Hospitals, Good byes, and Heading home

It has been one long journey. One that, I have to say, is coming to an end. Not really though, I’ll be back; I am in the process of starting some pretty awesome things, in which I can continue to aid the inspiring people I've met, my biggest passion here. so this is not the end, it is just good-bye for now.

All of this is coming on the heels of a tough decision. This last month I have been battling whether I should go home or not. I cannot stay well.  I keep getting sick and am in and out of the hospital just fighting to not get sick again. my body just won’t fight anymore. I never want to hear the word amoebas again. I’m afraid to eat because I am scared I am going to get sick again, but that only works for so long...I was in the hospital for 2 days last week and then headed back to my village. After one night I got sick again, it's baffling and discouraging and depressing. I am back in the hospital for 3 days and I have decided my body just isn’t fighting back. I have to go home and get well.

One of my best friends here has been extremely sick like me and on her blog this is how she described it: 

“Physically, mentally and emotionally, I am exhausted, beaten and drained. I feel like I’m doing this all wrong. After 4 months, I shouldn’t be making these mistakes that get me so sick. After 4 months I should be getting the hang of living in the third world. After 4 months I shouldn’t be so tired all the time. Instead, more often than not, I feel like I got hit by a train; I can feel my immune system frantically trying to pull it’s flattened self off the train tracks before the next parasite or bacteria or unfamiliar disease comes along to squish it into submission once again. Coupled with the lack of available protein, the daily stress that the intense sun and heat put on my ivory skin and my New England accustomed body, the hard physical labor of village life, it’s safe to say my body has been through the ringer and it’s begging me for respite, mercy, a chance to recover. Realistically, how safe is it to push myself through another illness? A few eggs and bananas aren’t going to completely get my immune system back on track. And water isn’t either – especially when that’s what made me sick most recently. What’s to say that my immune system will be able to gather it’s fragmented self in order to respond to what comes next, whatever it may be? And yes, there are changes I can make. As a very wise woman recently said “it’s time to start acting more like a tourist…”; she’s right. But since the amoebas, I’ve stopped eating fruit at the market. Since the malaria, I’ve started using two mosquito nets instead of one and practically started a new religion centered around prophylaxis and bug spray. When it comes to the typhoid, yeah, I clearly need to be more careful with my water. I try to drink only bottled water, but sometimes boiled water is the only option. Maybe one batch didn’t reach the right temperature or I swallowed a little in the shower; maybe I washed the vegetables in unfiltered water or didn’t dry the knife and cutting board completely. I honestly don’t know. I do know that I’m almost as sick of retracing my steps as I am sick of being sick. It’s infuriating; I’m angry mostly at my body for being unable to withstand a little bad water, but I am also angry at my inability to live in a way that essentially protects myself from the danger that I’ve so willingly put myself in. But after all is said and done, what’s more important than your health? Without it, you can’t go anywhere or see anything or do anything. Without it, you can’t live.” 

You can read more of her blogs at abigailskelton.wordpress.com she’s an amazing writer! I just felt like she took the words right out of my mouth.

All I know is that I trust in God’s plan for my life. But He's been testing me. for a while there, there were lots of sleepless nights and lots of tears questioning things. How can you be so sick in a foreign place but dying to stay somewhere for the smiles you put on peoples faces? And then turn around and all you want is the familiarity of home and the people you love and to be OUT of a third world hospital ALONE. 

And have I mentioned the only person anyone wants when they feel sick is their mom? There are so many things going on back and forth in my mind. Don't get me wrong, I have loved teaching in Africa, but the number one thing I have loved the most is forming strong relationships with the families I have helped. Sponsoring families and getting them back on their feet has meant everything to me. Making sure that my students get a meal during school hours once a week - that project means a lot to me. These connections and projects and smiles I have created are memories that I hold near and dear to my heart. They will continue even though I am home; they have to. While in the solitary confinement of the hospital, I have set up that process. It is going to be really hard for me to leave this place, but I have put a lot of thought in my decision and I think in this case I have to put myself first and go home. There are so many close relationships that will remain in my heart forever. Memories and people have changed my life. I feel like I have lived in another world for the past 4 months and honestly it has felt a lot longer than 4 months! 

I can pack my things in my two big orange bags and think back on all the good that has happened in these 4 months. I do so with a clear conscience and a grateful heart. I have been touched by so many people, I have been changed for the better in so many ways I can’t even begin to describe; honestly I don’t even know if I will be able to at times.  This place yet filled with lots of health issues that can keep you from living here, has SO much good; so many positives rich in values and culture that will always be a part of me. 

This is not a good-bye; this is a “see you later"; to all my friends and families, students, teachers: I promise, I'll be back. 

Lord,
I pray for peace. I know you are so much stronger than all my worries. I know that when I am down you paint that beautiful sunset in the sky to tell me tomorrow is a new day. Even though I feel like so much is changing at home I know that your love for me will never change. You brought me here for a reason and I feel like I belong here. I have never felt so close to you and so close to others like I do here. I am growing in my faith and as a woman in Christ each day. I look around and I see your love everywhere. I see big smiles and acts of kindness throughout my day. I see people with so little give so much. People teach me something new each day and my heart feels so warm to be able to do life with them. Help me remember that you are God and all things are possible with you by my side. Your plan for my life is greater than I can see right now. In all things give thanks and remember that I am not in control, you are God. 

Learning so much in a place that I now call home.

