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.
