Homa, hospitals, and hare-brained doctors.

In America, going to the ER was an all day process. Unless you had a bullet in head, you could expect to wait in the ER waiting room for about 3 hours before getting you vital signs taken and moving to one of the hospital rooms. At that point, you get really excited because, you're in the hospital bed, it must be almost your turn, right? Wrong. It takes another 2 hours of rolling around in the hospital bed in a silly johnny, with your bum hanging out, calling the nurse every half hour to request one of those warmed up blankets and pain meds, until finally: 5 hours after arriving at the ER, you get seen by a real doctor. And the real doctor sits with you for 15 minutes, asks you questions and then determines a series of tests to run, then hands you over to a lab tech, nurse, or intern. Your tests get run, you see the doctor for another 15 minutes to talk about your plan of treatment, and then you're done. 6 hours in the ER for a total of ½ hour with the doctor. Sound familiar.

That used to annoy me, as I am sure it does everyone else. I've heard complaints that doctors have too many patients now-a-days, that nurses are overworked, that patient care is no longer a priority. And, it's true. Ideally, everything would run smoother. Ideally, you wouldn't have to be dying to be able to see your doctor on short notice. But, that being said, let me tell you about my hospital experience in Tanzania.

So, I have been really sick this last week. Like 102.5 F, swollen/painful glands all over my neck – to the point where I could barely move my neck, headache, chills, not sleeping at night, the whole 9-yards sick. After 4 days of being miserable, and more neck lumps popping up, I called the PCMO and she suggested that I go to one of the PC approved hospitals. The closest one is in Mbeya town, about a 2 hour bus ride from my site. Being on a bus in Tanzania when you're sick is miserable.

When I first arrived at the hospital (which by American standards is a small clinic), I was actually pretty impressed. I registered at the front desk, and the woman actually spelled my name correctly and then I got my BP taken by a nice old mama and then was asked to wait for the doctor to call my name. It was a same, familiar process that would happen in the States.

I waited for the doctor for maybe 15 minutes before my name was called and I entered his office. His office had a sink, a desk, and two chairs. Nothing like an American doctor's office. There was really nothing there that would enable a complete physical evaluation to occur. I explained to him what was wrong, told him about my fever (which I was even nice enough to convert into Celcius), about my very painful swollen glands, about how I had pain medicine that I was taking to reduce the swelling and be able to move, about everything (he didn't speak English, and my Swahili actually held up pretty well). He then felt my swollen glands very roughly, even after I had stressed how much they hurt and diagnosed me with “inflammation” and “pains of the neck”. And that was it. No temperature taken. No tests. Nothing at all medically competent. It was the biggest waste of time of my life. And the kicker: he prescribed me an antibiotic and then three different types of pain medicines (even after I told him I already had some). Even doctors want to rip of the white people. I didn't get any of the prescriptions. The PCMO recommended a different antibiotic which I could get at a local “duka la dawa”.

So moral of the story: the 6 hours spent in the ER is at least a productive 6 hours. You get a knowledgeable doctor to give you a real diagnosis. You get tests to prove that diagnosis. You get medicine. Even though you only see the doctor for half an hour, there are nurses, interns, heated blankets, magazines, and real proffesionals to fill up the 5 ½ hours that you are not seeing the doctor. Here, you see the doctor for 5 minutes, and come out no more knowledgeable than when you went in. Except that he's given you the names of 3 different brands of medicines that do the same thing.

I'll take the knowledge.

Things Aren't Always Rainbows and Puppies.

School restarted last week: July 2nd, although most students didn't show up until a week later (which worked to my favor because I could go to Matema and hang out with Scotty instead of teaching – guilt free.)

So, I started teaching again on the 8th. On July 9th, one of my students, during the evening drank a mixture of different chemicals in an attempt to kill herself. She was rushed to the hospital. Fortunately, she survived. On July 12th, she returned home. Sadly, for her, she is only allowed to return to school on the days of National Exams...She will sit for exams but not be able to be in school to learn the material necessary to pass the exams. Apparently, the reason she drank the poisons was that she was upset about her report card grades. But that is heresay, it may not be thereal reason. She was upset about her grades, tried to kill herself, and now her grades will suffer as a result.

It's too bad that she felt like grades were THAT important. It's too bad that there was no one that she felt like she could go to to get help. It's too bad that there's no services in Tanzania for her, or other troubled teenagers, to help them learn how to deal with there emotions in a more appropriate manner. It's too bad that she had to return home after on 2 days in the hospital, instead of being able to get adequate treatment. It's too bad that she all but lost her right to an education because of one bad decsion. And it's too bad that there's virtually nothing that I can do to help her.