It has been a few weeks since I have had the time to sit and reflect on my time here. So much has happened and I have been so busy. If I am not at school I am at the hospital and if I am not at the hospital I am at the market buying things for families I am sponsoring. It takes a lot out of me but it's what keeps me going every day. Before I left for Zanzibar I didn't even want to go because I didn't know how I was going to leave the families for a week. Who was going to visit them? Who was going to check on them? I would miss them and when I told them I was leaving for break they seemed confused. I hated that feeling. Mama Minza has called me so many times this week to tell me how much she misses me and she will put Kulwa on the phone and say "we love you." Now that right there makes me melt. I absolutely love the relationships I have formed here, they mean so much to me and I take them very seriously. I never make promises I can't keep and I always visit my friends as much as I can. I don't want to let them down.
One of the best relationships I have formed is with Mama Minza's little baby Kulwa. He has my heart in so many ways. Every time he sees me he just gets this huge smile on his face and he reaches out for me to hold him. It's been awesome to watch him grow because he is only 15 months. To have started loving him in the hospital when he was so sick with malaria until now when he is so happy and full of life is so awesome. Mama Minza now calls me Mama Kulwa because she knows how much I love him. She td me after break I could take him from the morning til the night, so I could keep him for a full day! That made me so excited! I told her she would have to teach me how to wrap him on my back in order to carry him while I walk like all the other mamas do because babies cry if you try to carry them on your hip here they are just not used to being held that way.
The uji project is doing so great! I hope all of you had a chance to watch my video! If not add me on Facebook and you can see it on my page. The students look forward to the porridge each week and with the help of a few main teachers directing the cook it really runs pretty smooth. I can see the students attention span and energy increase once they have their meal for the rest of the day and that is so important for their studies. Without it on the rest of the days it is like a downward slope, energy level and attention span is high in the morning and then just continues to decrease as the afternoon goes on. It would just be like if you went a whole day without food. You may be sufficient the first few hours of the day but the towards the latter end of the afternoon that is going to change.
My school was supposed to have mid-terms before mid-term break but they didn't have enough money to print the tests for the students so they just decided not to give them. I was pretty shocked at this because we teachers had to turn in our mid-term test and answer key weeks before mid-term but then they decided not to give them.
Many students need textbooks. I think maybe 4 students out of my class of 60 have their own textbook and so many students ask me to get them one for biology. I let them borrow mine (I have two) and then the other four students share so well get in groups to share the books.
As for sponsoring families, that project is going wonderful!!! I'm on my 5th family and two other people have donated so that I now can add two more families to make it 7 total families! I'm thinking on ways I can improve sponsorship. Micro start ups and micro financing have been on my mind a lot lately. My piki driver put this in my mind when he told me he wanted to start a car wash business. He asked me if I would help him by the machine to wash the cars and then he wouldn't charge me for my piki rides each day to school until the cost of the machine was paid off. I thought that was such a wonderful idea! Mama Minza asked me if I could give her $50 USD to help her start a canteen/eatery where she sells chapti and Mandazzi on market day so she can make money for her family. I was thinking maybe I could give her the money and then ask for her to pay me half of it back over time once her business gets going. Same with the family in the village that Taylor sponsored. There only source of income which is extremely little is through farming so I can teach them how to start a garden and give them the money for start up seeds. Once the crops grow they can pay me back for the seeds. Each family will be different in means of work but it would be a case by case basis.
One elderly man I visit a lot named Slivanos. He lives alone and is the sweetest man. He takes care of his cattle and keeps his home so clean it is unreal. When I first met him he was wearing shoes with no soles and so many holes in them I don't even know how he kept them on his feet. His pants were all but falling apart but he gave us the only chair he had to sit on and he welcomed us with open arms and a huge smile. He's always building something new when I visit or planting flowers he's found or fruit trees. He warms my heart. I bought him a new pair of shoes and a new pair of pants and now he never takes them off.
Down the road there's another family who expressed to me that they needed glasses. I took them to the hospital and had them get there eyes checked. The wife needs surgery she's developing cataracts but the eye surgeon only comes to my village every 3-4 months so well have to wait to see him but we were able to get the husband some glasses and that was fun to watch because it was as if he got his eye sight back instantly and he couldn't stop smiling.
There was also George. George will always have such a special place in my heart. He came into my school asking each teacher if they would donate money to help him go to advanced level to continue his education. When he got around to me, I had my good friend who teaches English ask him a few questions back and forth in Swahili for me. I found out he was an orphan and for the last 4-5 months he's been walking around town trying to collect money to go to school. I asked him how much he needed to go to school, he told me $150. I told him I would pay it. I went the next day to his village it was about an hour away from mine so a long piki drive. When I arrived his grandparents greeted me and had been preparing food all day waiting for my arrival. Out of all the families I had helped, this family brought me to tears. Both George's parents died when he 3 years old and his grandparents have raised him. They have absolutely nothing. They borrowed plastic chairs and a table just for the day so I would have something to sit on. They sleep on sticks woven together to make a mattress. They told me they were relying on George to get an education so that he could send them money to survive. That was a moment that extremely humbled me, comparing my education to George's education. My parents sent me to school because they wanted me to learn and to be an intelligent individual. George's grandparents are relying on him to go to school so that he then can get a job and provide for not only himself but for them as well. What a contrast. The next day I took George into town and helped him buy all his basic needs to go to A level. Uniform, mattress, plate, bowl, cup, shoes, etc. he won't come home until the end of the year so he lives at his school. George was so grateful for all of my help. A Tanzanian engineer heard about George's story and wanted to help. He paid for George's transport to his school which will take 2 days by bus and for half of his school fees. I was so excited that I could partner with a local Tanzanian in these efforts to provide education.
The hospital has been going well. I have been learning a lot in the maternity ward. I delivered a baby by myself the other week! I cut the umbilical cord, removed the placenta, did all the post delivery care etc. It was awesome!!
There was this one night and the hospital was extremely busy. I was in the maternity ward. All the beds were filled, most women were two to a bed and we were caring for one lady who had eclampsia. She had delivered her baby but her blood pressure was extremely high, she had edema and convulsions. She was extremely sick and we had to seek treatment right away. The nurse was showing me step by step what to do in this situation and what meds to administer etc. Well in the middle of her treatment a terrible accident came in. 27 people were severely injured from a bus accident. The driver turned too sharply and the bus flipped several times. Bodies were stacked on top of one another on the back of two pick up trucks and brought in. Two people were left on the truck when I went outside and I soon realized it was because they were dead. I helped where I could but it was mainly head injuries or lacerations to being thrown around in the bus. I went back to maternity and the nurse was still working on the patient with eclampsia. This mama kept asking her about her baby but the nurse was busy. I asked her what the problem was and told her I could look at her child. She laid the child on the delivery table and uncovered her from the kanga. The child was premature. I touched the child and the child made no response. It was showing no reflexes to anything I was doing. This mama was watching everything I was doing so closely. I grabbed a stethoscope and listened for a heartbeat. There was none. She may not have understood anything I was saying but she did understand that. She looked at me and I just shook my head. Her eyes filled with tears and I called the nurse over to check behind me. The nurse came and said this baby has been dead for a few hours. She told the mama in Swahili that the child was dead and the mom lost it. This was the first time I had seen a Tanzanian woman express emotion at really anything. It was extremely moving and a very difficult night for me to process.
There was one girl who was in the ward the following week who had a deformity that I had never seen before. She could not move at all by herself. The only thing she could do was move her head side to side. She had very bad bed sores that needed to be treated because her parents don't change her positions a lot like they should. All I could think though is why is she in the maternity ward? Did they run out of space in another ward? This doesn't make sense. Come to find out she had given birth to a child just the day before. How? By Caesarean section obviously and the child was 100% healthy, It honestly was a miracle. The parents will have to take care of the child and raise it for all of it's life but the child survived. All of the nurses and I were wondering how did this girl manage to get pregnant? She can only turn her head on her own, something isn't adding up. One nurse and I called the girl's mother into the nurses station and begin to ask her some questions. Here's what we found out: Her parents both are farmers so they would leaver her all day to plow their land and tend to their crops. When they would leave a older boy down the street would come in and rape her and the leave. This happened about four times. When the mom started to notice signs of pregnancy she just could not believe it. She asked her daughter if anything happened but she always denied it. It wasn't until the mother started asking around her community that she found out about this boy. The boy has now ran away and no one has seen him and the grandfather of the boy sent money when the baby was born. I almost got physically when I heard this story. To think about how this boy would have to do this to her when she cannot move any part of her body...I can't handle it. It's terrible. It's evil.
Dr. Mponya texted me that week and told me to hurry to the hospital he had a surgery he wanted me to assist with. I got there and it was a woman who had ovarian cysts that needed to be removed. They had found the cysts by ultrasound. When we cut her open there were no cysts anywhere. Dr. Mponya searched everywhere and could not find anywhere. So the conclusion was that the person in x-ray read the ultrasound wrong. We just put this woman through serious surgery and in the conditions were in she definitely has an infection now that is 100% sure. For what? For nothing. They decided to treat her "psychologically" meaning they told her they removed cysts and all is well now. They just gave her antibiotics for the infection. That was pretty eye opening for me to see.
When I was leaving one night I passed a little girl sitting alone on a bench in the hallway of the hospital. I tried to tell her hello but she just looked at me with eyes that were saying, "Help me." Something was up, I felt it. A kanga was wrapped around her elbow and she was so silent. I sat beside of her and soon realized she didn't know any Swahili and was Sukuma. The main tribe around my village. Finally a man walked up which was her father and he was acting out what happened to me. A dog bit her. He unwrapped the kanga and half of her arm was missing. I kid you not. How was this child around 4-5 years old sitting there in complete silence. She wasn't making a peep. The doctor was nowhere to be found. I immediately went to find him and stayed with them until they were seen. They were admitted and I visited her until I left for midterm break.
Mama Minza even had to go to the hospital twice because of her leg. I went to visit her one week and she lifted up her kanga to show me that her leg was bothering her. Ummm yeah I had a minor freak attack. It was a massive infection/ulcer due to a previous burn when she was a child. It was right in the area where you bend your leg so I can imagine how much it hurt every time she tried to walk. I got my piki driver to take her to the hospital and I met them there. I had Dr. Mponya look at her leg and he agreed that it was definitely sepsis. They had to clean it out pretty good. Mama Minza held my hand and cried. They bandaged her up and they gave us a script with some antibiotics and some cream for her leg.
Those are all the major events at the hospital nowadays I haven't been able to form any lasting relationships like I did with Kulwa and Doto but I am still trying every day.
The new thing around my house is that a lot of the younger kids want to come over as soon as they see me walking home to learn English. At first they came over just to hang out but then I passed out paper and markers to all the kids and they thought it was their lucky day! They were drawing all sorts of objects and wanting me to write the English word. I thought that was so neat that they wanted to learn so we started it do it more frequently and more kids would come each day. Now I bring out chairs and our plastic tables and as many kids that can fit squeeze together to write and draw. Haleigh Treutel sent paint pens for the kids and they absolutely loved this!! It was so interesting to me how much they lack creativity because they are not given the opportunity growing up to explore it, by doing arts and crafts or looking at picture books, reading stories, using their imagination, etc. I taught all of the kids how to use the paint first and I had about 15 kids so they were a task to manage. Then I said "Okay everyone draw a picture, anything you want!" I just started drawing mine not paying attention because hey I love to paint too! I drew clouds and grass and a big green tree. I look over and every child is copying my picture. It's like they can't just think of something on their own to draw, they really struggle using their imagination. They are so used to bring told what to do all of the time. I bought an Oxford Primary English exercise book because the kids have been asking me for one and I also bought a book I can read to them where one side is in Swahili and one side is in English! So we can do some exercises together and then have story time, the kids will absolutely love that!! All of these kids are in primary school so they are little ones!
I left Friday to go to Zanzibar, on Monday I was in the hospital again with giardia cysts. It's a type of parasite. It never ends with the sickness. I was well enough to travel to Zanzibar, but don't let the pictures fool you I was pretty sick there too. Zanzibar was awesome!! I wasn't going to let sickness ruin my trip, a little bit of sunshine and ocean will make anyone feel better, right? I went with my friend Abby. She teaches in Mtwara which is about ten hours south of Dar es Salaam so the total opposite direction of where I am. But it was so nice to meet in the middle and spend time with her for a week! She is such a sweet girl! Let me tell you we did a whole lot of nothing and I loved every second it. I think I am going to turn into chai tea we drank so much of it each day! We loved the markets in Stone Town. We bought lots of elephant pants and then wore them for the rest of the week so I don't even know why I packed other clothes to wear! We looked like we were walking straight out of a Bollywood movie haha. The guesthouse we stayed in was perfect for us. There was hardly anyone on the beach and it was very quiet, everything we wanted. We met lots of locals and their were lots of Germans there believe it or not so we met two German girls that were really cool. They had just finished up volunteering for 3 months at an orphanage in Uganda so we went to dinner with them one night and shared stories with one another. We snorkeled one day out at an island and got to hold starfish and then we swam with the sea turtles another day! I would love to volunteer helping at this rehab facility I love sea turtles so much. They are such fascinating creatures to learn about. We also got a $20 massage which I was pumped about on one day when it was a little rainy out. So other than that we say and drank lots of tea and reflected on our time so far as teachers and as volunteers. It was nice to hear about Abby's time in a different region and laugh about her stories as were both experiencing the same feelings and going through a lot of the same struggles whether it be with our students or with day to day life. I was hesitant to go on break, I didn't want to leave the families behind and my village behind, I felt guilty in a way. Especially when you leave the village and the prices sky rocket and I feel so guilty even ordering food somewhere because all I can think about is how I can be giving that money to them instead of wasting it. But people have told me that it is important in these cases to try and separate myself the best I can. It was important for me to take a break for week. Try to separate myself so I can let my mind rest and then return feeling fresh and healthy again. I tried but I'm not going to tell you it was easy. I'm excited to get back and to see my friends. I miss them and I hope they missed me just as much. 

