#2 backpost: Mtwara, Tanzania

The night spent back in Addis was uneventful yet profitable. We played 2 games of poker and I won both, giving me nearly US$80 to spend in Tanzania.

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.

#1 backpost: Nekemte

I realized that I haven't really been keeping up with this, and my 3 loyal readers must be really upset. I'm going to catch us up to speed on the past couple of weeks, which were marked by week #1 in Nekemte, Ethiopia, and week #2 back in Mtwara, Tanzania.

We went to Nekemte to work in their hospital's HIV clinic, where CHAI already has 2 hopital management fellows and 2 clinical mentors. There are so many people there because the hospital is a total mess, far worse than any other clinic I've been in so far. Nekemte is about 300 km west of Addis, which equalled an 8 hour drive through lush valleys and farmland. I even took a photo! The yellow is meskal, which is a popular flower in Ethiopia, used for decoration and celebration.

So we did an analysis of the hospital's clinic and made some recommendations to them for how they could continue to enroll patients in the clinic without adding more staff. We're pretty much becoming full throttle consultants, which is okay, but I think in the next phase of our work we're going to take our findings from clinics around Ethiopia and work with the Ministry of Health to make broader changes throughout the country.

A non-work related highlight of the trip to Nekemte was talking with a lot of kids in town. Although it's the biggest city in western Ethiopia, Nekemte is pretty small. It has 2 main roads that intersect, and everything is pretty much within a 5 minute walk. The first night we were in town, we noticed a sign saying that there was bingo in the center of town at a park every night, so of course the next night, we were there right at 6pm to start playing. Unfortunately, the announcer announced the numbers at lightning speed and in Amharic, so we couldn't follow too well. Fortunately, there was a big group of teenage kids who was more than willing to help us play. We didn't win, but we found out that in Ethiopia people think that bingo is an acronym which stands for Best International Numbers Game Organization.

Later that night, we were walking home from dinner when 2 kids came up to us and engaged us in the standard Ethiopia kid/white foreigner chat, which went like this:

kid: Hello! How are you?

me: I'm fine, how are you?

kid: I am fine, what is your name?
me: My name is Kate, what's your name?

kid: My name is China.

me: No it's not, what's your real name?

kid: My name is China!

kid's friend: His name IS China.

me: Why is his name China?

kid's friend: Look at his face!

[I looked. He looked like a regular looking Ethiopian kid.]

Eventually, China told us he wanted some food, and we found him endearing, so we said we would buy him something from one of the sellers on the street. We found one, and China picked up a package of cookies, then put it down and told us that he actually wanted a real meal, not just cookies. Well, you can't deny that it's a better investment, so we bought him tibs, which is basically little chunks of meat eaten with injera, and we went on our way.

The next night, we ran into China again, and Adam decided that we should buy him some pants and shoes, since he was shoeless and wearing some big sweatpants cut at the knees and tied with a rope. We ended up buying him a whole outfit of pants, a t shirt, and a jacket, then some rubber shoes. We left Nekemte feeling like we helped one kid on a very micro level and started the process of improving the hospital's system of providing ART on a more macro level.

After returning to Addis for about 10 hours, we were off again for Tanzania.

It's official: we have the cutest dog of all time

Like any proud parent, I will inundate this blog with photos of the puppy. Did I mention that our colleague Peter was so jealous of our puppy that he got one too? By the way, we gave her a name: Buna. And Peter's puppy is called Shai. What do these names mean? "Coffee" and "Tea." Still not sure if that's super cheesy or just on the line between cute and cheesy. Peter also has 2 dogs already, so here's a photo of Buna and Bobbee (he's one of the full grown dogs) and Buna and Shai. Try and tell me these puppies aren't adorable. The one downside is that I definitely have fleas.

A new addition: contest included

This past Sunday, Adam went to a volleyball game at the US Embassy. On his way home, he and some others spotted a small animal in the road. It was moving a little bit, but then just lay in the road and went to sleep. It turns out this animal was a tiny puppy, and since we'd been talking about the possibility of getting a puppy here, this seemed like the perfect opportunity. So now we have a puppy! She remains nameless, and I'm looking to others to come up with names - the best entry will win the happiness of knowing that s/he named a puppy. Some important things that might help you in the naming contest:

1. She was found on Bole (pronounced Bo-lay) Road, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

2. She has really bad lice

3. She likes to bite fingers

Here's a photo of her adorably chewing on a bone and one of me with her, so that no one accuses me of stealing photos from the internet...

New house

Visit our website: http://www.cshor.org

The past couple weeks have been pretty dull, but we did move into a new house, so here are some photos - The outside of the house, the living room/dining room, and my bedroom:

Safari photos

Finally, some photos to prove that I went on safari!

SAFARI

Safari, in a word: Unbelievable.

Safari, in a lot of words:

My main goal for safari was to end my previous reputation as human wildlife repellent, which I achieved during a trip in Maine a few years ago. In the Maine wilderness, all I wanted to see was one moose. "Oh, we've never NOT seen a moose," Kersten and her dad said. "You'll probably see a ton." After spending hours and hours driving around searching for the elusive moose, we quit and returned to Boston. I was disappointed, but I figured the moose population was somehow massively dwindling or something. Unfortunately for me, every time they've gone since, they seem to see thousands, if not millions, of moose. So I was nervous that on safari, I would have a similar impact on the animals.

We arrived back in Dar from Mtwara on Friday, September 8th. Luckily, we arranged to borrow the car that Meg owned when she lived in Dar from its current owner, and early Saturday morning we set off towards Mikumi National Park, about 4 hours west of Dar. We got to our camp and headed out immediately for a game drive. It's amazing to me how quickly we went from amazement to boredom - whereas at first we were going nuts for every single animal we saw, after about an hour we found ourselves saying "Another zebra??" or "Oh, it's just a group of 30 impala again." That first day, we saw many, many animals including (in order of coolness) impala, zebra, giraffes, and elephants.

It seems like a lot of people really want to see lions when they go on safari. I really wanted to see elephants, and I saw a ton of them. There is really no creature more amazing looking than an elephant...they look so prehistoric and out of place, and I couldn't get enough of them. On the morning of our second day, we were driving around for a few hours, not seeing much, when we decided to pull over to a dam to look for animals. Being the start of the dry season, the best place to spot animals was at watering holes. As we pulled in, it looked like there was nothing there. When we got closer, we noticed some movement, which turned out to be a lion! How lucky we were to see one lion, when the camp manager told us that no one had seen one for a few days. Slowly, we noticed that there were more lions. And more. Each lion stood up from the grass and walked up onto a dirt mound, and by the end we were looking at a pride of 10. A few minutes later, a group of about 15 elephants came to the same watering hole, with a few baby elephants in tow. This was like hitting the jackpot; we were so lucky that I expected a flock of pegasus or unicorns to show up next.

The rest of the weekend continued to be amazing, with more incredible animals and beautiful scenery. The African savannah is a spot that everyone should get to at some point, if possible, because it is beautiful beyond words.

I just discovered that I'm having trouble adding photos to this post. This post will be much more interesting with photos, so I'll work on a solution. Stay tuned!