It's time I showed you what you are missing and gave you a
tour of the village. It won't take long believe me, although Nyangao is larger than I imagined because it
needs to provide for the hospital staff and the many patients and their relatives
who pass through. St Walburg's hospital has a very good reputation for surgery
and has one of the only functioning x-ray machines in the region. Patients come
from as far away as Dar Es Salaam and Mozambique to have surgery here.
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The High Street (Top Shop is opening its flagship store next month)
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| The church |
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| The school |
The hospital has 220 beds and 220 staff. At any one time
most of them are chilling somewhere - sat on a bench catching the breeze,
taking a nap on an empty bed, or having a wander around the hospital and
chatting with colleagues. St Walburg's also has the only ICU in Southern
Tanzania - what gives it the "intensive care" status though is the availability
of a sats monitor and the ability to provide oxygen at a higher flow rate than
the other wards. I hope I never need it...
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"AIDS is dangerous, no cure or prevention,
watch you do not get it, avoid fornication"
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Where the patients are lined up awaiting theatre
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The pharmacy stocks medication in line with the World Health
Organisation's Emergency Medication List for Developing Countries, so there's
not much choice when it comes to drug treatment. We don't ask about patient allergies,
stage of pregnancy, whether a woman is breast-feeding, or about drug
interactions....in fact, we don't worry too much about what is prescribed. If
the prescription can't be deciphered (the doctors writing here is even worse
than the UK - imagine!), we make a guess at what it says or what we think it
should say. I am fairly sure I gave someone Betadine wash instead of
co-trimoxazole tablets the other day. My bad.
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The view from the dispensary
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The VSO volunteers go for lunch every day at the small restaurant
outside the hospital gate. It's speciality (indeed its only dish) is wali,
maharagwe and mbogo; that's rice, beans and
spinach if you've let your Swahili slip. Sandra's unending positivity
shone through when she remarked, "mmm, this is really tasty", while I
was thinking it tastes the same as yesterday, and the day before, and the day
before that. But actually it's true - it really is tasty food and for 40p
you can't knock it.
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The restaurant
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On New Year's Eve there was a special service in the
hospital chapel, followed by an all-singing, all-drumming staff parade through
the wards to bring good luck; the patients were sprayed with Holy water and
they were all given a bar of soap for washing clothes. Then we got to finish
work early and watch a gangster-style rapper from the village entertain the
staff. A typical post-work activity for me, then.
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I thought he was wearing a Calvin Klein shirt but it turned out to be
the lesser known brand Kalvin Klient
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At last, I have started having Swahili lessons three times a
week though I'm not sure if I'll get on with the teacher. He has an annoying
propensity to answer the questions he asks me before I get the chance to answer
them myself. At one point he exclaimed, "you know nothing..." to
which I rather angrily replied, "that's why I need a teacher!". In
his defence, he was probably frustrated by my poor use of the future tense of
the verb to have. Apparently if I say, I will be a dog, it's not quite the same as saying I will have a dog. However, any lessons
are better than none. Until now I have been relying on a phone app that teaches
Swahili to the Armed Forces. Lay down
your weapons and are there armed men
near here?, have a rather limited use in Nyangao.
Language blunder of the day: Asking a man who was clearly
unemployed and had a mental disability, "How is your work going?"
On a positive note, Mission Convent has gone incredibly well
this week. Sandra and I invited Sister Columba to our house for chai which went
down well. She brought us many mangoes, Korean trinkets and a statue of the
baby Jesus which I tried to stand on a ledge in the lounge as a gesture of appreciation,
but embarrassingly he kept falling off. Turns out the baby Jesus prefers to lie
flat on his back.
Then, I spent 3 hours on the weekend, helping Big Boss
Sister fill out an application for a course in Germany. It took a painfully
long time and I ended up writing it myself but I was rewarded with bread and
jam, mangoes, fruit juice and some rice with beans and sandy spinach for lunch.
Today, I said I would help her set up an email account. She thought divine
intervention had stopped her setting one up over a year ago, but really it's
just poor Vodacom signal at the Convent. I wonder whether BigBossSister@gmail is
already taken?
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Finally, sour dough bread straight from the
Convent - it made a nice bruschetta
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Question of the day: Why are there millions of insect wings
outside the back door every morning? Where are the insects they belonged to and
why are they leaving their wings here?
Clearly, I've been on my own too long....
*Muzungu - white person
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