Meet the Hamisi family! This is the 2nd family that has been sponsored. They are a family of seven children and one father. The mother is absent from the home and the children cannot afford to attend school. They eat one potato each day. We got the privilege of meeting some of their basic needs and helping the children return to school! The family was filled with gratitude and was so happy to have assistance from us!

I am fully recovered and am in action doing so many things in Bariadi! Over the past week I have come up with two major projects that I have started and am so excited about: sponsoring families and feeding the kids at my school uji (porridge). I have done all the research and budgeting and to feed the kids (700 of them) it would cost $25 dollars a day. I would need two buckets of maize each day and then I would take it to the mill in town to make it into a powder form. I would also need 10 kilos of sugar. There are two men that work at the school as security but I would hire them to cook the uji and pay them per month. The students would each bring their cup from home and be responsible for washing it after eating. Each month each student would also bring 1 piece of firewood so we could prepare the food. This would allow us to have a stock of firewood per month. I bought two 60L jiko pots to cook on the fire with two giant wooden spoons. I am so excited to start this at school because these kids are starving. So many kids don’t take any food in the morning before school and walk miles each day to get to school. Then school is from 7am-2pm each day without any lunch being served. This affects their energy level, their ability to focus, and their willingness to come to school. If they know that during break time (10:00am-10:30am) they will be served uji this will motivate them. With my budget right now ($100 a month, $25/week) I will start only serving the kids uji once a week on Wednesdays. Hopefully in the future I can increase the days maybe to Tuesday/Thursday or Mon/Wed/Fri!

            As for the families, I have sponsored two families myself. A BIG thanks to Devan Kuhn and Taylor Sockwell they have also donated and each sponsored a family of their own! I am so excited about this! I am finishing up on the second family by this Tuesday and then I can begin working on the next two families for Devan and Taylor. With sponsoring families my goal is to find families in extreme need of help. It is difficult because everyone is in need here but I am working hard with a close friend of mine who is also a teacher at my school, Mwajabu, and we are trying to come up with a criterion for this. I buy food and clothes to help get them back on their feet for the first month. So for Mama Minza’s family I bought a sack of rice, small fish, cabbage, tomatoes, salt, sugar, onions, cooking oil, soap for washing clothes and soap for bathing, shoes for the family, and clothes for the family, school uniforms, etc. (All of this totals to around $65-75 depending on the number of children in the family.) Mama Minza has 9 children. Mama Minza went to the big market with me, which is every Tuesday and helped me pick out the right sizes for the clothes, school uniforms, and shoes. Nothing is more rewarding then going back the next week to see them and seeing the kids smell so good in their scented lotion, so squeaky clean not covered in dirt, wearing all the precious clothes I picked out that don’t match of course because there are such limited choices but they still look so cute, and to see their area covered with pots and pans because they actually have food to cook now for their family. It gives me a feeling I can’t even describe to you; to see the babies crying for food now instead of crying because they are hungry, such a change from one-week prior.  

            After providing things for the family, I then asked Mama Minza’s education level and her skills. I want to know how she can provide these things for her family without my help. She has a primary school education level and is a very good cook. She says that if I provide her with 100,000tsh which is $50 US dollars she could go to the big market each Tuesday and sell mandazi, chapatti, chai, etc. African foods to the people. This would be enough capital for her to start her own business and she would be able to provide for her family each week with the money she earns. This is my goal with each family, I want to help them get on their feet but then to find out how they can be sustainable on their own without me.

            I am still trying to collect backpacks for the kids. Backpacks cost $5, and I have a list of 44 kids from Kidinda who need them. I will continue to work on that little by little.

            School is going well, I just started a new topic….Reproduction. haha. SO awkward. These students ask me so many questions it is so funny!! I feel like I am teaching Sex Ed.