I wish in highschool that I had understood how unimportant report card grades are. That is even more true here. At least in America, your report card has some effect on which colleges that you can get into. But even then, not super important.Here it is even less important. Here, report cards mean nothing. O-Level report cards have NO effect on which A-level school you get into. Which A-level school you get into depends solely on National Exam results. Report card grades mean very little, besides maybe, that you need to work a little harder or that you are in good shape for the National Exam. Especially here, report card grades are NOT a measure of how smart you are. The questions on exams are usually so obscure that they are not a real test of understanding. Take form IV English grades. Form IV is the equivalent of sophomores or juniors, it is the highest o-level form. They, hypothetically, should know English. There are some Form IV students who could get an A in English and I can't hold a basic conversation with them in English. On the otherhand, there is a Form II student, who I think got a C in English: who absolutely refuses to speak to me in Swahili. Only English. Her English is impeccable. How did she get a C in English? Although she understands English and can speak English: (a) the English tests are written with so many awful, grammatically incoherent questions that even I would do poorly on the exams and (b) The exams ask for themes of poems (and all poems, apparently have the exact same theme – poverty, so students need to regurgitate an answer), asks you to write letters to friends (and if the letter is in the wrong format, but the English is perfect, it is graded as incorrect), and asks other really advanced question to students who can not speak the language. English tests, in no way, test for understanding of English. Same goes for other subjects.

Obviously the important thing is that the girl is, physically, OK. It's just a shame that there is really no help that she can get, so that there isn't a next time. It's really a shame that her opportunities in life have been dramatically reduced, that she can no longer study, that she can't return to school, that she can't return to being a normal teenager.

Other than that, I have bulked up my schedule this month. I am painfully behind in both my physics and math syllabus, so I've arranged extra meetings each week for both English and Math. With the result that many days I am teaching from 7:30 in the morning to 5:30 at night with a 1 hour lunch break. And then two nights a week I will be teaching from 8:30-10:30 at night: about 31 periods of physics and math a week. In addition, I announced that I was going to start teaching computers to students who were interested during prep time (8:30-11 pm every night). I expected maybe 30 or 40 students to apply. 96 students. 7 computers. Hmmm. So, I will be teaching computers three nights a week, 4 kids per computers. And really no idea what I should be teaching them... And then of course, health club, which is morphing into a FEMA Club, under that students guidance. They are very excited about having a FEMA Club.

Our FEMA Club Motto: “Badilisha vijana kubadilisha dunia” = “Change the youth to change the world”.

Scotty vacation

So, my Scotty-vacation is officially at an end. Yesterday, Scotty bussed to Kenya and I bussed back from Dar to Mbeya. It was sad to say bye.

The trip started off great...with AirKenya losing Scotty's checked bag. So we had the option of waiting around for them to find it or we could leave Dar without any of Scotty's stuff and just kind of wing-it as far as clothes go. We chose the second and left for Mbeya the next day, after splurging on some expensive and delicious food in Dar (I even found a SUBWAY restaurant and had a sandwich). We go to my site on Sunday night. Technically school started on Monday, but only about 20 of my 110 students were there so on Monday, we packed all my clothes into a bag and headed to Matema beach until Wednesday.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we hung around my site, I did test revisions with my students that were there. On Friday we had a long staff meeting. The outcome of the staff meeting: we decided to send all the students home again to collect school fees. So, I am pretty sure that I am not going to have any students this week, too. And tomorrows a holiday. Oh...Tanzania.

Anyways, on Saturday, we bussed back to Dar: ate at a really nice rooftop restaurant, and went to bed. Sunday we hung out in Dar, went to get Scotty's bag from the airport, and found this really odd Big-E type fair. It was cool, we walked around there for a while. I bought some cheese. And some jewelry. And then Monday, we parted ways. Sad.

The bus ride yesterday was AWFUL! I finished my book about 1/2 way through the ride. Usually it takes about 13.5 hours to go from Dar to my site. The bus leaves at 6 am and usually arrives at Kayuki around 7:30 pm. Yesterday, the bus left at 6 am and arrived in Mbeya (about 2 hours from my site at 9 am). Since the guy that sold me the ticket is an idiot and said that the bus was going to Malawi, when it was really going to Zambia, this bus wasnt passing my site, so I need to get off in Mbeya town. But since the bus took 4 hours longer than it needed to to get to Mbeya town, all the cars running to my site had stopped running, so I was stranded in Mbeya. I hate African travel...So I am in Mbeya now, getting ready to finally head back to Kayuki. I think I am done with long bus rides for a few weeks...

