Here's a map of Tanzania. You can see Dar in the center of the country all the way to the east, and then Mtwara all the way in the southeastern corner. If you make the map a little bigger, you can also see Masasi, where I spent 1 night.
So early on the morning of October 27th, we took off for Dar es Salaam. We spent a day in Dar where we ran some errands and met a few people from the CHAI Tanzania office who we quickly became friends with. We spent that night and the next with our new friends, and then on the morning of the 29th we all took off (along with about 15 other CHAI employees or CHAI partners) to Mtwara, Tanzania. As I think I've written before, Mtwara is a small city in southern Tanzania, about 20km from the Mozambique border. It was developed in the 1940s (ish) by the British to be a great center of the groundnut (peanut) industry. The British built up the town and its infrastructure before finding out that groundnuts don't grow particularly well in the Mtwara soil, so the city is kind of large, but with not much going on. It's right on the Indian Ocean though, and the views are beautiful.
The purpose of our trip to Mtwara was twofold: first, to conduct assessments of the ART clinics throughout the region, and then to use those assessments to help the sites with their annual planning and budgeting. We set out for our sites in teams of about 5 people, but somehow I ended up in a car all alone with this kind of important guy in the Tanzanian HIV world. This turned out to be lucky, because we spent the whole ride to our district (Masasi) talking about how CSHOR could work throughout Tanzania. We also gave a presentation on our work during the planning and budgeting portion of the week, and it was well received.
The outcome of this whole thing was that there's a chance that once we complete our work with all of the clinics we're engaged with in Ethiopia, we might move our base of operations to Tanzania and see if we can work there.
On our 1 day off of work, a few of us went to this tiny town about 11km from Mtwara, where there was a beautiful hotel that was formerly a fort. Adam and I decided to check out the town, and he thought it would be fun to take one of the fishing boats (a dugout canoe) out for a spin. While we tried to negotiate a price, pretty much everyone in the town gathered around to watch. Eventually, this guy agreed to have us pay about $2 to take his boat out. I don't know if you've ever been in a dugout canoe, but they are not sturdy. While the whole town watched, I got in the boat. Then when Adam started to get in, the boat flipped over, much to the delight of the local kids. This happened twice before we finally got in a boat and took off. Unfortunately, the fun wore off after about 10 minutes, and we returned the boat. It was $2 well spent, and my first time swimming in the Indian Ocean.
Since then, we've been back in Addis working in 2 clinics here. We're planning on going a few hours south the week of the 27th to a town called Hosanna, and then there's a chance we might go to China in early December, but that's very TBD.
No comments:
Post a Comment