Our first day at the hospitals was Friday. Charlotte, Laura, and I have 2 hospitals this week: St. Elizabeth and Ithna Asheri. We started off at St. Elizabeth, where we met with Jonas, the fundi (technician) who works at St. Elizabeth. Only thing is…. Jonas doesn’t speak English! Looks like we’re gonna be getting a lot of practice in our Swahili. For the first day we toured the hospital, getting to meet each. and every. staff member. In Swahili. Needless to say, it was a pretty long day. We did meet this one awesome doctor, Mark, who works at the HIV and TB building. (HIV patients 3 days a week, TB for the other 2 so reduce exposure of TB to the HIV patients) The building is super nice and brand new, and Mark is definitely our favorite staff member so far. He speaks really good English and keeps trying to show us the elusive giant monkey he’s been seeing around the hospital. He gets so excited about it! Also entertaining is how much everyone struggles trying to say Laura’s name. We ended up making up a little sign for her spelling it “Lora,” to help with the introductions. Swahili just doesn’t have that “aur” sound. Jonas’s workshop is one of those big metal shipping containers converted into a room with windows and a door. Pretty nice! Unfortunately for us, since St. Elizabeth has a lot of generous donors and a fundi to repair broken things, there’s not that much for us to do! When we were working at Mt. Meru, all of the equipment was old, dirty, and piled up in a corner. At St. Elizabeth, the first malfunctioning things they showed us were new, very electronic things. An anesthesia machine (eek!), an ultrasound (too high voltage for us), and a fully automatic patient monitor. We checked out the monitor, which worked for ECG and pulse oximetry but had a problem with the blood pressure part. Not an easy fix! We think it might be a faulty 2-way transducer, since it was able to monitor while filling the cuff with air, but freaked out when the air started coming back out again. We haven’t had another chance to look at that again though. Maybe when Miguel (our engineering teacher) makes his rounds to St. Elizabeth later this week.
This weekend was pretty relaxed, which I think everyone needed. On Saturday we ate lunch at Bigg Bite, this amaaazing Indian little restaurant in town. Seriously, probably the best Indian food I’ve ever had—and for half the price! After that we walked to the Massai Market, the giant tourist craft marketplace filled with stall after stall of carved elephants, tribal masks, patterned bags and beaded flip flops. Super touristy, I know, but we hadn’t really gotten to be tourists yet! Hard bargaining is a must, so by the end of our trip we were worn out. We went back home for dinner at Mama Mackerine’s guest house. Later that night, we all got ready and went out to Via Via, the club I had gone to previously with Meaghan. Saturday was definitely less busy than the Thursday I went on, but still really fun! Raelyn and Lauren had also come into town to go out with us, so that was a nice reunion. Sunday was a pretty lazy day, until a friend of ours got robbed. Yeeahhhhh. :/ Orianne, Laura, Tugce and I had met up with Angela (a girl who did EWH last year and who is now back in Arusha for this summer), and her boyfriend Collin. We were walking down a big main street, in broad daylight, following Angela and Collin to go play Frisbee with some of their friends. Laura, Tugce and I were about 15 feet behind Orianne, Angela and Collin. Just as they passed a large alleyway on the left, a group of men/boys ran at them from the right. One of them grabbed Orianne around the waist and picked her up, distracting Angela, who was wearing a purse. A 14-yr-old-looking boy then pushed Angela down and cut off her purse strap with a machete, the other man let go of Orianne, and they all ran off down through the alley and into a field. Collin instinctively ran after them, which you should really never do. The next few minutes were pretty frightening as we waited for Collin to return. He did, eventually, safe but without the purse. The most important thing was that no one was hurt, but Angela did lose a bit of cash, her debit card, phone, and camera. Everyone was pretty shaken up, so we decided to ditch the Frisbee and just take a cab home. Lesson learned: never let your guard down, and don’t carry a purse! It was obviously an unpleasant event, but a good reminder to everyone that you can never be too careful. (Don’t worry Mom, I’m fine!)
Well, this post is already pretty long, so I think I’ll fill you in on our other hospital, Ithna Asheri, a bit later. Till then, everyone remember to tell my sister, Niki, Happy Birthday tomorrow! J