"Do People Wear Clothes in Africa?" or The One With the Fingers!

Showing knees and shoulders are big no-no's in Tanzania.

Tanzanians are also perpetually freezing apparently. Men wear parkas on days where I sweat in a tshirt. Baby's get dressed in snow suits for the first year of their lives regardless of weather. And women.... I'll get to women.

Did I mention I live in the dessert, and not the kind that gets really cold at night. This is Tanzania.

I get up close and personal with what women wear working at the clinic. This is what a typical woman wears on a typical day, at least while she is pregnant. First, underwear. Then these things called skin tights, that are basically elastic shorts. Then a skirt. Then a moomoo. Then a kanga wrapped around her waist and one over her shoulders, over the moomoo. But no bra. That would interfere with breastfeeding.

Kanga and kitenge are fabrics that come in all colors and patterns that women get made into clothes or wraps, etc. Some are beautiful, some are strange, some are rare, some you see everywhere you go. The most infamous kitenge pattern, in my opinion, is The One with the Fingers. For some reason, women here seem to love it! I see it everywhere! And it is terrifying! Bizarre!

I do not understand so many things about Tanzanian style. Or how they can feel so cold.

Tanzanians, most of the time, will pitch a fit if you try to open a window on a bus. The wind- its so cold!

One thing that is awesome about Tanzanian style is the shuka. If I were to walk around America wearing a plaid blanket, people would look at me oddly. Wear a plaid blanket here and people think I'm awesome! Maassai and similar tribes wear shuka, a different color and pattern for each tribe, as well as variations for men, women, and different age groups. I think PC decided to send me here because they facebook stalked me, and decided from my pictures that I would be the sort of person who would relish wearing a plaid blanket as an article of clothing.

Moral of the story: Be careful what you put on facebook.

A Week in the Life or... "Why did you paint white on your feet?"

Monday: Hike back from sitemate Rachel's house, work at the clinic- “Your hair looks terrible, its because you're tired, you couldn't do it right."-Mama Mosha Read The Alchemist. Eat dinner at Mama Mosha's house.

Tuesday: Plant my garden with a jembe- Tanzanian hoe- aka make triceps. Finish The Alchemist. Read Holidays on Ice. Eat dinner at Baba's house.

Wednesday: Work at the clinic. Get a mani-pedi from a 6 year old and a 3 year old with crayons. Celebrate Mama Mosha retiring by eating meat!

Thursday: Read The Unheard. Have an oddly familiar college experience of taking girl to buy a pregnancy test, then talk about birth control options. Run to darajani kubwa “the big bridge.” Biggest lightning storm I've seen since Training! Eat dinner at Baba's house again.

Friday: Work at the clinic. Go to the big soko (vegetable market) and eat at my favorite chai place- beans, vitumbua, katumbali, AND chai. Hike to Rachel's house, “I walked in the rain, so now all your villagers think I'm crazy. Half of your villagers think I'm you.”-Kat “PERIOD TEA!”-Kat and Rachel “Listening to Beach House, drinking herbal tea, PLAYING SPEED!”-Kat “Its as FAT AS A BABY'S ARM!” “She's a PINCUSHION!” Watched New Girl (Rachel has access to electricity in her vill, she's fancy).

Saturday: Hike the mountain behind Rachel's house; follow some random trails that may or may not be for humans, find impressive feat of Tanzanian engineering, run away from Siafu (biting ants), stop following trails and bush whack our way up to the top, get attacked by the fire plant. Total time to reach the top: 2.5 hours. Eat lunch, enjoy the view, nap on top. “What's growling? I think its a lizard.”-Kat “Oh SHIT! Cows.”-Rachel How are we going to get down? Rachel finds a trail. Total time to get down: half hour. Make a chocolate cake with pili pili kali (hot pepper) added; I am a GENIUS! Start reading Cutting for Stone.

Sunday: Go to the health center to work on the Girl's Conference grant. Harass a praying mantis en route “I am zen, STOP PISSING ME OFF!”-Kat speaking for Praying Mantis. Write this blog, avoid working on grant.

Monday: hike back from sitemate Rachel's house. Work at clinic......

 

 

Its flacid, get it?

Some gems from Josh Swiller's The Unheard:

“You might be the greatest bush nurse ever, the kind of woman Mother Teresa looks up to, and still be raped by a platoon of children playing war. There are beauties like Alice and then at the clinic, the faces of angels are attached to bodies assembled from deflated balloons. Chickens and petty revenge and then moments when you can make diamond necklaces out of the stars.”

