Arrival

Getting here felt long this time around. Being delayed 2 hours in Amsterdam didn’t help and I continued my tradition of being able to sleep everywhere except an airplane. All this meant that I did not arrive to Tanzania until around 11 at night. It was still hot and I sweated my way through immigration and customs. Arranging a ride had been touch and go, but fortunately the KCMC land rover was there to pick up a Dutch pathologist and his wife and I hitched a ride. It was dark as we crossed the plains toward Moshi with the spectral image of Kilimanjaro on our left. I got into my room, showered and got in bed. Just as I was heading off to sleep I heard a thud outside my window, followed by another thud a minute later that continued for a couple of minutes. I finally put my headlamp on and realized that its mango season and the huge tree in the front yard was dropping its fruit. Breakfast!!!!

The first days was spent with errands and getting acclimated. Some has changed since I was here 4 years ago, but most is the same. The same paper hawker, same place to buy sim cards, same place for internet (although now with air conditioning), same crowded dala-dala (shared taxi). I lasted until about 1 before I needed to come back to the house, hydrate and nap.

The project I am working on over here focuses on amputation and how amputees adapt to their loss of limb. Function and quality of life after amputation have been shown to be predicted by certain factors such as age, status before surgery and co-morbities. Less clear is the role that cultural and social factors play in adaptation to amputation. Our goal in both the Boston arm and the Tanzania arm is to further explore these factors.

My partner in the Tanzanian arm is Anthony Pallangyo. Anthony grew up an hour away near Arusha and went to medical school here at KCMC before doing his internship in the major city of Dar. After a year as the only doctor in a rural area, he returned to KCMC to do his residency in orthopedics. Anthony invited me over to his house for dinner where I got to meet his almost one-year-old daughter, his wife and his sister who is a nursing student. We had a great meal of rice, beef stew, fish and fruit. We also chatted about the project and our plan for the next two weeks. I barely made it home and got my shoes off before I collapsed in bed.

Saturday passed uneventfully with some sleeping in and reading to try and get over my jetlag. I took a long walk around the dusty roads of the doctor’s compound. This is the hot season and it seemed like there was even more sun and heat.