            The hospital is going well also. It is nice because I am starting to feel like a part of the staff, everyone knows me and I finally am remembering everyone’s names. They ask me to assist in certain procedures instead of just referring to me as the “mzungu” haha.

            Besides that I spend most of my days trying to figure out how I can help these families, trying to find more families to reach out to, meeting with my headmistress discussing my food project for the kids and how it can continue once I come back to America. I am trying to plan a trip to the village which is about 6-9 km away from where I live I just need someone to take me so I can see the conditions of the village and what I can do there.

            Hope everyone is doing well! If you have any suggestions or advice please let me know!! laurenbrookeparker@gmail.com

Lord provide me with the resources to help these people. They are in such poverty and have so many basic needs that are not met on a daily basis. I trust you to open up a pathway where I can provide these resources to them and convey your love in their lives. I want to help them so that life is not so difficult and try to relieve the burdens that they are struggling with. You are the healer, the provider, the father to all children I trust in your ultimate plan. 

A view of Mwanza. Lake Victoria. 

My sweet baby Kulwa before I got sick!

When I think back about this past week, it is hard to reflect. I have been in and out of hospitals and trying to get well. I have been discouraged, and my spirit has been weakened. For as busy as I had been and for as much as I was doing my body got run down. My health slipped away and I could no longer do my work. On Tuesday I went to the hospital. I tried to push through but I had been pushing through the day’s prior. I knew a few hours after I had woken up that I needed to go to the hospital. I called the administrator where I volunteer here in Somanda and he came to check on me. At first I asked if he could just bring some nurses by the house but I wasn’t so lucky. He came by my house and after seeing me told me I needed to come to the hospital. I knew I didn’t have the strength to walk so he managed to get a car to come and take me. Even with being a “mzungu” and with Richard taking me past so many people in line to just get admitted it still took hours. At this point I was so sick I just needed to lie down. I didn’t care if it was the ground. I felt so bad and I hadn’t even been in a serious accident or didn’t even have a serious emergency and I couldn’t get past how long these people had to wait in line to get medical care. Richard took me to an area where I had to wait for the doctor. There were three other people waiting. The girl beside me had a pretty bad cut on her leg. We all were sitting on this skinny wooden bench but I was about to faint. I looked at her and looked at her lap and then looked at her again. She lifted her hands up as if giving me the okay. I laid my head in her lap and just closed my eyes trying to find some comfort. It felt like another hour went by before I was called. The doctor asked me my symptoms, took my temperature, which was 102, saw that my blood pressure was 90/50 and also saw that I had lost 14 pounds. She decided to admit me. They gave me fluids and oral antibiotics. It took 24 hours to wait for my results. They told me the next day that I had tested slightly positive for typhoid fever. This could have come from water or food contamination.

I was very thankful for the visitors I had during my time at the hospital. My headmistress came, Mwajabu and Mkama came, and many nurses that I’m friends with from other wards came to visit me. I was very happy. When Emily got out of class she came to bring me some fruits to eat. The hospitals here in Africa do not provide you with any food or drink that is up to friends or family to bring to you. My fever was still elevated and nothing was improving but they did not have a mosquito net in my room and they felt it was very important for me to sleep under the net so they let me go home to sleep. That night Dr. Mponya forced me to go eat chips mayai with him. He was determined I was going to eat food. I just couldn’t eat. Every time I would eat I would get so sick. Let me remind everyone that chips mayai is an omelette with French fries. I was surprised I kept it down…until I woke up the next morning. It was sickness all over again. I talked to my field director and she encouraged me to transfer to a better hospital that was three and a half hours away. I knew at this point it was my only hope to feeling better. I just wasn’t sure if I could withstand the bus ride. Bus rides in Africa are brutal. You cannot move positions and they fit about everything known to man in the bus. Goats, babies, charcoal stoves, if it can fit then it can come. All the fellow World Teach volunteers felt like Mwanza was the best bet for curing this sickness so they were really encouraging me to go. The hospital was more advanced and could provide better care…I just needed to get there. Emily missed a day of school to come with me. We managed to get a window seat and I didn’t budge the entire ride. Three and a half hours turned into five and a half hours. After about the three-hour mark I couldn’t hold in the tears any longer. I just wanted off the bus. It was so crowded and so hot. We kept going through checkpoint after checkpoint and there was not enough airflow. The last two hours my head just hung out of the bus. We finally made it and I ran to the “choo” (bathroom) as fast as I could. The taxi driver dropped me straight off at the hospital. They had to re do the tests that Somanda did and I got my results in 30 minutes (crazy the difference). It showed that I had a large amount of amoebas (parasites) and that’s why I was not getting any better. They gave me different medications and told me no matter what this would stop the constant bouts of sickness and all would be good. I left and checked into a hostel and then tried to get some food to take my medicine before I went to sleep. I couldn’t even finish my food and I was so sick again. It was a very rough night alone in my room just wanting to feel better but my body wouldn’t let me. Emily and I got separate rooms so this added to me feeling even more alone. It was so hot and I just wanted to be in my own bed back in Bariadi with a fan not in this hotel room by myself. It was hard too because I had no TV or no music it was just me in a room thinking about how awful I felt. The next morning I was not any better. I decided to go back to the hospital and they admitted me for two days. They gave me IV antibiotics and fluids for dehydration. They switched the medicines again and this time it actually worked. Third time is the charm! After a day of rest in my hospital bed and a day of fluids I felt like a new person. Emily brought me dinner and I was able to keep it down which was a huge sign of improvement. They had a TV in my room and believe it or not they had good shows playing! I watched Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives. I didn’t feel so alone with the familiarity of American television and a nicer surrounding. Emily brought me a milkshake that night which made me happy. The next day it was the same routine, white walls caving in on me. I just wanted to go home. I finally left the next day after 24 hours of no sickness. They sent me home with 5 days worth of oral antibiotics. On the bus ride home I couldn’t stop thinking about how important my health is. I have to stay healthy in order to stay here. I want to accomplish so much while I am here but I will not be able to do that if I cannot remain healthy. It makes me so sad that something like water can be such a setback for me on my journey but I am trying to remain strong. I lost my spirit for a while this week but now that I am recovered I am going to work so hard to regain my strength. I love it here too much to go home early. I love the people, I love the work I am doing, and I love the passion I have created inside myself for helping these people. When that got taken away from me this week I felt like my entire spirit was drained out of me. Please pray that this will not happen again, that I will stay healthy and that my spirit will remain strong.

"For my strength is made perfect in weakness." 2 Corinthians 12:9

Haven’t posted on my blog in over a week so it is time for an update! Between now and the last time I posted I have been very busy. I got my first bout of sickness. Pole sana. (I’m sorry) Is what I heard all last weekend from many of my friends. I got an amoeba from the water or the food I’m not sure which one but it was awful I know that. I think I made the outdoor toilet my new home for the weekend. I texted a doctor from the hospital and he brought me medicine. He told me to take 10 pills at one time after eating a lot of food, I was a bit skeptical at taking ten pills at one time…so I ended up just taking my cipro.

