Kids Kids and more Kids!

Today was yet another day living the good life here in Tanzania! We had our 5^th Swahili lesson to date and we are still quite inept with the language. However, we are trying and have an excellent teacher. Today was all about conjugating verbs, I wouldn’t say we’re masters at it but we sure try!

After Swahili we did a bit of arranging to figure out our day. Here, the days are usually outlined tentatively but can change at any time. It’s quite exciting and nice to get away from the drone of Westernized scheduling and planning. For those of you who know me, yes, I am saying I enjoy not planning, Miss I Love Lists, which seems to be a common title for many in our group. The end plan was for all of us to go to a local orphanage to play with the children for the morning, such a tough assignment!

This orphanage is one of the poorest one’s we have been to since we arrived in Tanzania. The children are at a severe disadvantage as the location of the orphanage is right beside the Arusha dump. However, that does not stop all the children there from being overly joyous and happy. We spent a few hours singing songs, playing games, learning Swahili, and teaching some English. As we were leaving we all had to make sure we didn’t accidently put a child in our bag to take home, they are truly precious children.

Once we were loaded back into our van we set off for an appointment with Centre for Educational Development in Health, Arusha (CEDHA). This is a centre for degree holding health care professionals to continue their education to learn how to teach others in their field. The aim of CEDHA is to ‘strengthen and support the health care system through training of human resources for health in health personnel education, health services management, and continuous professional development’. Our informant at the centre explained that CEDHA has approximately 30 students, which is all their current resources can accommodate. The majority of the students are nurses but they also have professionals from medicine, dentistry, laboratory, and others from all over Africa. They also have a few individuals from Nepal.

We managed to keep busy all the while learning things. It is inevitable to get through a day here without learning at least one new thing. Our brains are constantly on the go whether it’s remembering what to say when someone says ‘Mambo’ (the correct answer is ‘Poa’) or explaining the treatment and management of a patient presenting with pneumonia. Here’s to another week and a little bit in Tanzanian, where has the time gone!

- Samantha