One of the things that Scotty and I noticed while being together and reminiscing on old college times is how much our "normal american social skills" have deteriorated. There were several times that we'd be doing something, and we'd realize that - wow, if our friends back home saw us right now, they'd be absolutely mortified with us. Some examples:
-We each wore the same clothes for like 5 days, before we thought that they were dirty enough to be changed
-My parents sent me packets of condiments (after not eating condiments for 10 months, they are pretty much the most delicious thing ever), so Scotty and I feasted on avocados and mayonaisse. Healthy, huh?
-When we are on the bus, we had saved our chicken fried rice for the night before. Without thinking much about it, we dug into our leftovers with our hands, since we didn't have any silverware. Yes, we ate chicken fried rice with our hands on a crowded public bus. We also ate avocados and mayo with out hands, but that was in the privacy of my own home.
-At that fancy restaurant, each night we went, we polished off half a bottle of ketchup with out fries, because ketchup is so yummy. We also played cards while waiting for our food and then had a debate about whether we were supposed to tip or not: usually in Tanzania, you do not tip, but we were at a fancy, touristy restaurant, so maybe we were supposed to. We ended up tipping 1000 shillings on a 18,000 shilling bill.

But the good news about our social detereoration is that at least we notice that we are behaving oddly. But the bad news: we've still got one more year to pick up weird habits. :)

Thats all. Today I am back to school to start work again and to get back into a routine. It'll be nice, I am looking forward to starting work again, but I'm sad vacation is over. Happy belated fourth of July.

Girls Conference

Letter from a Student

I received a letter two days ago from one of my students that I would like to share with the world. This letter made all the huge frustrations that I've encountered since I came to Tanzania seem pretty small and and all the small successes that I've experienced seem pretty huge.

Before I share this letter with you, there are a few things that I tell you. First, to get ANYTHING done in Tanzania, you need to write an “official letter”. I mean anything. To get my ATM card, I needed to write an official letter to the bank, requesting that they give me my card (which had already been ordered). To get photocopies of tests made, I need to write an official letter to my headmistress asking for money. To go away, Tanzanians need to write an official letter to the education office to ask for time off. To choose girls to go to the Girls' Conference, I asked them to answer three questions. Instead of getting answers to questions, I got 20 official letters. Letters are huge here. If you want something done, chances are that you have to write a letter to get it.

Secondly, the girl that wrote me this letter is from a family which doesn't have a lot of money. She came and asked me to borrow (in Tanzania, most of the time “borrow” means “give”) 2000 Ts /= so that she could buy a notebook and pencil. 2000 /= is about equivalent to $1.54 USD. Not a huge sum of money. I gave it to her. And didn't really think much of it. I mean, what is $1.54, a 20 oz bottle of soda in the USA? Anyways, apparently she thought that was a pretty big deal. The next day she came hodi-ing at my house with a letter which said this (I'm writing it exactly how she wrote, with the exception of omitting her name):

TO
MY
ADORABLE ONE
MADAM CATHELINE
KAYUKI GIRLS

KAYUKI SEC SCHOOL
S.L.P 232
TUKUYU
30TH MAY 2010

Dear Madam Catheline,
I think you continous so very well with your daily activities come back to in my side I feel so good and I continous so good with my daily activities with my studies.
The main motive of this letter just to tell you something. The something is that I want to be your friend because I want to study something to you and me too. I want to tell you something which you can't & no understand in Swahili. And the two resons for me to write this letter to asking to be friend me and you because I LOVE YOU SO MUCH MORE THAN OTHER PEOPLE LOVE YOU. Believe it or not I love you so much Madam Catheline. Madam if I see you I be so happy because I love you Madam. Me am a student of form two B. My name is --------------------- and I come from at Tukuyu. I will be glad if my request it good.

SMS
I love you for the WARMTH of your heart, the NICE things you do for me, and for the SWEETNESS you fill my LIFE with. Loving you is a DELIGHT.
Its
me
-------------------------------------------------

That's for $1.50. And, as you can probably tell, Form II students aren't totally comfortable with English, so for you her to write the letter in English, means that she spent a good amount of time on the letter. I thought it was really sweet. Especially the last part, which I am thinking is either from a greeting card or a song. I'm not sure which.

So she stood there as I read the letter and I didn't know how to respond. I told her that “of course I'll be your friend! I love you too.”

So that made me feel pretty good about Tanzania.

First Semester...DONE

So today was officially my last day of my first semester! I am in Mbeya sharing some good time and homemade Kahlua with sometother volunteers. yes - I come to Tanzania and learn how to make my own booze...Kahlua, wine...it's delicious, inexpensive, and a good gift to give to Tanzanians and other PCVs. An all-around successful endeavor.