That Friday Dr. Mponya insisted that I go with him to hear the mzungus (white people) preach. I was really interested in going! How many times are white people preaching in Africa?! Low and behold they were from NC! They spotted me in the crowd pretty quickly considering I was the only white girl. They came up and asked me where I was from and if I was a missionary. I told them I was a teacher here in town and heard that they were preaching for the week. They invited me to dinner that night but that is when I got so sick. They were Pentecostal and they preached a lot to the congregation about how to speak in tongues and how imperative this was as a believer in Christ. I knew nothing about this so it was very foreign to me to listen to. It was very interesting to see that the African people believe anything that mzungus say no matter what. They lack critical thinking skills to the extent that they never question anything for themselves to think ‘is this right or wrong.’ The preacher spoke about having visions from God and seeing demons many times in his life….lets just say it was an experience for me to be there, hearing congregations speak in tongues, and then there was me feeling very isolated. That Sunday when I was somewhat recovered from my amoebas Dr. Mponya came and got me and insisted I share a meal with the team. So I had dinner with them. The locals were begging me to ask the team if they would pray for a certain man that was very sick. I said I had no problem asking the preachers if they would do this. They said they didn’t mind. The man showed up after dinner, and was face down in the dirt flailing around like a snake. The team immediately told me he was demon possessed…They started praying that the demons would come out of him. I have never been around anything like this before. So after they prayed he was still lying there and literally started freaking out!!!! His body was moving in ways that I didn’t know were possible. They moved him inside and he was just out of control and they just left him there. I’m not really sure what happened there.

Later that week, I went to the big market that they have here in town every Tuesday and found baby clothes for the first time! I was so excited! I bought 25 outfits for $12. I am going to distribute them to some of the mothers in the hospital who keep asking me for clothes for their baby. They are truly in need and leave the hospital with their baby only wrapped in a thin sheet called a kanga. I also got a list from the school beside my house of kids who need back packs. Many of the kids carry their books in black plastic bags. I am going to try to work on getting them backpacks for school. I was so sad when I went to go give my sweet little twins that I visit every day at the hospital (they are 7 months) their outfits I bought them and they were gone. I was trying to ask where they live but to get directions around here is comical. People were telling me “beside the cows” I’m like there are cows everywhere around here haha. My friend is going to help me find them because I miss them so much and they are truly suffering from malnutrition and I want to help them.

This week we had a 2-day holiday. It was Eid Mubarak, a Muslim holiday and also the end of Ramadan. It was so nice to have a break from school! I went over to my friend Mwajabu’s house (she is also a teacher at Kidinda) and we made pilau and mchicha on the jiko! It was honestly one of the best meals I have had since I have been here. I met her roommate Ummy, which I loved. They both speak such wonderful English and I connect with them so well. I feel so bad for her because she has not received her salary from the government since March. She is a teacher at Mahaha, which is a school in Bariadi. They keep saying she is not approved, which is a lie. It makes me so angry how corrupt the government is here. I asked her how she was surviving here with no salary and she said Mwajabu was helping her and her parents are too. Today BiBi told me that she found out that all the kids who board at Bariadi (250 students), the government is supposed to pay for their food. They eat 3 meals a day so that costs 1,500 tsh. That is almost $1 per student to eat 3 meals a day, but the government hasn’t paid this money for their food in 1 year. We were trying to figure out how these students are going to continue to get food….makes me so angry.

I want to try to grow food at my school for the students to eat but Bariadi is a desert area so not many people garden here. All the food we get from the market is imported from bigger towns like Dar. I will have to give this more thought to see if this could even be a possibility.

School has been going well. I get so frustrated with my students some time, because I feel like no matter how many times we go over material they still act clueless when it comes to quiz time. If they have 1 hour to take the quiz and it has 20 questions, they will have 30 minutes left and still be on #1. I’m like!!!!!! Let’s speed it up! Or if I have them draw diagrams of some sort and label things on their quiz, like draw the neuron and label a b and c, or draw an eye and label a b and c and they will spend so much time on this!!!!! Shading and adding patterns and texture to the picture you’re just like sweetheart that’s wonderful but lets get to the next question! They are such perfectionists and test-taking skills have not been taught here whatsoever.

One day this week I walked into my class to find three male teachers beating half my class for no reason. All the girls were in the corner of the class trying to protect each other covering themselves and the teachers were just looking for people to beat. I walked in the class so upset. I may not have the authority to say anything in a large school setting when that is going on but when it is my class time that is not okay. I walked right up to them and said, “get out.” They looked at me with their stick in the air ready to hit the student again and said “Madam let me finish I have 4 more I need to beat.” I said, “No, please go.” They walked out and all the students were saying “thank you Madam thank you for saving us, thank you for saving us.”

I was walking home late one night and ran into Suzy my neighbour. She is 6 years old. It was very dark outside and not safe for her to be walking alone. I said “Hi beautiful! What are you doing out by yourself?” She told me it was her sister, Rachel’s birthday tomorrow. I love Rachel she is 11. Her and Suzy come over and spend time with me a lot on the weekend. Last weekend they came over and watched the Lion King on my computer while I worked on some worksheets for my students. I said, “It is! How special!” She said, “I am going into town to get her a jift.” I love that she says gift with a ‘j’. I said “Do you have money?” and she said “No.” My heart sank. I didn’t have a lot of money on me to give her, all I had was 900 tsh which was not that much at all. I gave it to her and said, “Here take this, go buy Rachel the best jift ever.” She was beaming with joy and ran off saying thank you Madam!! I was teary eyed the whole way home thinking wow. All the time and energy I spend on my birthdays and Rachel is going to get a gift that is less than $1 tomorrow and will be so thrilled. That will be her birthday. I made her a card the next day at school and went to her house to give it to her. She was so happy! It’s the little things here.

At school on Thursday they had a debate on if Europeans came to Africa would this be a positive or negative thing. The whole school participates in the debate. They all bring chairs and sit under the trees and students from each form are called on to give a pro or a con on the topic. One boy was called on to give a con. He said that if Europeans came to Africa they would bring a lot of promiscuity. This would also cause a lot of sexual acts to occur and Europeans wear condoms, which cause cancer. WHAT?!! I was appalled. I called the student over after he was done speaking and said, “Who told you that condoms cause cancer?” He said, “Madam it is true condoms cause cancer.” I said, “No that is not true they do not cause cancer! You need to protect yourself.” Lord help us how can they think this. Education is key!

I am really starting to feel like a local now in the market near my house. I leave my house and grab some food before I head to the hospital or grab some food on the way home. I always go to the same little spot and the mamas always get so excited to see me. They always force-feed me soda and rice and beans. They are so sweet!! It is so interesting how you learn to love communicating in a language you don’t even understand. They speak Sakuma the local tribal language that I probably know 3 words of. I just sit and listen to them try to speak to me. I nod my head and hold their hands. I eat my rice and love their company. I don’t understand what their saying but I laugh with them and smile and I feel such comfort being with them. They are my friends. The other day a precious little girl came up to me in her school uniform and you could tell she was hungry. She handed me a piece of white paper all folded up. I opened it and it was her report card from school! She made all A’s this term! I pulled her up a plastic chair and got her a soda. I went and got her an empty bowl and spoon and gave her half of my food. We had lunch together and she was so excited! I had to teach her how to use a spoon because she was only used to using her hands, that is definitely a cultural thing here in Africa. She showed me how she could count to ten in English, and she sang me the song “head, shoulders, knees and toes.” She was 4 years old and the most precious little girl I had spent time with. She beamed with joy and didn’t want me to leave her. I told her I had to go to the hospital but I would visit her tomorrow!

One night this week I went to some of my hospital friends house. They live pretty close to me. They have a TV and they get some American channels. They love to watch the Kardashians. I was so embarrassed! “Is this what America is like? Is this what you do in America?” “No I said, not everyone lives this way.” “They don’t?” I was becoming so frustrated. The next show on E TV was a reality show where Americans were at a restaurant and all they were doing was screaming at the waitress because their guacamole wasn’t on the side just the way they ordered it. “Why are they being so rude?” they said. “Are all Americans like this?” What am I supposed to say to this? How am I supposed to explain this to them? I just said, “Why are we watching this? Can we turn the channel? Lets watch something else.