“Volunteers who go to South America come back politically active, volunteers who go to Southeast Asia return spiritually aware and curious, and volunteers who go to Africa?- They come back drunk and laughing.”

Shout Out to Modesta or Can I Go To Med School Now?

Early in November I got to return to Tanga to visit my homestay family and teach the new class all about my favorite topic- mamas and babies! It has been a year since I last saw this family that I lived with for my first two months in Tanzania- when I couldn't speak Swahili, wasn't used to the culture, wasn't used to the heat, and was really terrified of spiders. Despite these barriers, I really loved my mama; she would kill spiders and cockroaches for me, she tried to teach me how to cook (I still gave myself parasites/giardia/I don't know what, but she tried), she saved me from overly forward young men, and when I screamed because a frog jumped on me while taking a shower, she rushed in to rescue me from what she probably expected to be a snake. We laughed uproariously one night when she made a joke about a cow peeing (ngombe ana choo! Actually, she might have been using choo as a verb so my broken Swahili could understand) and my baby dada kept the joke going for several days after that. We both cried when I left at the end of homestay. She put up with my incompetence and ineptitude with love and patience for two months, and, going back, I would finally be able to express my gratitude to her for that, and to actually talk to her! I wasn't incompetent anymore! I could help cook- help more than hinder- now, and I could understand all the gossip about the new PCTs living in the village. My favorite was when my dada came over and her and my mama talked about how one of the PCTs was mwenyeji (a local) because even when he was late, he would still mosey on slowly, greeting everyone, while another PCT dashed to get places- she had poured her chai (tea) into a plastic bottle to take with her to “drink I don't know where!” because she was late. My dada was so frustrated and perturbed at how this girl could take her chai to go just because she was late! Ok, maybe you had to be there, but I still topple over laughing about this. She was so bothered!

So, I am much more capable than I was in Training. That does not mean, though, that I can handle everything. Yesterday after regular clinic, a woman came in with contractions. She was only 6 and a half months along, but this baby was coming out! The kicker was- I WAS THE ONLY ONE THERE! Both the clinical officer and the nurse were gone! So, I delivered a very tiny, 1.5 kilo, premature baby. THAT IS BABY NUMBER 3- BY MYSELF! I clean up the room, all the blood and fecal matter that comes out with the baby, and check on Tiny. Her lungs either aren't fully formed or she has mucus in there, so she was having a really hard time breathing. You could see the effort in her face; when she finally opened her eyes, they would roll back in her head sometimes when she had a particularly hard time breathing. Then another woman comes in with contractions. And another. We only have two beds, so I find an extra mattress and get everyone to fit. Women always come to deliver their babies with an entouarage of other women, so now the clinic was crowded with about 25 women. I told an entourage member of the first women that Tiny needed to be taken to the hospital- we don't have a doctor, and even if they were here, e don't have the supplies to help her. Tanzanians have a habit of asking stupid questions sometimes because of the culture of always asking the white person for help, so in response to my telling her to go to the hospital, she says “But the baby doesn't have a father, the mama doesn't have a husband, what should we do?” With two other women in labour, no actual training on how to deliver babies, and no one there to help me, I looked at that woman with what was probably a very stupid, open mouthed expression, and while I wanted to say “HOW THE FUCK SHOULD I KNOW I SAID THE BABY NEEDS TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH HER HAVING A HUSBAND” I said “sijui” (I don't know).

I could not handle the responsibility anymore, so I called my dada- who also doesn't know how to deliver babies- to come for moral support. I asked her “what do people do when Mama Mosha and Msuya (the nurse and clinical officer) aren't here?!” “They help each other” she responded, “We don't know how to deliver babies, its not our job.” I hugged her, I was so relieved. Modesta, my dada, is 5' tall, 21 years old, but that girl will tell anyone off. One mama was angry about how many people were at the clinic, and Modesta told this woman ho its not our fault! Its the government's fault for not building and staffing more clinics, so people come from outside our catchment area because there are no closer clinics. This mama responded that Modesta and I are no help, we can't help, we are just pretty. Modesta, who works at the clinic for free because we are understaffed, fumed about it the rest of the day.

Moral of the story is 1. I am not always competent to handle situations I get myself into here. 2. My dada Modesta is amazing and this is a shout out to her because she can always handle everything when I go to her for help. 3. Can I go to med school now so I can know what I'm doing?