week sixteen

monday started off with a bang, that evening there was a lovely cry through the entire base around seven thirty in the evening, and it was announced that we had a visitor on the grounds.... a snake. a python to be exact. i of course was not a fan of this little find and retreated to my bedroom and jumped to a top bunk and stayed there for about an hour till i felt safe once again. needless to say i do not go out in the dark anymore by myself. i try to avoid it if at all possible. if your wondering what happened to the creature, it was killed, i believe with a machete? not sure the details i didn’t stay around to listen and didn’t ask any questions. but i did catch a glimpse of it when one of the girls tried to call me over to see it and i, being oblivious to the situation went over.... did not end well!

moving on.... hmmm i’m trying to remember what happened this past week. there was a lot of community profiles. lots of typing them up and i went on a trip to a nearby village to conduct a few interviews. met some neat women and am actually going back this week on thursday to see them once again. one of the women is actually eight months pregnant and her appointment at the clinic is on tuesday, the same day i’m scheduled to go to the clinic! so hopefully she’ll be there and i’ll get to see her once again. it was neat to talk to the group of women, in doing the interview we learnt that they didn’t know some basic things about when to wean your baby and little things about breast feeding. (this was the first time pregnancy for the one lady) so we got to do some basic teaching as well. at the end they wanted to ask us questions, which was pretty interesting. it started off with asking us if we were married and had children, then why when we were ‘so old’. we tried to explain our culture but i think its difficult to understand because here some girls are married and pregnant at fifteen. then the ladies asked us if we would ever marry ‘one of there brothers’ is how they worded it! and then the conversation turned to them asking about Canada and why we were fighting with Germany.... i asked where she got her information and the response was ‘i hear things from people’. so i was a little confused, but the conversation moved on to poor people in our western countries and how they get by. it was really interesting to have such a conversation with these women.

on friday we had a team day and went to the beach! so much fun to hang out as a big group, we packed chapattis (pretty much the best thing ever here in Tanzania, basically there a crepe but more fried) and banana’s and scrambled eggs.... quite the beach lunch! we had to eat in the parking lot cuz there is no outside food allowed on the beach as it belongs to a small resort. but it was a really good day. saturday was our day off and a small group of us ventured off down town to find the ‘mall’ and we found it! it took an hour and a half and three dala dala’s to get there but it was air conditioned and had an movie theatre! it felt so removed from the life we’ve been living here, but it was nice to relax and be ‘cool’ feeling all day! sunday was ‘find your own church to go to’ day and we had heard of a Vineyard church down town, that is apparently near the American Embassy. so we thought we could find it, gave ourselves two hours to get there and set off just after seven thirty am. well by ten o’clock, four dala dala’s later we had arrived at the American Embassy and could not locate this church anywhere. we asked the security guards outside the embassy and they had no idea either. so after a bit of discussion we decided to give up and the seven of us piled into a taxi and headed for a nearby mall. where we ate our lunch and had our own ‘home church’ in the restaurant. it was nice day besides all the extra traveling we did but we did talk to a staff from here on base and he said that we were walking distance from the church but it is tricky to find.... shucks eh?! next time!

so yes not a terribly exciting week but it had its moments! next week i’m in the clinic again and it looks like our team is going to have a few more opportunities coming our way!

till next time...