Well as kind of mentioned before, Tanzania runs by the beat
of its own drum. Today (Monday, Jan 13th) was no acceptation. From
what I understand, yesterday (Sunday, Jan 12th) was a national
holiday celebrating Zanzibar’s 50th year of independence. To
commemorate this, the president decided to make today a day off. That’s all
fine and dandy, except fore he didn’t make the announcement till 1900 last
night and we didn’t find out until today when visitors phoned. They asked if
they could have a meeting since their previous plans were cancelled due to the
holiday. They came here around 10 o’clock and us students were able to listen
in to the meeting. The visitors are part of an American NGO organization
looking to help develop a sustainable way to collect health information for
three African countries. This can have a
huge impact on the health care system because health care professionals would
be able to see the history of the patient when they come for treatment. They
came to meet with Green Hope to see how they could work together and pool their
resources.
After the meeting, we went to a government run clinic. We
were able to compare this clinic to the ones Green Hope supports and see new
babies that were only a few hours old. Tanzanian woman are so strong!
We than went to a near a traditional medicine “pharmacy”. A
lot of Tanzanians (mainly Maasai) believe in tradition methods and medicines
for curing all types of illnesses. The man running the shop wouldn’t tell us
specifics of what was in each concoction was, but did tell us that it was made
from a lot of different kinds of roots and bark. He even had so called cure for
malaria, cancer, typhoid and several others.
Imagine that! It is interesting to think about the impact that peoples
beliefs have on the care they seek.
Overall today was a good and eventful day even with the unplanned
holiday. ;)
-Stefany
No comments:
Post a Comment