Thursday, 07/24/14, 9:02 p.m.
Oh jeez, I know it’s been awhile since I last updated this. If you were awaiting the next post with bated breath, please seek medical assistance immediately. I have to admit that my mind has been elsewhere lately...the past several days have brought a barrage of difficult news from both family and friends back in America. I simultaneously wish I could hop on the next plane home and also never go back again, and since neither of those are possible or even helpful, it’s just sort of distracting and leaves all my thoughts with a slightly bitter aftertaste. I’m alright, though, and grateful that satellites and, more specifically, iMessage are a thing. Thanks, NASA!
In other news, it’s also been a crazy busy couple of weeks at work. The last thing I want to do after nine hours of entering so much data that I leave the office cross-eyed is look at my computer some more to write a blog. We finally got access to the huge labor ward registers, brown and tearing on all the edges so that they look more like something that’s been at the bottom of the sea for 200 years instead of sitting in a hospital for about two. Thankfully, Alfa always goes to drop off and pick up the books, so I haven’t been back in the labor ward theater since that first time. I think Alfa may have picked up on the fact that I didn’t like it in there. What gave me away? Eyes wide like saucers and white knuckles? I’m not subtle. When open, the books are so wide that in order to read them I have to stand up (yes, all day long) to pore over columns such as weeks of pregnancy, birth weight, c-section (actually quite a lot, but St. Francis is a referral hospital, so you get sent there if you’re already having problems), volume of blood loss...and the golden nugget, maternal HIV status. The mothers either get a “1” for positive, along with a note about which PMTCT (prevention of mother-to-child transmission) drugs they received, a “2” for negative, or a “-” for unknown. Seems pretty simple, right? Wrong.
For one thing, you try following a row three feet long from the mother’s name to PMTCT all day without accidentally veering into another line. Also, there isn’t a lot of importance placed on how people spell their names here. It’s kind of, you know, whatever you feel like. Although Starbucks hasn’t made its way into Tanzania yet, I’m convinced they’ve parachuted in their baristas to write down these mothers’ names in the labor ward. And they all have cotton stuffed in their ears and used to play in metal bands, too. I once spent a long while looking for a certain Angela Kassim (forgive me for breaking confidentiality, but it’s a very common name), only to find her hospital alias, “Enjo Hassimu,” after saying it a couple times aloud. Rachel moonlights as “Lecho,” Michael as a last name can be “Maiko,” and Simon just wants to be “Saimoni” sometimes. They have taken creative liberties with plenty of traditional Tanzanian names, too, but those are just harder for me to remember. No one ever seems to have issues with my favorite name, Scholastica, which is actually quite common among the large Catholic population here. I would absolutely love for that to be my name, and to take on its common nickname, Scola. It speaks to me, man. I end up having to do a lot of detective work, cross-checking their village name with a code we’ve given them for the study, or date of Vitamin A dosage, which has been helpful every so often. My Excel spreadsheet I’m supposed to fill in lists “family name” as well, whereas the books list husbands’ names. These rarely ever correspond with each other or the mothers’ names, so I’m still trying to figure out what the custom is around that. With less than two work weeks left, I know that if any are too elusive I should skip them and possibly come back to them later. And they say you don’t learn anything during standardized testing! Luckily, one of the Harvard researchers from the Vitamin A study tells me that my numbers are coming out right: 4-5% positive (compared to the 9-10% national average--I think having IHI and the St. Francis Hospital here helps), about the same percentage unknown, and the rest negative. So although by the end of the day my feet hurt and I’ve started to talk to the mothers in my head (Oh man, Rehema, you can’t hide any longer because I am going to FIND YOU. Or, Hadija looks like she’s negative, weeeee’ve got a winner! *balloons drop from the ceiling*), something is working.
To shake things up a bit, this week I also started interviewing the supervisors about their thoughts on the Saving Brains questions, in order to improve them for the next pilot. As of today, I’ve spoken with all six! I was extremely surprised each time I finished another interview and realized that there was never a time during that hour in which I was completely lost, even though they were conducted entirely in Swahili. I held my own and was able to conjure follow-up questions on subjects as esoteric as early cognitive development and parenting strategies on the spot. I think I’m going to have to thank all of my Swahili teachers over the last two years, formal and informal, for that. I recorded each one on GarageBand, just in case I needed help understanding what they were saying, and compared to the supervisors, I sound like a total valley girl. In Swahili, if that’s possible. It’s mortifying and hilarious. However, given my closer proximity to the actual Valley during my formative years, I think I have a good excuse.
Not only is this the single most challenging task I’ve had to do in Swahili, I have also learned a lot about how seemingly simple concepts in English can get entirely lost in translation (“do they lose attention easily...you mean, do they lose consciousness?”), and even about Tanzanian views on parenting. Everyone here loves children so much, although it can look a bit different to an outsider (“Why would you read books to a child this young?” or the many examples the supervisors used which started off with “Let’s say you’ve beaten the child...”). It’s nice to know the learning is reciprocal, because two of the supervisors told me they were happy to be working on Saving Brains, because it helps them as parents to know when children can do certain things. I’m happy to know I’m working on a project that is actually useful and appreciated; it makes the hours typing into Excel, writing up interview notes, and translating and back-translating forms feel worthwhile. I still have yet to interview Geofrey (who, while a great English speaker, insists on doing his interview in Swahili to watch me struggle) and the nurses, but those will be much shorter and easier. These interviews are my main assignment for my internship here, and I’m glad they’re turning out so well.
