Post Paradise

Back on the mainland, we were forced back into reality and the no worry attitude of the island seem to fade away just as quickly as we had adopted it. Jordan’s rare lung condition started to act up the night we got back to Dar Es Salam. We were up all night just trying to get her comfortable and debating whether to go to the hospital in Dar or wait until we got back to Moshi.

Thanks to Philipo, we were able to catch a ride with one of his friends back to Moshi and avoided taking the cramped bus with no shocks back home. We said our final goodbyes to Rachel who’s eyelids were only half open still and was wearing nothing but a toga made from her sheet. It was easier to say goodbye knowing that we would see her again this summer.

The ride back home was much more enjoyable than the one down, for me at least. Poor Jordan cringed at every speed bump and I felt helpless knowing there was nothing I could do to ease the pain.

Our journey came to a pause only a couple hours in due to a car wreck where a bus was completely engulfed in flames. Every driver and their passengers from the cars stopped seemed to think that their presence in the middle of all the action was needed. Mass amounts of people, literally in the hundreds, crowded the street trying to get a better look. Looking up the road behind us, it looked like a marathon or some Walk for the Cure event as more and more people got out of their cars to join the group.

After a while, we were able to drive through the crowd and around the still burning bus. As we passed the metal shell, Jordan and I gave each other the same shocked look. The name “Dar Express” could still be read on the side. That should have been our bus if we hadn’t gotten a ride. I guess some things do happen for a reason.

When we finally reached Moshi, we spent the remainder of the day rushing to different four or five different clinics and hospitals getting medication, x-rays and running other tests trying to figure out what was going on with Jordan’s pain. We didn’t discover much but they treated her for several different conditions and by the next morning, thanks to Tremedol (a relaxation drug) she was feeling much more…relaxed. I would be in the middle of telling her something and turn around to find her passed out, mouth open and everything.

As Jordan’s condition seemed to progress, mine began to digress. The next day we were back at the hospital getting tests run. Both our blood tests came back negative for malaria but one of mine came back positive for an amoeba. Carl was back.

The remainder of the week was spent in bed, watching movies and working out issues with coordinators and worried parents back home.

On Thursday, we were rejoined by Jasen right before we said goodbye to Barbara and Lynn. The next night we went out to Glacier to celebrate. Still on antibiotics and not feeling the greatest I stole Philipo’s keys and fell asleep in the back of his car. It wasn’t until we were back home that I woke up and zombie walked into home base where I then collapsed on my bed.

All day Saturday, Jordan and I spent packing up all of the crap I came with plus the extra crap I have collected since I’ve been here and moved it up to my new home up at KCMC. My room sits under a perfect view of Mount Kilimanjaro next to a cornfield and an above grave. After walking through a red gate, you see eight doors, four on the left and four on the right facing each other. In the center two clothes lines run the length of the building and end down near the shared kitchen. Having my own bathroom, queen size bed with no bug net, a sound system and a mini fridge is definitely an upgrade.

I met my neighbors and made the mistake of assuming because they were black they were from Tanzania and spoke Swahili with each one. All of them are either doctors, nurses, or studying to become one or the other. Though all from Africa, they are from all over including Rwanda, Zambia, Uganda and South Africa.
On Monday, Jordan and I met two of the four new volunteers who had apparently arrived that weekend. The trauma room became very crowded so we all split up to spread things out. I followed Kishe on ward rounds taking temperatures, blood pressure, pulse rates, wrote out prescriptions, and changed dressings.

One of the patients was a quadriplegic and had a wound about 10 inches in diameter on his lower back and buttocks from lying in his own fecal matter. The wound was so deep you could see and touch his spinal cord. The doctors said there was nothing we could do at this point seeing as it was impossible to keep to wound clean for more than two hours. They shrugged and said he would be dead by the end of the week. He died two days later.

Friday night, Jordan and I went to the doctors’ house to cook them homemade macaroni and cheese. However, on the way over I lost my wallet on the daladala. Of course, it was only after I cancelled my card and filed a police report that I got a call that someone had found it. Everything was there except 25,000 TSH and then an extra 15,000 TSH that Philipo gave to the person who turned it in. It’s been over a month now that I’ve gone without a card and I just found out that they didn’t even send the new card to Africa…it’s sitting useless at my address in America.

The following day, Junior told convinced us to go with him to Rombo, a very rural town at the base of Kilimanjaro, for “an exciting day that [would] be lots of fun.” The day did not go that way at all. To start off, Jordan didn’t go so I was left to have the exciting adventure without my partner in crime. Next, I spent an hour and a half waiting at the bus station trying to ignore all the conductors trying to convince me to go on their bus while street hustlers were grabbing my arm trying to get me to follow them to their store or to buy their peanuts and cigarettes.

When we finally got to Rombo, an hour and forty-five minutes later, and arrived at Juniors home via pikipiki, he told me what we really were going to be doing all day: moving water from one well on his property to another well across town.

After spending a half hour trying to get the truck to start we drove over to the other property to get the barrels. The guy who had the keys to the storage room with the barrels wasn’t there of course so we found a ladder, climbed up to the roof, slipped in between the rafters and the top of the walls and handed the barrels over that way.

We took turns driving the beaten up truck, which took some getting used to seeing as it was a manual with the driver side set on the right side.

It was then back to the first property to first fill up each barrel by using a smaller bucket and a rope to draw water from the well before lugging the barrel to the bed of the truck and driving back to the second property to empty the barrels.

We did this all day.

If it wasn’t for his sweet, little grandma who made a delicious Chagga meal and put me in a better, I probably would have murdered him right then and there and buried him somewhere in the corn field.

By the time we had finished, we had missed the last bus back to Moshi. We ended up grabbing a ride with some random couple who happen to be heading to town and had an obsession with the song “Natural Mystic” by Bob Marley. The song was on repeat the entire hour and forty-five minute ride home. It was right around the thirteenth time we were hearing the song that I was glad I didn’t have any sharp objects with me, or blunt for that matter because I’m sure things wouldn’t have ended nicely for that man and I would have ended up in a Tanzanian jail cell.

When we finally got out of the car it was into a tightly packed daladala and then a trek through muddy roads back home where I couldn’t have been more excited to pass out, sleep in and wake up to a brand new day.