Explanations for yesterday's Blog-- MEPI, Hats, Visitors , Hash Lots of "splaining" to do

Re-reading yesterday's blog--some explanation necessary

As I read the blog I posted over again, I realized that most of the readership would have no idea what I was talking about, thus I hope I can provide a brief explanation of the previous blog. 

The first part of the blog was referring to the MEPI close-out.  MEPI stands for Medical Education Partnership Initiative.  This was a five year grant awarded to several medical schools, most of which are located in Sub Saharan Africa.  KCMC college was one of the lucky medical schools, the only one in Tanzania to receive the award. Careful planning had gone into the grant, and our grant was the only one looking at shoring up the curriculum and maximizing faculty by building infrastructure, improving internet technology so that every student would have access to fast, reliable internet, bringing in Macbook desktops, the top of the line, and for the first three years giving each student a tablet.

A well recorded success story in Singapore involved maximizing  a small faculty by introducing Team Based Learning or TBL as it came to be known.  Two senior faculty at KCMC were sent to Singapore to watch TBL and to have tutorials in TBL. They were sold on this method of teaching.  Thus, when they returned and Singapore Faculty came with them to have intense instructions with other faculty, these two faculty were the cheerleaders.  The success of TBL was based not just on faculty take up of the system, but of a new Learning Management System, or LMS, which involved faculty loading their lecture plan, reading materials, and back up information on the tablets so that students would be able to easily prepare for classes before hand, and even to move ahead so that they were ready for classes in the future.  The beauty of this system, is that the faculty really only had to be present once/week if that is what they chose.  Most were present much more frequently.  The discussions regarding the particular class were led by a so called expert who helped to divide the students into teams to discuss the on-line questions.  There was lots of discussion and then each group presented their answer.  Opposing answer groups challenged them, they defended their answer and the expert would somehow manage to steer them to the right answer.  Usually this was the faculty teacher, as they were so enthralled with the process.  Students moved from sleeping, texting on their phones, coming in late leaving early, to coming early and being actively engaged.

All exams were “on-line” exams and this gave faculty the ability to grade and get the grades back to students 3x earlier that other schools.  The students had a new first line “wet lab” to work in and a trainer who could see every student from some kind of video camera to see that they were comfortable with the equipment with which they worked.

The results of this five year grant were astounding.  KCMCco went from the 4^th Medical School in the country in ranking (that is how many medical schools they were at the time) to the 1^st.  Students are engaged, take on responsibilities, beg to get in, and often their parents try to persuade friends who work at the college to help them be accepted.  The changes are astounding.  The faculty pictured in the previous blog were those granted awards for teaching and mentoring and are only a few of the outstanding faculty who walked through this whole new way of college/medical school learning.  It was definitely rough at first, but the pay off has been amazing.

Another positive about MEPI is that it brought the other awardees together once a year to discuss what they were doing and how it was working.  No one was doing the same thing, each had their own approach to the funding.  Possibly KCMC had been the least developed college so their approach meant using the most creative strategies to raise up the entire school.  It has been fun.  And it has been especially rewarding to see young graduates being retained at KCMC to work on the wards and to be on the pathway to be specialists.

So that is MEPI. After five years there was not an opportunity to renew the grant and thus we closed it out with a big party.  It is important to note that our Provost Kessy believes so strongly in this concept turned into real concrete successes, that he has taken over nearly all of the programs and is paying for them out of the College budget.

I don’t think that there is any reason to explain our house.  It most certainly has been the same for 12 years, with little additions here and there.

The fabulous baby hats refer to several women who knit and knit and knit.  If you have ever visited southern Africa anywhere, you will always see young babies with warm hats on, even when it is boiling hot outside.  It is just something that mothers do…put hats on their babies and wrap them tight.  Our studies involve mothers and mostly infants.  As HIV medicines have largely ended mother to child transmission, we continue to look at other infections for those mothers and babies, how to prevent that, low birth weight, how to prevent it, medication interactions, what is the best medication to prevent transmission, and of course adherence adherence adherence. There are obviously other studies.  Our nurses are dedicated and have been with our study site for years, some since I first started coming to Moshi 12 years ago.  It is illegal to give big compensation for the mothers and babies, but we do provide travel money and for undernourished moms (which are many) a meal.  I thought some time ago that a little gift like a little knit cap would just give a lift to these HIV-infected mothers who are trying to make the best out of a difficult life.  I had seen it work at my old NGO in town, and how happy these mothers are to receive a pretty knit warm hat.  So knitters, THANK YOU!

We have lots of visitors to KCMC, mostly because we are always cogitating on new grants.  We have garnered several that have been successful as team efforts with other schools and even other countries in East Africa.  So, it is important that everyone understand each other’s programs.  Welcome visitors.  A-5 is waiting to greet you.

Finally, the 350th Hash.  The Hash House Harriers are a world wide group that has traditionally gotten together because they love to drink and to run.  Our fearless leader Greg Emmanuel had gone to a number of these, in particular ones in the US when he was living in Maryland.  When he returned, he decided that it would be great to start this group in Moshi.  But ours is different, it is a family Hash, and that means walking and running and it means that the fellowship is as important as the walk/run and definitely the bites and drinks figure in after a long usually hot hike or run.  They are set in different parts of Kilimanjaro, and most in beautiful sites that we have rarely seen before.  There are many stories of daring in these hashes, some really hard ones as we do after all live on the side of a mountain, and others that are just beautiful and relatively gentle.  The hash trail is set with flour and there are always checks to throw you off.  The "hare" sets the trail (a different person each Hash) and provides the drinks.  It has become a huge tradition here in Moshi and all of us are grateful to Greg for his leadership.

I hope this explanation is helpful and supports in some way the pictures I tossed up last night as I really should have been in bed.

As always the mountain stands tall and though with less snow, still magnificent.