(chairperson and Board of KIWAKKUKI)Wow time passes
Maybe the biggest thing is the KIWAKKUKI Annual General Meeting where I was the official photographer (thank goodness I had my SLR canon.) Amazing. There were over 400 people there and each one represented 10 persons in their home districts. What a testimonial to a great group.
(the MC, Aginatha, a long time KIWAKKUKI member who now runs her own women's NGO)
My favorite rock, Margaret. She said, "I started with KIWAKKUKI and I will die with KIWAKKUKI". what a lady You should see her dancing, and "Paka Chini" which means loosely to dance to the floor.
Dancing KIWAKKUKI staff
The Mwanga ladies are crazy about KIWAKKUKI
These singers and dancers from Moshi Urban were fabulous
I love Kilimanjaro. It has been very shiny lately
This post is going to be a mixture of one I intended to do on Sept 11th and today. My brain and too busy! It is now September 23rd instead of Sept. 11, and we are languishing in the Detroit airport after our travel agent screwed up our flight reservations yet again, and we were unable to get out on the earlier afternoon flight home. No luggage anyway, but exhausted in the airport. So, I reflect back on the blog that was never posted and try to decide—should I?
Neha and family before hiking the mountain. Neha and Katya did an awesome job in Mwika. Duke is lucky to have such great undergraduates. And yea-Mwika can have students next year!It is September 11, and several weeks have passed, leaving us with just 10 days before we leave for Durham. It seems nearly impossible. The time has been productive and fun. Work has been hard but by and large good. We currently have 4 guests here that is work but always interesting.
Sandy, Tom and Colleen from Duke NUS and Duke University, Durham.
Dan and sweet Lucy. I think Dan had fun this time around!The medical students have finished their exams and are waiting for their grades and when the new medical students arrive, they will find their schooling quite different from the previous years. (Oh and their will be about 20 more students without any additional faculty). Hopefully, the MEPI transition will ease this problem, and make a difference. The last year of training faculty, bringing the fast internet to the campus, and developing programs and small grant possibilities for the project has flown, and now the education time begins. You can feel the excitement amongst the “MEPI” staff. I think that for John and I, the most exciting part of this grant so far is the sense of team building between the Duke faculty and the KCMC faculty and the resulting camaraderie. We always felt welcomed by the Tanzanians and faculty here at KCMC, but the sense of a team, other than the Duke-KCMC project in HIV research was not very present. Now, here we are as persons with common purpose. We are learning so much, and hopefully they are as well.
weird caterpillar on our craziest cactus (portender for the bizarre weeks before we left) For me, life downtown has been frustrating, interesting and lots of work. I have decided that there are reasons that Tanzania is going to have to find some new solutions to old problems, and I have no idea what that is going to be for I don’t see the changes in place, nor the real desire to move into the 21st century now. I am working on getting my driver’s license, and what should be quite simple, is a complete nightmare. The process requires a minimum of one day, with the potential of two or three looming. Currently, the system has failed, so not only can I not even begin the process of running back and forth to the police department and the bank, but have to arrive each morning at the Tanzanian Revenue Authority, only to wait for 45 minutes to be told that the system has failed. This has been going on for over a week, and what a first seemed like a sort of game, has become drudgery. It is almost too much to bear. But there we are. Tomorrow I will drive back down and race upstairs and wait, hopefully with the next steps ahead…fingers and head logged in, filling out some more papers, running to the police station, racing back, getting more stamps running back to the police, then back to TRA to get a receipt to take to the bank, paying the fee, bringing the receipt back, and then waiting for two or three days for my license. (note to anyone who can bear to read this far, I finally got my license exactly 10 days after I started the process. I am proud to say that I didn’t bribe anyone (this is what most people do), and had a near miss when I went to the police department the second time where I was to take the tests (???) and found that the police officer just asked me what I thought of Obama. Did I think he was a Kenyan?, Did I think he WAS born in the US? Was I sure? And inevitably…did I like him? To all these questions, I answered honestly and proudly-to be an American with Obama as my president. Low and behold, he said that I had passed the driving test.! You explain this to me).
Though this experience was extremely frustrating and time consuming, it was sort of a social experiment. And, at the end of the day I had a. been saved by a sweet young woman who collects parking every day. She saw that one of the days I had left my window partially open with my computer bag conspicuously in the front seat. She stood by my car for hours until I returned to it. Whew! And b. the Director of Accounting at TRA was so disturbed by my coming back and forward that he called me the day I finally got everything through to make sure that I actually had gotten it without any problems. I can hardly call my issues problems because they are the order of the day. But, you do wonder if Tz will ever approach the 21th century.
Somehow I have been so busy that I have not done many of the things I usually do, and the time is now coming to a close. I have however, reviewed one paper, two project reports, visited the Palliative Care Centre, and provided feed back to KIWAKKUKI program leaders. We have gone on two additional hashes in Mac
hame and up the side of the mountain to Mweka. They were really hard but beautiful.
(Our fab pastor Adrian and his wife Ruth (enjoy your grandchild's birth and time in UK, but please come back!)
Mountain Club president Marc and his adorable baby. His wife Sim is I think the fastest person on our side of town.
The mountain has graced us with her presence about once a week, and amazingly, we have had three rainstorms and the rains aren’t really scheduled to begin until November, so this is good news indeed.
Our little Moshi singing group had the opportunity to sing a farewell performance of a few songs bidding Anthony goodbye. Here is a guy who has been in Moshi for about 10 years. Anthony is truly wonderful eye doc who for little compensation rode his bike day after day and truly made a difference here. As well, we had fun. Our little rag tag band did Godspell (thank you Chrissy) a Gilbert and Sullivan medley, and we pulled a little Cole Porter “Friendship” off. The last tribute to Anthony was a little teary, and a little weird as I did the “needful” and sang tenor.
Trish doing "the needful"
Here is to the wonderful Bill who adopted this sweet, determined orphan who is supporting his family and trying to finish his schooling at the local college. Bill, wherever you are...you are a saint!(I wrote this on September 11) I recall September 11 in 2001 when Katrina was a freshman at NYU. I believe that I was more frightened than any other time I can remember. A great deal of the fear was because I didn’t have Katrina near me, and I couldn’t do very much to stem her own fear that was fed by rumors that flew around NYC. It was also perhaps one of the most devastating losses she had had, as all the Engine 10 Firemen of whom about 30% died that day, were her security guards on their days off in the dorm, and she was fond of them all. I hope that their lives are remembered around the world today.
So cheers to all, and for friends in Durham, NYC, Boston, and DC, will talk soon.
