I can’t believe how fast the last two weeks flew by. I feel like I didn’t even have time to breathe and I haven’t done laundry in almost a month now which is only adding to the unidentifiable smells here. The hospital was extremely busy. We broke our record for the trauma room with 52 patients on Monday. More pikipiki (motorcycle) and panga (machete) accidents. We started off the day with a victim who was accused of being a thief. Here, if someone calls someone a thief, anyone and everyone on the street will beat him up, put a few tires around him and set him on fire usually before the police can get there. This one was lucky and the police intervened. We put in over 100 stitches in him and used a whole bottle of providone just cleaning his road rashes. The doctors came in and questioned us for tending to him. They said we should wait a few hours to make him suffer and then they took away the anesthesia because they said it would be a waste to use it on him.
Other injuries were dog attacks, one lady had her heel completely off and we had to sew that back on, another guy had his nose hanging off, another had a tree fall on him. It was intense and I am basically pro at stitching and casting now. Philipo, a doctor, asked me one of the days if I wanted to watch a cesarean and as I was walking into major theater, he handed me all the sterile uniforms, aprons, masks etc… and said, “Hurry it’s an emergency. Have you ever done this before?”
I just looked at him with a blank expression and said, “Hmm?”
Then he simply replied, “Don’t worry you’ll be fine, you’re assisting”.
After a mass amount of bleeding, cutting, pulling, and ripping he looked at me and said, “Okay pull it out.”
“Pull what out?” I asked confused, thinking he couldn’t possibly mean the baby. But he did.
“The baby what else?”
“I don’t want to kill it or pull it out wrong,” I was hesitant and not willing to be responsible for a newborn’s death.
“You won’t just grab his shoulder and pull him out,” he assured me.
So I did just that and sure enough, I was holding a little, black, slimy, baby boy. They took him away quickly though because of some complications and the next half hour was spent putting the mother’s stomach back together.
The same week, on Friday, I assisted in a vaginal birth where I caught the baby, cut the cord, tied off the belly button and weighed it. They offered me the stitching job for the 18 year old mother but it looked way too complicated.
The women here have a completely different pain tolerance than white women. They are completely silent when giving birth. The doctors explained it’s a cultural thing. In America, it’s easy finding the maternity ward, all you have to do is listen and then follow the sound of pure agony.
Friday was also Jasen’s birthday. After work, Rachel and I picked up an overpriced, dry cake and ice cream for the party planned that evening. The house was all decorated and we had over 30 people over for dessert before heading out to La Liga. All the doctors, some of the physicians, our coordinators, all the volunteers, our neighbors, random people we’ve met in Arusha, Marangu, Bacoba etc… and friends of friends were all there. We closed the place down and Jasen couldn’t emphasize on how much it meant to him and how much he enjoyed himself as well as everyone else.
The following morning, Kristina, Jordan and I had quite an adventure. Gerald, our Kiswahili teacher, was graduating from secondary school, which is somewhat equivalent to our high school. Before heading out, we asked Fatuma directions to the school and she gave us a vague idea that it was across from the police station. Little did we know, there are two police stations which are about 12 km from each other and separated by a nice hill.
So we set out around 11am, the hottest time of the day thinking we had more than enough time before the graduation started. We passed Rau Secondary School which was set up with chairs and decorations in the football field but thought nothing of it. We continued walking up the hill and then up another hill followed by more walking until we reached the police station we thought was the correct one. We jokingly laughed and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if it was the first school we saw after all of this.” The school across from it was called Old Moshi Secondary School. We asked around and know one knew of any graduation or English for that matter.
We finally found two students who spoke English and they simply laughed when we told them where we were trying to go. Turns out, it was the first school we had passed, now 50 minutes ago. They led us through a few random fields and back roads to the base of the hill where Rau Secondary School was, which just so happened to be the first school we passed which is about 10 minutes from our house. In order to avoid walking all the way around the barbed wire campus to get to the main entrance, which would take an additional 15 minutes, we decided to part the thorn-filled bushes at the far edge of the field and make our own entrance.
Every attendant, student and teacher watched us as we blindly walked over thinking we finally made it. They all had the same blank stare and replied with simple blinking when I smiled at them. I asked the first teacher we saw if we had the right place this time. She laughed and could barely get out a reply of “No”. She guided us, still laughing, to a student who said he would walk us over to the correct school. By this time, I’ve about lost all faith in Tanzanian directions.
As we walk out to the main road, the word had spread at the graduation that we were a bunch of stupid wazungu who didn’t know where the hell they are in life and literally everyone was laughing. I have no idea why because frankly, I didn’t find it funny and I wanted to sit down and cry.
While we were walking on the main road, Ally, our coordinator, just happened to be driving by and stopped. He asked us where we were going and when we told him he started laughing too and said we would never make it in time to actually see the graduation. He saved us by giving us a ride across town to the correct school. We ended up not missing the actual ceremony but we had missed almost all the performances before. We were able to see the Masai do a traditional dance, a group of girls do a hip-hop routine, an Indian dance routine, traditional drumming and a comedy skit in Kiswahili. Apparently their graduations last from 9 am to about 5 pm and involve a lot more sitting than ours do, which I couldn’t believe was possible.
All in all it was fun and I ended up laughing around the time the weather changed from 103 degrees of sun to absolute downpour. We took the long way home because we got lost and hadn’t had enough walking for one day obviously. The good news is I didn’t have to take a shower that night because of how wet we were from the rain.
Sunday I did nothing. I think my biggest accomplishment was reading a few pages before I took a nap.
Next week isn’t going to be any slower and I am alright with that.
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