This week marked our last at the language school in Usa
River. I'll be sad to say goodbye to everyone for the month. We will all be
traveling across northeastern Tanzanian to work in 14 different hospitals in
the Arusha and Kilimanjaro regions. Most of our classes this week focused on
wrapping up and how to work in the hospital and do paperwork next month. It’s
definitely going to be a lot of work. This week, some of the students started
playing volleyball after class. I’m very disappointed we waited until the last
week here to start playing because it was a lot of fun! I will miss being able
to hang out with everyone frequently.
On Friday, we went to a new hospital, Tengeru. Our teachers
told us that Tengeru is known for having a lot of thieves, which made us pretty
hesitant to go there, but nobody had anything stolen. Right when we arrived at
the hospital, I was allowed into an operating room where they needed a light
and two autoclaves fixed, which are extremely hot, high pressure baths used to
sterilize surgical tools. Camilla and I decided to work on the smaller
autoclave, which ended up being a project that took up most of the day. After
much testing, we found that the problem with the autoclave was a broken heating
element by testing the resistance of the component. EWH will need to buy a new
component to fix the autoclave. The second autoclave we found had a more
dangerous problem, with a short in the circuitry somewhere that we could not
find. Unfortunately while trying to find the problem, Camilla gave herself a
pretty good electric shock, and we could not fix the autoclave.
Another adventure we had on Friday, was going out to eat at
a local restaurant. At most sit down restaurants in Tanzania, it takes about an
hour to receive your food after ordering. Being the impatient westerners that
we are, we started getting antsy after an hour had passed. When we finally got
our food, Wangui noticed that we had all received beef, when most of us had
ordered goat meat. When it came time to pay the bill, there was much argument
and debate over whether we had gotten goat, which is more expensive, or beef.
This was also ten times more difficult because they only spoke Swahili. It
ended up being about a two hour lunch break.
Saturday was probably the most relaxing day I’ve had on my
trip thus far. I got to sleep in until 9AM! I walked over to TCDC for the
morning and hung out outside and in the library a little. For lunch, our
homestay dad took us out to eat at a restaurant where we had supu ya kuku na
chipsi, which is chicken soup and fries. After lunch, he took us to see another
house he owns which is close to a natural spring river. We explored a bit, and
the river was beautiful. He also took us to see the new house he is building.
As I was taking pictures, I showed his son Isaka. He loved taking many pictures
himself, and he had a lot of practice. He’s soon to be a pro.
This Sunday, we visited a boarding school near Usa River to
teach a lesson on circuits. The lab we did was building a heart rate monitor by
soldering electrical components to a tinned circuit board. The students, who
were high school age, enjoyed it a lot and did very well. Some of the students
gave us individual tours around their campus, which was very modern, beautiful,
and had many buildings. They were very excited to have us there. After the
tour, we played some icebreaker games with them and talked a little about our
different cultures. It was a very fun day.
When we got back from the school, many of us decided to hang
around TCDC to play volleyball and soccer. It was also one of the Danish
student’s 25th birthday. One of the traditions in Denmark is to
throw cinnamon on someone on their 25th birthday if they are still unmarried.
The trick is you also douse them in first cold then hot water right before
throwing the cinnamon on them. None of the Americans had ever heard of this
tradition before, but we all whole heartedly took part in it.
(pictures to come)
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