Mwanza-the real beginning

We just finished day two in Mwanza and I am exhausted. Mwanza is the second largest city in Tanzania which is so hard to believe…it’s not big at all! I already saw someone I knew today who I met on the street yesterday! Our first morning here, Dawn, from midtown Atlanta via NYC and Long Island, awoke started by the sound of roosters crowing. Apparently it was her first time hearing it! Although it was hard for me to believe, you should have seen the Tanzanian’s reaction when she told them! Yesterday we met with the women that will be helping us with our research, they all previously were hired by CARE to work on this project and they are all retired midwives. They are extremely nice and seem to get a big kick out of us. They have been helping me with my Swahili and I have to brag and say that they told me I sound like an African and eat like an African! Speaking of eating like an African, last night we went to a restaurant on Lake Victoria and I had a whole steamed fish for dinner. I was then bet by the group $5,000 shillings to eat the fish’s eyeball, and all I had to do was think about Justin for one second and of course I did it. They were very amused and I made $5,000 shillings…don’t get too excited though, it’s about $3.50 US. Although we have been eating out a lot, it’s clearly not how the locals eat, as the women we work with said they eat chicken maybe once a month since it is so expensive. Tanzania is extremely poor; I can especially confirm this after our first site visit to the Musungwi hospital today. We have been working hard preparing to start our field visits, including choosing which health dispensaries, out of about 60, we will be visiting during our study. We clearly cannot go to all of them, as many of them take a whole day to reach by car. We started out at the hospital today, which was very depressing in ways, as the facilities are very bare, dirty, and minimal. If the hospital is the best line of care then I can hardly imagine what the health centers and dispensaries will be like. After meeting with the hospital doctor, they showed us around. The first stop was the maternity ward, which was about 15 cots in a room with no real windows. As we walked in a woman stood up moaning and her water broke. There was no hospital staff and one of the midwives in our group went to console her. She took her in the next room, the “delivery room.” They told me to follow, and after watching for a minute I felt bad just watching the women (still no hospital staff around) so I asked someone how to say “good luck” in Swahili and with saying that, I left the small room. The next stop was the post-natal room. Four beds. There was a newborn baby boy that I held..he was so cute but peed on me as they don’t have diapers and I noticed he had bad thrush in his mouth. Then I noticed that the one other woman in the room actually had a baby too. I didn’t see a baby when I walked into the room, only some bundles of cloth. Then I was told by our Tanzanian counterparts that she had twins! She opened up the cloth for us to see them, a boy and a girl. They were very premature; the girl couldn’t have been more than two pounds. I’ve never seen a baby so small in my life, it looked more like a fetus than a baby…but they were alive and I was very excited to see them. The last stop was the outbreak room. There was an outbreak from a village with about 10 people in the hospital that were very sick and had very bad dysentery. As I was excited about the babies, our professor was excited about the outbreak. She was an outbreak intelligence officer with the CDC and has worked on many outbreaks both internationally and abroad. I left the room fairly promptly as I wasn’t thrilled at the thought of being around whatever they had, but you could tell she was in her element. She stayed for awhile asking a million questions to the patients and health staff through our interpreters and determined it was from their pond in the village. Anyways, I could tell she was really in her element…I just waited outside and used a lot of hand sanitizer.
The land and scenery here is beautiful, it really reminds me of the Lion King. I keep thinking/hoping that I am going to see a wild animal, but nothing so far beside a humongous lizard or iguana.
I got my reputation for eating like a native after having lunch with the group today. You go into this place and sit wherever there are seats which for me was with other Tanzanians that I didn’t know, Dawn, and Bernedetta, a village worker in our group. My food was fish, ugali, and bananas and I just tried to eat how everyone else was eating. Ugali is basically a plain starch that is thick and very moldable, I can’t really think of a good analogy to describe the texture. Anyways, you take it in your right hand and make a ball with it, then pick up other food on your plate (with your hand) and eat it with the ugali. Well, everyone was making balls, which I was doing at first, but then I decided to mold a heart out of the ugali. I hadn’t really talked to the other people at the table as they didn’t speak English, but I showed them what I did and said, “ugali heart” and they all started cracking up. I guess no one had ever thought to make a different shape out of it instead of a ball. Anyways, I really liked the food and they were impressed that I cleaned my plate. I can’t say the same for the others in the group; Dawn definitely isn’t used to picking bones out of the fish.

Also, my parents and I bought a huge bag of Smarties candy before I left to pass out to the children here, but today I discovered a problem with them. On the way to the hospital when the car broke down (yes!) we were in front of a very small village so I walked in and said hi to the people. I tried to give the children the Smarties, but no one would take them. Then I tried to give them to the mother and she wouldn’t take them either. I tried saying it was candy, but they didn’t speak English…I also ate one, but they still wouldn’t take it. Then, a Tanzanian from our group came over, and translated. They thought the Smarties were medicine because they looked like pills! I had never even thought of that! I need to get a Swahili dictionary and find out how to say candy.
Anyways, as usual I am completely exhausted by the time we get home in the evening. Our days have been long, but we have a lot of work to do and nothing moves too quickly here. One of the women in our group has begun calling me her African daughter. We also determined that since I am her African daughter, if Jeremy expects to marry me, he will have to give her a dowry. She is excited about that…I hope it’s something good, because I’m worth a lot! She said it can be anything; it is really a token of appreciation for raising a daughter worthy of marriage (or something like that).
We are staying at an amazing woman’s house here.
She must be almost 80 years old and she is from Canada, but moved here two years ago and began a program where she goes out everyday and reads to the street children here. The money we pay to stay with her goes to her program, “Streetwise.” I really admire her, to move to the middle of Tanzania at this age (by herself) and to start this program is beyond my wildest imagination. She really amazes me and should be such an inspiration to everyone that anything is possible and it’s never too late to do anything.

You can find everyone else’s blog and pictures here: http://www.outbr8k.blogspot.com/
Again, please look at their pictures because I haven’t taken very many!