By Sarah Sevcik Tanzania
9 July 2008
This has been our first real week “on the job”, and it has been fun and interesting already. My first day involved putting up curtains in the new Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies (HMHB) center. HMHB is in the old office of the District Medical Officer (DMO) next to Karatu health center. The idea is to allow intense education on prenatal and antenatal care for women with high-risk pregnancies. There will be private counseling for women and their families, a nutritional area, growth monitoring, and access to the health center garden for education on healthy weaning foods and diet. The center isn’t quite finished, as it still needs furniture, toilets, and a brick walkway, but Jolene hopes it will be open before we leave. We didn’t have enough curtains to cover every window, so Lizz and I spent the rest of the morning walking around the village trying to find more identical fabrics. It didn’t work out so well, but we enjoyed the process of having village men assist us by running ahead into fabric shops explaining the colors and designs we needed.
9 July 2008
This has been our first real week “on the job”, and it has been fun and interesting already. My first day involved putting up curtains in the new Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies (HMHB) center. HMHB is in the old office of the District Medical Officer (DMO) next to Karatu health center. The idea is to allow intense education on prenatal and antenatal care for women with high-risk pregnancies. There will be private counseling for women and their families, a nutritional area, growth monitoring, and access to the health center garden for education on healthy weaning foods and diet. The center isn’t quite finished, as it still needs furniture, toilets, and a brick walkway, but Jolene hopes it will be open before we leave. We didn’t have enough curtains to cover every window, so Lizz and I spent the rest of the morning walking around the village trying to find more identical fabrics. It didn’t work out so well, but we enjoyed the process of having village men assist us by running ahead into fabric shops explaining the colors and designs we needed.
Putting up curtains in the HMHB Center.
Today we spent the day putting together a pregnancy-monitoring tool for the Village Health Committees and Traditional Birth Attendants of eight villages in Karatu District. This consisted of revising and editing the final monitoring document and then using a ruler, pencil and scissors to cut poster-sized paper into legal size paper (which doesn’t exist here) to use for printing. Often there are no (or few) records of children born in the hospital, and certainly few (if any) records when children are born outside of a clinic (which is the case for the majority of families). The record-keeping document will be used to keep better track of pregnant women in the district and make sure they are receiving adequate care during and after pregnancy. Once we printed out such booklets for each village, Lizz and I took them to town to get bound. However, there were no legal-sized binding, so each cover didn’t quite reach far enough. No problem—we just added packaging tape to the edge to make it more laminated. :-)
Lizz and I with the monitory book.
I have recently started running, and I’m thankful for the chance to do so. I find that I see the most interesting things about a culture by running through new areas and keeping an eye out for the colors that make up people’s lives. Whenever I run, the adults walking by shout out, “Pole! [Po-lay!] Pole!” which means, “Sorry!” I smile back and say, “ham na sheeda” which means “no problem”. People feel sorry for me that I’m running, but I want to! The children, on the other hand, come squealing out of their homes and dash to catch up to me. They love to run beside me for a few hundred meters with amazing pace despite their lack of footwear.
Speaking of children, I have only seen joyful and excitable kids around Karatu. They are such an inspiration to me. I just love how little things impress the children. Today Lizz and I passed Theresa’s (our house and laundry cleaner) home and saw her children playing with a broken tennis ball. We asked to throw the ball with them and they jumped up and down with joy. We probably could have stayed there all day and they would have been happy. Last week we visited an orphanage, and all of the children there were full of laughter, smiling eyes, and a love of play. We played football (soccer), let the kids use our cameras to take hundreds of photos of themselves, and found it humorous that nearly all 30 children had bright and bold colored crocs on their feet. Perhaps a gift from the states?
Some cultural experiences:
*Americans eat food much sweeter than Tanzanian’s desire. When we were camping outside during a safari, we offered roasted marshmallows with melted chocolate to our drivers. They didn’t like it at all—much too sweet. Even Mark’s banana bread has been too sweet for many Tanzanians.
*Nearly every business, tourist attraction, hotel, school and public landmark here are advertised with Coca-Cola. No joke. I think Coke must have offered them free advertising posters or something. Even the police station states “Police Post” with the Coca-Cola sign attached.
*I bought some fabric to bring to the tailor to make cloth napkins. The man didn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Swahili, so it was difficult to get my idea across. “Napkin” certainly wasn’t a word that was getting us anywhere, so I ran down the street to get a paper napkin from a restaurant and ran back, where the man said, “tissue?” Yes, tissue! It worked. :-)
Speaking of children, I have only seen joyful and excitable kids around Karatu. They are such an inspiration to me. I just love how little things impress the children. Today Lizz and I passed Theresa’s (our house and laundry cleaner) home and saw her children playing with a broken tennis ball. We asked to throw the ball with them and they jumped up and down with joy. We probably could have stayed there all day and they would have been happy. Last week we visited an orphanage, and all of the children there were full of laughter, smiling eyes, and a love of play. We played football (soccer), let the kids use our cameras to take hundreds of photos of themselves, and found it humorous that nearly all 30 children had bright and bold colored crocs on their feet. Perhaps a gift from the states?
Some cultural experiences:
*Americans eat food much sweeter than Tanzanian’s desire. When we were camping outside during a safari, we offered roasted marshmallows with melted chocolate to our drivers. They didn’t like it at all—much too sweet. Even Mark’s banana bread has been too sweet for many Tanzanians.
*Nearly every business, tourist attraction, hotel, school and public landmark here are advertised with Coca-Cola. No joke. I think Coke must have offered them free advertising posters or something. Even the police station states “Police Post” with the Coca-Cola sign attached.
*I bought some fabric to bring to the tailor to make cloth napkins. The man didn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Swahili, so it was difficult to get my idea across. “Napkin” certainly wasn’t a word that was getting us anywhere, so I ran down the street to get a paper napkin from a restaurant and ran back, where the man said, “tissue?” Yes, tissue! It worked. :-)
The view of a village watering hole from the Healthy Mothers Health Babies office.
No comments:
Post a Comment