a translation, and after that, there comes the realization: in America, people don’t like to be old. Paying your respects to the elderly looks fine and courteous on paper, but in front of an actual person, a wall of Western etiquette slams into you and binds your tongue and makes you nod and smile and look stupid. And onward it goes…

 

               

In the beginning…

…there were many stories waiting: to happen, and to be told. Some too fantastic to happen, and some too secret to be told, but all of them waiting.

I collect stories. I don't remember the beginning of my own, but I have the beginning of this one. It involves me, a twenty-year-old engineering student of no particular fame or fortune, traveling with a group of people I don't know to a strange and far-away land called Tanzania. Probably I will have no idea what I'm doing, undergo several small adventures and minor emotional crises as I struggle to adapt and contribute, and will eventually take my leave of my new city/friends/etc to return (alive) to my old and beloved home in North Carolina and live more or less happily ever after. Until grad school applications. =P

It has all the right elements of a good story, doesn't it? ;-) Most of you, I know, are too busy for the details. So I'm trying my best to consolidate for you. I presume that this has all the essential bits, and if any of the particulars prove inaccurate—if, for example, I die—then I beg pardon and I will designate a surviving representative to amend the story on my behalf. Although I don't think that version will sound nearly as good. *makes a face*

Ta-da! And I'm off! Three days and counting. Wish me luck!

Jara