Mobile Clinic and Hunting with the Hadza

(Here is the link to the National Geographic article featuring  The Hadza, enjoy!)
7/29/11

                  Last Monday we left the Clinic in Karatu and drove four and a half hours over dirt roads to Gidamilanga, a small government dispensary that is virtually abandoned except for the one week each month that the staff and volunteers of FAME call it home.  When we arrived we noticed that there was a big to-do in a small Detoga encampment down the road. Grant and I decided to go down the road and check it out. In Karatu, two white men walking down the street stand out, here the contrast was even more extreme. As we approached we began to draw stares from the group surrounding the barricades set up to keep lions out. We decided that we would just continue to walk past and act normal. Grant thought that maybe someone would invite us in, I though this unlikely, but as we had just about passed, a man came walking briskly out from the interior of the encampment gesturing to us. I was a little worried, but the stranger came up and after greeting us in Detoga continued the conversation in pretty good english. He invited us in and said that it was fine to look around but, eyeing my DSLR, advised that it was better if I did not take pictures. We assured him we wouldn’t and proceeded to follow him past the guards. The “party” was the end of a 10 day celebration of the coming of age(13) of the young men and women of the tribe. The celebration was culminated by singing, dancing, drinking and circumcision of the young men and women. Observing the armed men surrounding us I figured that this may not be the best time to take a stand against female circumcision so I held my tongue. Our “guide” told us that he had family matters to attend but that we should feel at home and stop looking so tense. I tried to get some video of the women dancing and singing but I am not sure if it really turned out, after all I was shooting it while the camera was lung over my shoulder. After a while of standing there “acting natural” we decided it was our time to go and we headed back up to our room.

                  The rooms were hot, and the mosquito nets had holes in them, and I often awoke in the middle of the night covered both in bites and sweat. Since I have stopped taking my malaria medication, I am hoping that none of the mosquitos were carrying the parasite.

                  For the next two days we drove 45 minutes each morning, out to Endesh, where we set up in a small school building once ran by missionaries in a dry lakebed . When we arrived there were already about eighty people there and over the course of the two days in Endesh we treated about two hundred patients. I worked mostly in the lab, analyzing just about anything that comes out of the body that smells funky, and found, partly to my dismay, that I was kinda good at it.

On Thursday we set up in Gidamilanga and saw another hundred or so patients. It was a very rewarding experience and the people were so grateful!!

Grant and I traded Knives, and steel nails for sets of bows and arrows from the Hadza. We aquirred quite an arsenal haha. Later that evening one of the Hadza took us out into the bush to hunt. I am not sure if we were hunting for anything in particular b/c he seemed content to stalk and shoot at just about any living thing in the vicinity. He made an amazing shot and hit a very small bird with a wooden arrow. We stuck close to our new friend trusting his chances against a lion or hyena attack better than ours alone, though I might add that we have been practicing and are getting much better with our wooden bows. It was an experience hunting with one of the few remaining hunter gather tribes left in West Africa. His shirt was falling apart so grant gave him his shirt and sweatshirt. While he looked a little odd clad in a button-down Patagonia shirt and a hoody he was very grateful, and I hope that they serve him well.

We are back in Karatu and I have less than a week left at FAME to finish up my projects before I head up to Oldeani for the last three weeks of my stay in Africa.

I miss home, but am very grateful for the experiences that I am having here and the relationships that I have built with the amazing people who work tirelessly in the healthcare field in Tanzania.  

Best wishes,

Dave

7/18

Today was hard. In Africa we encounter situations in medicine that would not occur in the US. Suffering tolerated and tucked away because of shame or ignorance.  There are people who fall through the cracks everywhere, but here the cracks are a lot bigger. There is simply not the medical resources and personnel to handle to needs of this country. 

It makes you appreciate the US. I think that there is an almost idealistic view of the people of the developing world. Like they have something valuable that we have lost. Life may be simpler here and there is a joy and beauty to that simplicity, but I would not envy the developing world. Because along with this simplicity comes suffering and poverty. You may be able to miss it when you glance around but it is there.

On a brighter note there are dedicated people here both Tanzanians and foreign aid workers. Last weekend we went up to visit an orphanage that was set up by an American woman in 2003. The children's village houses around 70 children. Once a child is taken in, they have a home for life. Many have gone off to secondary school but they still come back on vacations. The place was so alive! I was covered with children from the moment we arrived until they were pried off at our departure. There are many college aged volunteers who live their but they are almost all women and I think that the kids were so excited to see some guys.

7/24

I have decided to leave FAME early and spend my last three weeks in Tanzania at the children’s village.  Apart from the daily responsibilities of a volunteer, I will be working with Erica Southern, a nursing student at U W and volunteer at FAME, on a  sexual health education curriculum to institute in the local school while we are there. Check out their website http://www.tanzanianchildrensfund.org/

We are now packing for “Mobile Clinic” we drive 4 hours out on dirt roads and treat patients for a week that do not have a medical facility available to them. This should be as exciting as it is eye-opening. I have heard some horror stories that include bat bites and being forced to sleep with chickens but I am excited just the same.

