Visiting Old Friends

Wow another week flew by quickly! Our schedule has been so packed, it's been difficult to find time to get online. Our Swahili classes have been getting progressively more difficult, and they split us up by skill level today. By the end of last week, I felt like my brain had reached capacity. When talking with native Tanzanians, they say my Swahili is getting better, but I'm not sure that I believe them. I still feel pretty lost when conversing. The labs have also been getting harder. Allie and I made our first homemade flashlight one day and constructed a bridge circuit another day. It reminds me of working in circuits and electronics labs again. Working with a plain proto board instead of a breadboard is very different than a regular breadboard. It's a struggle to twist all of the connections together rather than having a bus you can easily place components in.

Homemade flashlight

Our classroom at the school

On Friday, we went to Mt. Meru hospital again. We continued work on the suction pump we had been working on last week, but found that we could only create enough pressure for a temporary fix. An original part in the machine was missing, so we ended up using an eraser to plug the hole that needed sealing. It was kind of disappointing that we could not fix it permanently, but at least we learned a lot about how suction pumps work. 

The notorious suction pump

After lunch, Jaya, Raiyan, and I started looking through the "Children's Ward" in the hospital, which was really acting as a large warehouse to keep unusable medical equipment. There is a huge open room there filled with broken equipment. We considered fixing some IV holders that needed new wheels, but they seemed to be too rusted to even be useful. Eventually, Collyn came back to the area where we were working with yet another broken suction pump. The pump would only turn on sometimes when the switch was pressed. We opened everything up and took a look at the circuitry inside. We soldered some loose connections, but were still having problems. We traced the problem back to a faulty plug through much multimeter testing and hope to bring back a new fuse to fix it next week. 

This weekend, Franael arranged to have me visit and stay with John, Anna, and their kids, the family I had stayed with the last time I was in Tanzania. It was very exciting to see everyone again, and all of the kids grown up so much. I got to meet Danny, their five year old son, who was very excited and energetic the whole time. He was usually jumping around everywhere and babbling in Swahili a mile a minute, but seemed quite excited to meet me. Baracka and Godluck had a lot of questions about America like what we do for fun and the kind of music that I listened to. It was very interesting to compare our cultures. Maybe one day they will be able to visit our family in Wisconsin.

From left: Baraka, me, Anna, Godluck, Danny, and John

On Saturday, Franael, John, and I and some of their friends from church took the hour long drive to Moshi to attend a wedding reception. There was much music, food, and people. The bride and groom even carried out the African tradition of feeding each guest African "cake", which is actually goat meat. On Sunday, I went to church at Kombelewa parish with Franael and John's family. The service was quite different from the service at the Pentecostal church last week, but similar to our Lutheran services in America. Pastor Peter and Franael asked me to give a greeting from our church near the beginning of the service, and I had to stand up in front of the congregation. I was able to follow along in the worship hymnal and even sing some of the hymns. Pastor Peter gave a sermon, and Franael translated most of it so that I was able to understand. 

Sunday evening, I traveled back to TCDC to stay with my host family again. I'm ready to take on another week!

The tree my mom and I planted 8 years ago

Kombelewa church

Pastor Peter