The hospital this week was eventful. My friend Monica who is my age had her baby! So I got to be there for her. She had a baby boy and he is so handsome! She did wonderful and I was so thankful for that. Another mother had twins, one boy and one girl. They are so amazing! I feel for her and try to help her as much as I can. The time one gets to sleep the other one wakes up and starts to cry wanting food, she never gets a break. They are always on the same schedule!  One morning I came to visit Monica and saw a lady across from her spoon-feeding her child milk. Monica speaks good English so I asked her, “Why is she doing that?” and she said, “She is having trouble with her milk coming in.” I said, “Why isn’t she using a bottle?” She said, “A what?” I said, “A bottle.” She said, “I’m sorry you’ll have to explain I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It hit me, oh my gosh they do not know what bottles are. That is why she is using a spoon. In my mind I was thinking spoons are not good to use because it will create bad sucking problems, why isn’t she using a bottle? But these people don’t know what a bottle is. This was a time where I had to take a deep breath and remember wow I am in a developing country. I just told Monica never mind and went on holding her handsome little boy.

I saw a baby be born who had AIDS. This was wild to see. The baby barely had any skin; you could almost see its femur bone. It also had very little hair. The mother had AIDS when she got pregnant and never took any of the retrovirus medicine. I honestly don’t know if the baby will survive.

Just two days ago I was in the nurses room and one of the male nurses came and got me and said would you like to come see a breached delivery. I said “yes by C-section?” He said “No we don’t deliver breached babies by C-section here.” I’m thinking that is really dangerous, in the US most all breached babies are delivered by C-section because it can be very dangerous for the baby and for the mother. I go into the delivery room and I see the mother in the process of delivery and two legs sticking out of the vagina. For about 35 minutes we make no progress, the baby isn’t moving further out of the birth canal and the mother is getting tired. There isn’t a doctor in sight. The nurses decide to assist the mother. They begin to see what the problem is, why the baby isn’t coming out any further. The male nurse sticks his hands all the way into the birth canal and the mother is in so much pain. He discovers that the baby’s arms are sticking straight out in the birth canal and will have to be bent down in order to help the baby pass through the canal. At this point it has been so long that the legs have just been hanging out that they squeeze the umbilical cord to check for a pulse, they get nothing. There is no pulse. The baby is dead. Now the main focus is just to get the baby out. They finally managed to get the arms down and managed to pull the baby out but the way they handled this woman I was cringing. They laid the dead baby on the mother, cut the umbilical cord and told her the baby had died in the process. She showed no emotion. They would inform the relatives to come get the body for a burial.

Last week I came into the maternity ward and the nurse Angel said “You just missed a delivery!” The young mother was standing up!! She had just delivered her baby and was standing up over her child. I said, “I don’t think she should be standing up right now.” Angel said, “Brooke, African women are strong!” I look down and she is standing in a puddle of blood, she had started to hemorrhage. I said “Angel, get in here we need to get her on a table.” She came and helped me and gave her 3 shots of oxytocin, which is supposed to cause contractions and stop the bleeding. Women can hemorrhage after labor and die if you are not careful. Angel was massaging her uterus and literally had her arm up to her elbow inside of her pulling clots out of her uterus. She was losing so much blood. The mother was yelling in pain and trying to close her legs because it hurt so bad. At this time Dr. Naomi (a man) walked in and saw her resisting Angel, trying to close her legs. He walked over to her and started beating her. I was in shock. This woman was hemorrhaging!!!! He grabbed both of her legs and yanked them as far back to her head as they could go, started hitting her stomach so hard instead of massaging it and started taking his fist to her head. He was yelling at her saying, “Do not resist her! Do not resist her!” in Swahili. I was frozen. I could not believe he was doing this. The nurse Angel was laughing. I cannot believe that beatings are so tolerated here not just with students but with women too. This woman was probably in half a trance she had lost so much blood and you beat her for expressing emotion? I keep my distance from him at the hospital now.

I visited the Pediatric ward the other day. There was a terrible burn patient. The little boy was 5 years old. His entire face was unrecognizable from burns. He was in charge of cooking dinner for his siblings that night on the jiko (a charcoal burner) and the wind was bad outside. Boiling water + bad winds equaled terrible 3^rd degree burns for this precious little boy.  A 5-year-old cooking dinner for his siblings, I couldn’t get it out of my head. So many things I took for granted when I was growing up as a child.

Positive things about Tanzania:

The stars are absolutely mesmerizing. I get lost in them every night on my walk home.

The people are so kind. I’m walking home every day and someone stops to escort me, or to help me carry my bag.

Sometimes people just want to hold my hand while I’m walking to wherever I am going. That makes me happy.

The Lord works in such mysterious ways here. I feel so close to him. Little things happen to me throughout my day reminding me why I’m here.

I am so thankful to be here to love on these people and to help in any way I can. My life is being changed so much. People are teaching me each day to be so grateful and my heart is humbled every second of every day with each encounter I face.

The twins that were born at the hospital!

Cooking on the jiko at Mwajabu's house!

My student doing his presentation on Neurons.

My sweet friends. 

First week of school is finished! Wow what a week. So many things happened I don’t even know where to begin. Things I never dreamed I would ever see or experience in my life. In one week.

Where do I start to process?

There were the school beatings. That was hard to deal with and I don’t think it will ever be easy. Children here are caned for misbehaving in school. For any minor thing, for arriving late, for getting bad grades, for not bringing water to school to water the plants (yet half the country has no water to use/drink in their home including me), etc.) Boys can be caned on the back and girls can be caned on the arms. This rule is not always followed. The rule is 3 times, that is not always followed. If the parents give permission then they can get more canes. The students have to be on their hands and knees while they receive the beating and sometimes they don’t even flinch they are so used to it. It kills me. The beatings are done in front of the entire school to teach everyone a lesson about discipline. The sounds of the whips are the worse. I always turn my head or walk away. I can’t stand to watch. In the staff meeting this week the head mistress asked me in front of the ENTIRE faculty if I would beat the students when I was teacher on duty, I said No. She laughed, and said then what will you do when the kids arrive late and their uniforms are not tidy? I said I will talk with the students and the entire faculty laughed. It made me so angry but I didn’t say anything. Emily told me when she was on her way to school this week with her headmaster, they passed one of her students biking to school and the headmaster says, “ah look one of our students, he will be late to school, how lazy of him.” Emily and I were saying that night how crazy it is that he would label that child as lazy. He is biking to school, which is 8 km away from home. Probably woke up before the sun came up to cook breakfast on the jiko for his brothers and sisters and to do cleaning for his parents. The child is the farthest thing from lazy and is doing the best he can. In my staff meeting (which was conducted in English so I could know what was being said, thank God, I was very appreciative they accommodated me.) the head mistress pushed that the children need to be beat for speaking in Swahili at school. That this is an English only school and she really needs the cooperation with the teachers on this (with the discipline) that the discipline master cannot do all the discipline, teachers can help too. This was crazy to me, because none of the teachers at this school teach in English. They are supposed to, but their English is so poor they teach in Swahili. This is a disadvantage for the students because the NECTA exam is all in English so how can these students succeed if they are constantly taught in Swahili? Anyways, my blood was boiling at this point in the meeting because I’m thinking you are going to beat these kids for speaking there native tongue yet you do in every class?? That is so HYPOCRYTICAL. So I told them that. I raised my hand and said I was confused at this policy they wanted to enforce with the students, because as teachers we are supposed to set good examples and if we are going to beat students for speaking Swahili then why is it okay to use this language as the language of instruction in the classroom? They all were very silent and the headmistress said she was very embarrassed. She sees my point and maybe the English thing is only something they will have to work on over time. I was thinking, yeah.