Many of the people that we will be treating are members of the Hadza tribe, one of the few remaining hunter gather societies in east Africa . The Hadza were featured in a National Geographic article  in 2009. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/hadza/finkel-text.html

Also I wish the Mountain Top team the best of luck at the Tahoe tournament! This is one event I am pretty bummed to be missing. LAX!

I wont have internet for about a week but ill try to update soon

Kwa Heri,

Dave

Out of the Crater

7/10/11

Today  I went on a safari in the Ngorongoro Crater with Grant and Russell, two other volunteers staying working here at FAME. The crater, which is the result of some ancient volcanic activity, is filled with grasslands that host some of the larges herds of mammals on earth.  The scenery was breathtaking; my pictures don’t come close to doing it justice.

7/11/11

            First full week of work began today : )  I am working on three projects at the moment.

1. Performing interviews of patients once they have been seen to evaluate their retention of important information. (e.g. ways to prevent spreading disease to family)  My translator Joseph is a nineteen year old Tanzanian who is currently awaiting the governments decision on which university he will attend. Joseph wants to study Environmental Science, a field that is in need of young progressive thinking people. I wish him the very best. Joseph speaks very good English, and we spent some time comparing our favorite music.

2.     2. I am developing cards that will be placed inside the medication packets that have information and pictures on them depicting important information about the medication. I am trying to come up with a symbol for food, this is what came up in Google search, however I was quickly informed that a knife and fork are not great ways of depicting food when a significant portion of our patients here don’t use utensils when they eat.  Well. Back to the drawing board. The hardest thing I find about education in Africa is not the language barrier, but the cultural differences. To teach someone something it is important to first understand who you are teaching. This being said the Tanzanian people are some of the nicest people on earth and I am shocked by how welcoming the staff and people in the surrounding village are.

3.       3. I am designing, building and implementing a composting system here that will hopefully be operational within a week so that there can be usable compost before I leave Karatu in September.  They have tilled several acres of land here and are growing vegetables to be used by the staff and volunteers.

 This is FAME from an afternoon hiker. The volunteer houses are found middle, the hospital is in the back right and you can just see the Outpatient clinic back middle partially obscured by trees

California to Tanzania

7/8/11 0400

From California to Karatu

I left my father's home in Pebble Beach at 8AM Tuesday morning, met a shuttle at 830AM that transported me from Monterey to SFO. From SFO I took a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt departing at 2PM and arriving at 1015AM. At Frankfurt I bought some chocolate for a girl who is seen at the clinic once a month for  follow-ups on a heart surgery then at 1pm boarded another Lufthansa flight bound for Addis Ababa Ethiopia. It was raining in the highlands of Ethiopia when I landed  and we were quickly shuttled through security before boarding a smaller twin prop plan that would carry me to my final destination Kilimanjaro Airport (JRO). I arrived in Tanzania at 130AM the morning of Thursday July 7th. A taxi took me from the airport 45minutes to the Impala hotel in Arusha. The next morning at 11AM after a continental breakfast that featured the best mango I have ever eaten, and lots of it, I was picked up by Moody, the driver who took me the 140Km to Karatu. At 130PM I arrived at a small art gallery cafe in Karatu where I met up with Jessica (FAME volunteer coordinator), Caroline (FAME Staff) and Grant (volunteer and my roommate for my first four weeks here).

It is winter in Tanzania which means that the people here burn their trash at nigh to keep their homes warm, a practice that Grant told me about before I went to bed last night. I woke this morning to the bitter smell of smoke. I immediately remembered what Grant had said, assured myself halfheartedly that the building was not on fire, and went back to sleep. By 3:45 I had given up on sleep and sat down at my computer to write.

7/9/11 0500

Yesterday was my first day working in the clinic here at FAME. The clinic is almost entirely staffed by Tanzanian medical personnel and I got to shadow Dr. Ringo to start out my day. The doctors and staff speak Swahili and most speak a English a little bit, much better than my Swahili. We are in a region that has a large population of Masai, a traditional tribe in the area, and few of them speak Swahili which requires a translator for them to be seen by the staff here at FAME.

I spent the majority of my day reading reports on Tanzania health policy and education in a hope to better understand the people, culture and the country before I begin to formulate a curriculum. One problem that Jessica hopes to address is the issue with staff patient communication and in particular the patient's retention of critical information (e.g. how to take medication, how to prevent spreading disease, etc.). Starting on Monday I am going to be performing interviews of patients after they have been treated at FAME. The hope is to conduct 100 patient interviews which can later be repeated as an evaluation tool to determine the effectiveness of the new education and changes that we hope to implement. 

It is different here but I am settling in and am confident that I will come to love it here, maybe to much. I will try and update soon!

Kwa Heri,

Dave