Whoop whoop yesterday was another uneventful day. Actually in the morning we met with Mama Martha, David Mwaipopo (awesome last name), and Dr. George to go over the ins and outs of the Care and Treatment Center (CTC). Things here are divided up into the clinical aspects of treating HIV and the community outreach necessary for supporting HIV positive patients. It was interesting learning about how people end up at the CTC (they come to be tested, they are tested in the hospital and are positive, they are referred by NGOs, etc.) and what happens once someone is a patient at the CTC.
Today started out with a staff meeting which was endlessly inefficient and incredibly funny. It started out with a very long discussion about how the minutes for the meeting were in terrible English and made no sense. This led people to attempt to come up with a plan involving two people doing the minutes for future staff meetings. Then everyone was making fun of everyone else and trying to pick a second person to help with the notes which was no small task (there were maybe 20 people at the meeting if that). That whole thing took a good 30 or so minutes. The next part of the meeting was dedicated to discussing time sheets, a concept that is very, very un-Tanzanian. On the time sheets there is a place to put the date (obviously) and it looked like this ___/___. Apparently it was decided by someone that the space was not for the day/month but instead just for the day. This led to people wondering why there was a slash because then when writing say the 23 of January you would be writing 2/3 (“a fraction not a date!!”). I am sure that description makes little sense but the whole point is that a pretty easy thing to figure out took FOREVER to explain. And that was only the beginning.
Luckily we were saved when Mwaipopo took us out of the meeting to drive us over to KIHUMBE, one of the NGOs that Walter Reed supports. We spent the first part of the time there learning about how the organization was founded blah blah blah. Then after seeing the compound they are housed in, we headed out to see some of the programs that KIHUMBE supports. We started out at a vocational school for vulnerable children (kids who have lost one or both parents to AIDS and who are in need of major support). There was a tailoring class going on as well as a class on weaving. After seeing that we headed to an alternative secondary school that is aimed at vulnerable children who are older than normal high schoolers. It was a really nice complex and I think our whiteness amused the kids endlessly. Our next stop was a ways outside of Mbeya. First we went to a training center where HIV positive patients and families are taught how to help a sick person, how to make a bed using local materials, etc. Then we went into the back pen where goats are kept for people to raise as an income generating activity. I have to say goats are one of the more amusing animals in existence.
After seeing the training center we went with a home based care agent to two homes of HIV positive patients to do visits. Once again I was amazed by the welcoming nature of the Tanzanians. There they were allowing complete foreigners into their homes in a situation which clearly indicated we knew their HIV status. And while the stigma attached to the disease here isn’t as bad as it is in some places, people are still not yelling their HIV status to the world. Afterwards we headed back to Mbeya where the KIHUMBE people took us out to a local lunch of kuku (chicken) and chipsi (potatoes). We went back to the office for a while and now we are watching Return to Me.
The other day mzungu (white) doctor from