I am teaching Form 3 Biology. So I have 7 classes a week. I realized a lot very quickly about my students. First of all my school has little to no resources. I couldn’t even get a syllabus/curriculum to see the material I needed to cover this term. I finally realize it is shared between 3-4 other biology teachers. I tried to go make photocopies for myself but the electricity is so sporadic that when I went into town there was no electricity so that was a fail. They only covered THREE topics last term. That is literally nothing, and on top of that they cannot recall any of it. I gave them a review quiz the second day because the first day the headmistress makes them clean the environment aka clean the school grounds, sweep the dirt, etc. On the review quiz I picked out questions from the three topics they covered in their notes and in the book. It was 18 questions. I bought flip chart paper so it is the size of poster board. I wrote the questions on the flip chart so I could tape it on the chalkboard. I made true/false questions, multiple choice, and fill in the blank questions. My kids had trouble answering a true/false question and a multiple-choice question. I had to walk them through it and they are form 3, which in America this would be equivalent to juniors in high school. I had torn white printer paper in half and passed it out to my students for them to do the quiz on. I soon realized after class that grading assignments would be quite tedious with 60+ kids. The class average on the quiz was 7.8/18 so 43%. In Africa, I realized this was a C not F. 20% is passing. Crazy I know. But I am holding my class to a higher standard and they need to do better. Only 1 person made a 15/18 so I rewarded the top 3 grades with stickers and lollipops. I decided from the quiz outcomes that there is no point in starting new material if we don’t know any of the previous material. I came up with an idea that I would divide my class into groups and assign them different topics within the first chapter. They will use the flip chart paper to display their information and will teach the class about their topic. This is how they will review the material from last term. I will give them a grade on their project and on their presentation. This is a great way to get them up and moving and get the students thinking outside of the box and using their creativity. You should have seen some of the things they came up with the last two days (I have two different streams, so it is neat to compare my two classes). They were drawing the human body, the brain, diagrams; I was so impressed!! We will see how they finish up and present next week! I will try and take a video for y’all!

The teachers at my school are mostly men, with a couple women. I love the women teachers. They are so kind and warm. We talk each day and they are so welcoming. Some of them are Muslim so they fast during the day. We other teachers aren’t much different we just get to have water and they don’t. There is no lunch break or tea break because my school cannot afford to provide that. Sometimes there is tea but we have to pay. I do enjoy the fact that when I am done teaching you can leave school, you technically don’t have to stay the whole day. So if I teach morning classes then I can leave early, my headmistress is pretty lenient about that. There are also a lot of student teachers at my school from universities around Tanzania. There universities send them to different schools to gain teaching experience before they can get their teaching certificate. I’m so glad World Teach does not allow a student teacher to work with me, because as for the rest of the teachers they are basically without a job for 4-6 weeks. The student teacher just teaches there class for that time and the teacher sits in the teachers lounge and has to stay at school and do nothing, the teachers say that it creates a lack of motivation for their job. I would definitely feel the same way.

I get to school by a piki each day. My driver’s name is Martin and he is the best! He speaks no English though so we do struggle, but he takes me to wherever I need to go after school whether it’s town or the stationary store. The school wanted me to bike each day but it is about 10 km (about 7 miles) from my house to the school, so that would be 14 miles a day and we barely eat as it is so I opted out of that one! I know they bike hours each day but I honestly don’t have the energy to bike 14 miles a day I would have to work my way up to that not just tomorrow be able to bike 14 miles no problem!

On Tuesday I walked to the hospital in town. I wanted to see if I could volunteer after school. Bariadi has 1.5 million people but only 3 hospitals. The Somanda hospital is so close to my house. I can walk there in about 10 minutes. After clearing it with the District Education Officer and the Hospital Administration I was cleared to volunteer. The Somanda hospital has 150 beds and 5 wards. Labor/Maternity, Pediatrics, Women Surgical, Male Surgical, and Infectious. There is very little electricity with frequent power outages, no A/C only open windows and lots of patients sharing beds because of little space. In one area there are probably 9 beds, then you move to the next area and there are 9 more, so no one has there own private area or room. The hospital does not provide food or water for their patients, family or friends have to bring that for them. Mostly there are patients with malaria, sepsis, cholera, AIDS, tuberculosis, lots of motorcycle (piki piki) accidents so tons of broken femurs, lots of burn victims from burning the trash or cooking and the wind causes a bad fire, lots of babies dead in utero or complications/sepsis due to C-sections. I have learned so much this week it is unreal. To be a doctor here you have to go to school for 5 years. Meaning four years of university plus one more. Crazy I know.

I went to the hospital after school on Wednesday to start volunteering. I was mainly in the labor/maternity ward for the afternoon. I saw a lady who was having contractions and was prepped for delivery. They do not give any pain meds here to the mothers only oxytocin to induce contractions. I was working with Dr. Mponya and we had just finished with another patient. He looks over the patient; she was barely dilated which I thought was a bit off. He thought maybe we would need to do a C-section due to her previous caesarean scar. He examined the abdomen and just as casual as could be stood up and was like well her baby is dead. I was like what?! And he said yep there is no fetal heart rate, her baby is dead we will need to send her to surgery to get it removed. He started to speak in another language. I was like does she know that her baby is dead? Have you told her? And he said yes I just told her. She didn’t show any emotion, she just remained expressionless, and just laid there as the two women beside her gave birth. The doctor walked out. I just stood there.

They have no hospital blankets or sheets for the beds here, just kangas, which is basically just a patterned piece of fabric. The mothers use it as a sheet and the nurses use it to swaddle the babies. They have one light to warm the babies under in the entire hospital and I haven’t seen them ever bathe the babies once they are born.

In the male ward there are tons of fractures. I was so amazed at how they repaired fractures for femurs. They stick two hollow needles in their calf. They are very large and hollow this has medicine going into it on both ends. Also it is connected to string, the string is wrapped around the foot, then it is connected to a giant bag a soil which hangs off the end of the bed. This keeps the leg completely straight and unable to move. They stay like this for 8 weeks. This allows the bone to heal but causes bed sores underneath the leg because the leg is unable to move due to the heavy weight of the soil keeping the leg in that tight position.

I saw a man with previous abdominal obstruction. He had had surgery to repair then came in with complications, they did a second surgery to repair then on the 15^th of this month he came in again complaining of lower abdominal pain. Dr. Mponya once again thinks it is due to complications. He says adhesions have occurred in the intestines and if progression doesn’t occur in a day or two a third surgery will have to be done. At this point the patient is screaming in pain. Dr. Mponya prescribes him some Panadol. Panadol is equivalent to acetaminophen or Tylenol. That is all he gave him as he is screaming in pain. They have no morphine or no strong pain medicine. It amazed me how freely he chose to operate that many times on a patient, if there were so many complications occurring.

Thursday when I came in after school I went to the pediatrics ward. There were so many children with malaria. A little girl probably 4 or 5 was shivering under her kanga and was burning up with a fever!!! Her entire body was on fire she was so hot. I called over one of the male nurses and was showing him how hot she was and how much she was shaking. I asked if we could give her some Panadol and he said No. her fever wasn’t high enough he said. At this point I was so angry. I wanted to walk around the hospital and pass out Advil that I had at my house that I had brought from home. Why are they letting these people suffer? Help them!! I wanted to say. I look over and this little boy is convulsing on his bed. His eyes are rolling back in his head and he is foaming at the mouth. What would be the first thing that would pop in your head if you saw this? It was a seizure for me. I got the nurse and said, this little boy is having a seizure! And he says no he has pneumonia. PNEUMONIA????!!! WHAT?! I’m like? Are you serious? No way, this is not pneumonia. He picks up the little boy and takes him over to the oxygen machine and gives him oxygen. He is not conscious at this point still convulsing and foaming at the mouth. Lets plug up another airway and make it harder to breathe!! I was so upset. This is not pneumonia!!!! This little boy is going to die I thought, how is this pneumonia. I held his hand and just prayed for what felt like forever. God please don’t let him die. Take care of him, lay your hands on him and heal him Lord. Give him the strength to make it through the night.