So, once I return to site, I have a stack of physics exams to grade. The form II and form IV students are sticking around the school to study more for exams, so maybe I will continue teaching a little (oh my, i need to learn about magnetic induction and trigonmetric functions without using a calculator...yikes) Marking my tests will be interesting. The invigilation of exams is horrible here, I was pretty annoyed. Firstly, we are not allowed to invigilate our own exams. Which would be fine, but all the Tanzania teachers give the students their exams. Stand in the room for a few minutes. Then walk out of the rooms for 10 minutes, then walk in and watch for 5 minutes and then walk out again. So, on average, they "invigilate" for a total of about 45 minutes out of a 3 hour exam. Tell me that the students aren't cheating? It's interesting...students who usually get 20s on my exams all of a sudden understood the material...they got 60s and 70s on my final......I must have gotten MUCH better as a teacher or they cheated some. I'm gonna guess option 1. Just to make myself feel better :)

But as for my break, the only thing I have really scheduled is the girl's conference in mid-June and then travelling around Tanzania and possible Kenya with Scotty. I am so excited to see Scotty.

The last few weeks at site have been hectic but good. We had a blood drive at my school (I imagine that as my dad reads this following section, he may have a heart attack...), and as the "health teacher", I felt it was my duty to set an example and donate blood...at first I was a bit skeptical. I mean, purposely sticking myself with a needle in a country with an evelated HIV rate, a little scary. But it was very clean and professional. Besides sitting on unsturdy wooden chairs in a classroom, it was like the red cross in America. I even got cookies and soda afterwards. I was one of 9 people that gave blood. The only teacher.

One of the interesting things about the blood drive was teh conversation we had. It realyl illustrates some differences between Tanzanian and American culture. So before we go the blood taken, they tested our blood for iron, weighed us, asked us questions (you know the usual: have you been to africa in the last 6 months...) So, I don't think a lot of the girls had really ever had their weight taken before. As we were sitting, with needles in our arms, our conversation went something like this:

Student 1 : Dada, so and so, how much did you weight?
Student 2: 82 kg
Student 1: THATS SO MUCH!
Student 2: I know! How much were you?
Student 1: I was only 72kg.
Student 2: Madam Catherine, how much were you?

So by the end of the process, I knew everyone's weight and they knew my weight. And no problem. It was all in good fun. No awkwardness. Just interest.

The other interesting piece of news is that my headmistress got transferred. So I have a new headmistress. She seems really nice. We had a 2.5 hours emergency meeting today to discuss whether we should require our students to purchase school t-shirts. All in Swahili. Only about 1/2 of which I understood. Glad we got that important issue settled...especially when more important issues are being ignored. Like how to address the issue of cheating on exams.

OK. So that's it. I'll leave you with some words of wisdom from my site mate, the incredible insightful Mwalimu Theo, "I really with you could just jump on people's heads in real life to kill them" (said as he was playing a 2nd grade computer came.

Cheers!

Cultural Differences

So my dad the other day asked me about Cultural differences between here and America. So I made Lists. Here They are.
THINGS I'M REALLY WEIRD FOR DOING IN TANZANIA
- Wearing flip flops anywhere but the shower.
- Letting my dog in the house.
- Not putting 6 tbsp of sugar into my chai (although the amount I put in has dramatically increased in the last 6 months)
- Reading books for fun.
- Showering only one time a day.
- Not mopping my floor every day.
- Planning more than 1 day ahead.
- Not hitting my dog.
- Enjoying some alone time.
- Not drinking chai every morning.\
- Going for walks just for the hell of it.
- Being a woman and having a house to myself.
- Not going to church every week, plus additional prayer sessions 3 days a week.

THINGS WHICH I DO HERE BUT WOULD BE CONSIDERED REALLY WEIRD FOR DOING AT HOME
- Eating with my hands in public if I can't find a spoon.
- Wearing dresses with either butterflies, or chicken (yes, I've seen chicken print vitenge), or flower print.
- Eating sardines (dagaa) on a regular basis.
- Drinking water that runs off of my roof.

There's definitely more, but I can't think of them right now.

Things here are going well. I have a school break starting in two weeks and I am very excited. I'm am EXHAUSTED. Like in America, I am very good at making my schedule just a bit too busy. But I love it. So it's OK. Over break, after the girl's conference, I am going to Kenya we my friend who is a PCV in Mali! I am really excited. Especially to see Scotty.

The other day I went to visit a friend for the day. It's been pouring rain here for the last week, so I left the dog inside. I was gone for probably 7 hours. When I came home, my Doxycycline bottle was on the floor with pills EVERYWHERE! So, of course, I had a bit of a panic attack. When I take one of those pills, I feel like I'm going to throw up, and I had NO IDEA how many Orion took. So I called everyone I knew that would have any idea about what to do if your dog ODs on malaria meds. In the end, there wasn't a lot I could do. But good news: he's fine. And he's as much of a trouble maker as always! I'm trying to upload photos of him right now on Facebook but seeing that I've been trying for the last 20 minutes, I'm not too hopeful. Sorry.

Alright. Hope all is well back home!