One of the first Swahili words that Mama Fatuma taught us was –lala meaning sleep. My middle name, Lalla (after my great grandmother), happens to be very similar. However, this hasn’t translated into much sleep lately since there has been LOTS of loud music the past couple nights. On Sunday night, a car parked within a foot of our windows (which only have screens) started blasting music around midnight and didn’t stop until after 2am. It was a weird mix of Akon and songs in Swahili. The worst part was that it would randomly get quiet, giving us hope that it had stopped, before roaring up again. On Monday, there was a government celebration called Mwenge at the school in front of our guesthouse. My understanding is that it involves a torch similar to the Olympics but is in honor of recent development in Kisarawe such as paving roads and building a soap factory. It lasted all day and didn’t stop until 6 or 7 am, and I think it only ended then because of rain. Anyway, enough of my whining—there has been plenty of more interesting stuff going on!
Our friend Victor took us to his church on Sunday morning. Although we didn’t understand much since the service was in Swahili, we enjoyed the experience. The worship was very spirited with lots of dancing, even a sort of conga line! After church, we surprised Victor with some new guitar strings since his were too old to stay in tune the last time we hung out. In exchange, he left me with about 100 selfies on my phone. Everyone here loves taking photos, and we’ve gained several new followers on Instagram to prove it.
We got a slow start on Monday morning because the power was out again, which meant more time to hone our checkers skills before heading to work on the x-ray machine. In addition, we fixed an x-ray label printer and worked on an ultrasound machine that had a note on it from other Clemson BioE students in 2014. Our friend Rachel made us a special meal of pasta threaded through sausage for dinner.
Today we ran some errands with Weston before heading to the hospital and working on a heater/dryer. Those errands included selecting some ducks for dinner and getting Nathan’s shoes repaired. Unfortunately, in the course of fixing the dryer, Nathan had an accident with the exacto knife and now has a slightly shorter finger…I guess you could say a part of him will always be in Tanzania. Luckily he is tough and we are well stocked with first aid supplies. He didn’t even let it stop our work, so we were able to completely fix the dryer!
