Day 2 at the hospital and things are looking up! I woke up this morning with a stuffy nose and itchy throat… hopefully nothing more than a little cold.
We start our mornings around 7AM to get to the study office around 8AM for breakfast with the other staff. Wilson and Weston (local program coordinators) have been indispensible, especially because many of the nurses don’t speak English at Kisarawe District Hospital. The last day and a half we have been running around trying to get an autoclave fixed. Currently, surgeons at Kisarawe have to send out their equipment to another hospital to get sterilized, so this would be a major improvement for them. We had to replace the heating coil in the bottom, which required several trips to the local welder as well as a trip to the next town over to find a gas welder. Anyways, it now works and the nurses are very happy!! We also wrote down step-by-step directions and got them translated into Swahili for future reference. (the reason it broke the first time was because they had let all the water evaporate and it overheated the coil)
Our guesthouse is across from a school, so on our way home from the hospital we decided to go outside to play with the kids! While Nathan played soccer with the older boys, Katie and I had some fun with the younger kids. They love playing with their bouncy ball and we had fun teaching them some new games. One of their favorites seems to be “mimic the mzungus.” I’ve had to make up several new dance moves to entertain them, while sticking to the classics; “the sprinkler” and “the shopping cart”… we also taught them how to dab!
Around dinnertime our friend from yesterday, Victor, found us at dinner. He loves singing and practicing his English. He’s really an amazing and talented singer! He especially loves singing gospel songs and John Lennon. He wanted us to meet his sisters, nieces, and nephews, so he invited us to his place after dinner. We met his whole family and spent a good part of the evening fixing up his guitar and showing him our very, very limited knowledge of basic chords and picking out the tune to the Titanic song and Hallelujah. He seems pretty impressed by our Swahili so far… we know our basic foods and can order almost all our meals in Swahili! To be honest though, we don’t have too many options. Breakfast consists of a few different types of fried bread, Spanish eggs, and ginger tea. Lunch is almost always our biggest meal of the day with rice, beans, boiled greens, and sometimes fish. Dinner is normally just rice, beans, and greens again, although we did splurge on our first night with chicken, and yesterday we tried the banana soup (3/3 did not recommend though).
Tomorrow is another workday and we plan on visiting another rural hospital not too far from here as well. It seems as if we have a pretty good routine going here in Tanzania, and we are having a blast!
Cheers from TZ,
~Irene