I walked to maternity/labor and watched a young mother give birth to her first child. I was encouraging her and telling her everything was going to be all right. She was all alone and very scared. When the baby was born the nurse asked if she wanted to hold her and she said no. That literally broke my heart. I didn’t understand how you could just have had a child and not want to hold it. She turned her head and didn’t even look at it. She was emotionless. The nurse just let the baby lay on the table for the longest time why she tended to the mother. No one paid attention to it but me. That took me a while to process. Emily told me later that night when I went home that the child survival rate is so low here due to so many diseases. People here in Africa don’t name their baby until the age of 1 because so many children die before then. So if they survive the first year then they will get a name. Mothers don’t want to get attached to their babies because of the high mortality rate. Or she suggested it could have been a pregnancy due to rape. I will never know the answer but to see a mother respond that way to her child was heart breaking.

On Friday school gets out at noon so I had lots of time at the hospital. I worked with the orthopedic doctor for a while looking at lots of fractures, then I went back to the maternity/labor ward. If you guys aren’t noticing yet I tend to like that ward a lot. When I walked in the back room, a mother was on the table looked very pregnant and was complaining of feeling super full. They took a nasogastric tube and started shoving up her nose so the tube could eventually reach her stomach. They did this procedure with no numbing spray or anything. Normally there would be a bag connected to the end of the tube to collect everything coming up from the stomach but the mother immediately started vomiting all over herself. It didn’t look like food or anything you knew it was from the inside of her body, directly from her stomach orange and black. It was all over her I felt so bad. They didn’t have towels or anything to clean it up only little pieces of gauze. So we got gloves on and started to clean her up. She was so helpless and had no energy left to move. We moved her to a clean bed and she just laid there lifeless. When she was doing okay I left to go check on the little boy Emmanuel, he was the 3 year old who supposedly had “pneumonia” last night. Today he had a feeding tube up his nose and looked a lot better thank God. I said hello to his mom and held his hand for a long time. I thanked God for keeping him safe throughout the night. I asked the nurse why he had a feeding tube today and she got his chart and said he has been rediagnosed with Meningitis and has started treatment; you treat Meningitis with 1g of Ceftriaxone. They also had previously given him treatment for Malaria, Lord knows what they gave him for his supposed Pneumonia I think they gave him two different antibiotics. This little boy was so sick. Meningitis is just not common here so I just was confused at how they came to this conclusion. They said due to his eyes still rolling back in his head and the convulsing last night is a sign of meningitis. His neck is stiff which is also a sign. His little arms were stiff too last night. He was doing better today though since his treatment started. I hadn’t seen one Doctor look at him though since last night or since I had been there today, which didn’t give me much comfort. His mom would look at me with her eyes full of questions and I couldn’t answer her in the local language of Sakuma. I went and got Dr. Ntelemko. I wanted to make sure this was the right treatment plan for Emmanuel. I told him I wanted him to come look at the 3 year old who had meningitis, he says, “no one has meningitis in this hospital.” I said, well your nurses sure are diagnosing someone with meningitis. He came with me to see him. I was hoping he would say they were wrong but he agreed that he thought Emmanuel had bacterial Meningitis. He took me to the infectious ward after seeing Emmanuel and showed me a girl who was about 15 who suffered from Meningitis. Her parents had waited too long to bring her in to the hospital to get treatment and the meningitis began to attack her brain. She now cannot speak. She can move her eyes so she knew we were there with her but she cannot make any words.

The Doctors were very excited today because they got their first ultrasound machine in the hospital. They had an extremely old one but it broke a long time ago and they never could use it. Little did I know after an hour or two of playing around with the machine they let practice on patients! It was so neat! We got to look at a pregnant woman and measure the birth weight and the femur size, and all kinds of stuff! After the overload of ultrasound fun I went back to the maternity/labor ward to check on the nasogastric patient. The nurse, Jen, said she was sent to surgery to see what was going on with her abdomen. I said “What about her baby?” She said, “Oh she lost her baby.” I’m like “what?” and she says, “yes she lost her baby already on the 16^th, the baby was transverse in the abdomen, so they went to do a C-section and the baby was dead in utero. She delayed too long to come to the hospital. Sepsis occurred after C-section.” Another death. They didn’t know whether the sepsis in the abdomen now was due to the C-section or due to the length of the dead baby in her abdomen that caused the sepsis. Jen went to retrieve her from surgery a little bit later, and due to the over crowding in the hospital she was put directly in the middle of all the new mothers who had just delivered. All I could think was how difficult that must be. Her baby died yet everywhere she looked she was surrounded by crying babies and breast-feeding mothers. I hold a lot of the babies to give the moms a break. You never see any men in the ward. So it is only the mom and the baby.

I was sitting down and one of the male nurses came over to me from pediatrics. He said Madame your patient, your patient. I said what? What patient? He said the boy.  What about the boy I said? He is bad condition he said. I said what do you mean bad condition? He is good he said. I said is he bad or is he good? Nothing he was saying was making sense. There was definitely a language barrier. I said I am coming I will come to check on him.

I enter the ward and I immediately see a green curtain put up around his bed. I walk around the curtain, and a blanket is over him. I don’t think anything of this because when children or babies are cold here they cover them all the way up here even their head. I uncover him. I grab his hand and it is freezing cold. My heart starts to race. I check for a pulse but I don’t feel anything. I look into his eyes but they just aren’t with me. I look for the nurse, and he’s a few feet away. I say, “I don’t feel a pulse, I think he’s dead. Is he dead.” Tears filling my eyes. He says so nonchalantly yes Madame he’s been dead. Look, and starts pulling back his eyes and I just cant look. I try to find his mom and I finally see her. I just grab her hand and hug her. ‘Pole sana” I say. It means I’m so sorry in Swahili. She just has her head down. I start to cry, which no one does here. I walk away and one of the nurses sees me, she says, “Pole sana, it is always so hard.” I walk outside and just walk past the hospital and lose it. He was just fine? He was just fine! How can life be taken away so fast. He was 3 years old. It isn’t fair. It made me uneasy how comfortable everyone was with death here like it was no big deal. They are so accustomed to it. That made me so sad. I was so sad. Jen walks up to me she was trying to find me. “Why are you standing out here alone” she said. Then she saw I had been crying. “Why are you sad?” “Im okay” I said. But she kept asking me, so I told her, “the little boy died.” She said, “Ahh Im sorry, do you have a pen?” Death is just another part of the day here. But to me I will always be affected by it. I will always remember the look on Emmanuel’s face. I will always remember that he deserved a chance to live. I walked in to the maternity ward and held a baby that was just born tears streaming down my face I looked at that beautiful child and wondered if they would be lucky enough to live past age 3.

The next day Sam picked me up to take me to his village in Ikoloko. Sam works with an NGO called Well Share, which deals with public health. He works with the 3^rd hospital that was just built. He wanted me to come to teach the head of the hospital how to use an ultrasound machine that was donated to their facility. It was a 2 hour drive out to the village. He is 14 miles from the Serengeti. I could see the mountains in the distance! The hospital is smaller than Somanda but nice. I taught Helen, the head of the hospital how to use the ultrasound machine. It was portable and pretty easy to use. We practiced on Sam, Emily and one lady who was complaining of abdominal pain. We practiced looking at different organs and arteries and veins. We drove back in the dark and had some car trouble so we had to stop at his friend’s house to borrow his car so we could make the rest of the trip home. Long but fun and rewarding day! I would love to volunteer there more but the trip out there is so far!

This week has been one week that will be ingrained in my mind forever and it was the first week. Now onto the second.