It hasn’t been all work and no play, although the scale is definitely heavily tipped in that direction. In the last week, I’ve been able to enjoy a goat roast, a cocktail party (who knew the sheer presence of a blender could be so freakin’ exciting?) which went with viewing a wedding video, and a Scrabble night. I’ve been accompanied by Aileen, an American grad student at the London School of Tropical Medicine, on my runs in the mornings, and I’ve been hanging out and harmonizing ukulele songs with a bubbly Swiss girl named Emi who came to volunteer at the hospital these past two weeks. Aileen, Emi, Geofrey, and I all went to hike at Udzungwa National Park last Sunday, which I think has been my favorite activity here so far. The Udzungwa Mountains, as well as the Kilombero River, are the two main geographical features of the area. Biodiversity is really high because the constant climate in the tropical rainforest there has been perfect for making endemic species. Ever the Human Evolutionary Biology nerd, I got really excited about a species of mangabey and a colobus monkey that are only found here. There are over 2,500 species of plants in the national park, and about a bazillion birds is my scientific estimate. Our goal was Sanje Falls, which is itself over 200 meters high, and we hiked all the way to the top to take in the view of the flat valley below dotted with toy villages and tiny spires of smoke. The blue sky stretched itself out luxuriously overhead, and the famous Selous Game Reserve beckoned to us off in the distance. On our way back down, we went swimming at the base of the waterfall, its waters roaring in our ears and making a frigid, but refreshing, pool beneath. On the way back home, we caught a minibus that was going in our direction. Dust immediately flew out of the air vents as soon as someone switched on the fan. “Turn it off! Turn it off!” people cried in bilingual pleas. I watched little mud houses and lines of banana tress pass by in that warm late afternoon night that gives everything a golden, romantic glow. The ride was mostly uneventful, the squish-factor waxing and waning at each stop, until the bus just stopped about 10-15 minutes away from Ifakara. Apparently we had run out of gas, but the bus didn’t even have a gas gauge on the dashboard. Surprise! The driver and conductor wandered off to some roadside stand or another to fill water bottles with gas, and sooner or later we made it back home.
I think my next excursion out of Ifakara will happen either tomorrow or Saturday, as we have Monday through Wednesday off for Eid, the end of Ramadhan. Eat, (don’t drink), and be merry again during normal human daylight hours, everyone! But no one knows exactly when Eid is yet, because it depends on the moon. That’s why IHI just gave everyone the boot for three days. Geofrey wants to go back to Dar es Salaam to tend to the mushrooms he’s growing (the culinary kind, if you thought this story just took a 180-degree turn) and visit his siblings, so he invited me to come with him. At first he was apologetic because he doesn’t live close to the tourist attractions and fancier mzungu areas, but I assured him that I’m not interested in that. I’m really not. If Harvard has taught me nothing else, it’s to hate tourists. Unfortunately you can’t get a degree in that, though, but it never hurts to talk to Special Concentrations. Now that I’ve finished my most important interviews and over half of the data collection, it’ll be nice to get away for a little bit to get my mind off things. A change in scenery, especially one that involves driving through Mikumi National Park and seeing roadside giraffes, never hurts. Well, for me, at least.
One last thought: there’s a group of Swiss people around my age here who seem to be volunteering at IHI, building who-knows-what or doing some groundskeeping job. It’s ridiculous watching these puny kids grappling with pieces of timber as a Tanzanian worker they’re probably supposed to be “helping” breezes by them. It makes no sense to me--there are people at IHI whose entire jobs are to do these kinds of things! Why would they come all the way here just to take this work away, and probably do it so poorly that it will have to be fixed when they leave? Have they seen the immaculate hedges that spell “Karibuni IHI”-- “Welcome to IHI, we love your grant money”? IHI’s doing just fine, thank you--dare to venture into the actual village if you really want to be helpful.
But Taylor, one whines, I just want to have pictures on Facebook of me saving Afr---
And that’s when I smack the jauntily-placed fedora off his dumb head. I guess I’m making too many assumptions about the traits and intentions of those who wear fedoras, but I don’t think I’m too far off the mark. I know some of the volunteering I’ve done myself in the past may not have been as meaningful in the grand scheme of things as some of the other ventures, but I’m happy that the investigators for my study here are not interested in “saving poor African babies so we can go home and preen ourselves amidst showers of praise and glory.” Especially after processing an onslaught of unhappy news this week, I know that in life there’s no time to waste on that kind of nonsense. When you do something, make it actually count. No, moving timber around at IHI does not count. Truly improve something, anything, with your presence. To do things for others with genuine unselfishness, to touch people’s lives in a truly good way, without seeking accolades in return--I believe that’s the kind of mark one should try to make on the world. A mark that glows from within, like the sun, rather than relying on the reflections of others, like the moon. I’ll get off my soapbox now, but I think it’s important for anyone doing this kind of work to analyze one’s real, even subconscious, intentions.
Otherwise, you know, someone might smack your hat off your dumb head.
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