Friends and Family Back Home

We found ourselves quickly back home in Durham when a family tragedy sent us flying from Kilimanjaro urgently. Somehow, the trip wasn’t as bad as they usually are. Thank heavens. We were touched by the Tanzanian friendliness and kindness as they wished us well, at our home, at KCMC and at the airport. Back home, all seemed to be a whirlwind. We had work waiting. Strange how we weren’t supposed to be home, yet when we were, there was much to do. But, we also had some special times with family and friends.

It was great to hear about Katrina’s successes, both in Rent and Grease (how can two musicals be soooo different—Mimi (wonderful) Rizzo (um well) ) getting a new apartment, starting a new life, and now in Maine. Chrissy, oops Elizabeth….also finding new avenues and excitement. And her amazing work on the new art web site Company..It is all her work. That is what thrills me. I hardly understand any of it. Now audio books. Here we are Harlequin Romances. These were defining times of her early life reading them over and over, cataloging them. Ha..high moments of fiction.

We discovered that we have a new “great nephew” , Welcome to the most unusual family Ryan. And of course lovely times in Boone.

We had a great visit with Beav and Quail,

and finally, Ella’s first Baseball game with Julia and Charles, Lexton, Michelle and Ella.
snow cones are a slippery slope, but, hey, it's baseball!

President Broadhead visits Kilimanjaro

John Lucy and Harriet, MEPI Partners
Executive Director Moshi Ntebaye, Provost Kessy, Vice Provost Ahazi Kukulanga and JB

Our lives have been consumed for the past two weeks by the impending visit of our Duke President and his wife, our Chair of the Board of Trustees of Duke Hospital and Global Health and his wife, Our Global Health Institute Director and his wife and several members of the staff. The planning involved meetings with our Executive Director of KCMC College, the Provost, Vice-Provost, the Duke Student sites, the caterer for our last night dinner and many incidentals as we led up to the date.
We had the challenges that we knew we would have: There are rolling power cuts here and we knew that we would have no electricity on Friday night, the night of our own dinner party. How do you handle this? We have no generator and we have an old electric stove. Should we buy a generator? A gas stove? We went to several hardware stores with our friend Greg to look at generators and nearly purchased the most expensive one that they had, but just thinking about it even made Greg look at us and state, “for one night—and when you aren’t here year round…I don’t think you should do it”. My favorite hardware store man told us the same thing and he was SELLING GENERATORS! He even promised that we could heat the food for the party at his house if we needed to in an emergency. So, we came away without a generator. We leaned closer to the gas stove and I still feel a little sad about that decision, but at the end of the day, we decided with the help of Melinda the caterer, that our gas cook top, her sterno and lots of lanterns, candles and flashlights would make for an interesting evening.
We made last minute “clean-ups” of the house. Our house keeper and gardener cleaned, shined, weeded and turned the house and yard into s beautiful home. Even with Rose’s brother-in-law dying and her holding the wake in our back yard (talk about timing) the night before the party, she was right back on Friday to make sure that everything looked perfect for the day.
Carol, the project driver, was perhaps more excited than anyone else about the prospect of driving President Broadhead around, and I am sure that he was surprised to find that he was humble, kind and thoughtful.

Carol and Lucy

The KCMC leadership sacrificed their Wednesday evening and the following day, their holiday, “Saba Saba Day” for the visit. For those of us who were anxiously hoping that the visit would be good, we had no idea how close to perfect it was.
The plane might have been an hour late, but the lateness did not dampen the greeting with the MEPI ladies presenting beautiful bouquets to each of the women on the trip.

The "Girls/Women of MEPI" with beautiful flowers for the visiting women from Duke
John Greets Dick Broadhead at the airport

The EDR, Provost greet President Broadhead and wife Cindy


Toasts given to the arrival of the anticipated visitors

Presentations from the Duke Collaboration were brilliant.
Dr. "Annie" leads the discussion of the Duke/KCMC Research Projects
Dr. "Eliza" co-site director with Annie discusses testing and community based research
Charles "Piki Piki" talks about the AIDS Training Grant
John introduces Shanette and describes the challenges of running an NIH approved laboratory in East Africa
Charles and Shanette
President Broadhead holds his letter of support for MEPI and highlights the points that he felt made the application and MEPI important
Lucy demonstrates new technology to improve teaching in MEPI
Group shots abounded.
Team outside Medical Education Building

Team outside KCMC

Camaraderie grew as we all walked from the Child Centered Family Care Center to the Biotech laboratory, to the Medical Education Building and then to lunch. The walk cemented friendships, the sites displayed the ongoing work with Duke at KCMC.

After lunch we drove to Marangu Hospital and met with students and staff there. It was a beautiful afternoon, crisp and clean. The students and staff excited to show their work and hospital to the visitors.
Group shot outside Marangu Hospital
Duke Students with Provost Kessy and President Broadhead at Marangu Hospital

The only dampening moment came when a woman outside the hospital grounds screamed and screamed. Some staff raced to her and discovered that a motorcycle (piki piki ) accident had occurred and someone injured. The staff raced back, grabbed a stretcher, and as if in a war, raced back to load the person and the stretcher and bring him quickly back to the hospital. As one of the presentations in the morning had been about the epidemic of road traffic accidents, especially motorcycles, we watched this drama with a new understanding of the reality of that morning presentation.
From Marangu Hospital, we drove on to Mwika Uuo School and saw our two students in action with children in their class.
Neha and Katya teaching
Neha Katya Provost Kessy and President Broadhead

After class, we walked back to the dispensary, had a tour and watched as the President and his wife chatted with the students.


Mwika Uuo doctor greets Meg and Tom Gorri

There are no words to express how thrilled these students were to have the President come to see their work.
Our EDR hosted a wonderful dinner that night, and the next day the crew went to an orphanage, home visits and more presentations downtown. When they arrived at our house exhausted but filled with a full sense of what the KCMC/Duke project really is, we toured them around the house with no power, the gardens that John and Pauli built, and drew together with a remarkable sense of single purpose and joy as two cultures came together across continents to celebrate all that we have accomplished and all that we remain here to do.

For me, I think the most gratifying thing was to sing the Duke alma mater at the end of the day, and Tanzania Tanzania in Kiswahili, and to know that we all can be friends and colleagues. Now, let the work continue!

Back in Moshi again

Suzanne misses Moshi, and Moshi misses her...and of course Tom. Come back come back!!
After a rather harrowing experience coming to Moshi, we are settled in our little house once again. Because of the one-way price differential, we flew British Airways and learned to our dismay, that the communication between Precision Air and British is virtually non-existent. As a result, despite our best attempts, we were unable to board the Precision flight and had to spend the night in Nairobi. The problem remained unresolved on Saturday when again Precision could not see our new reservation. Without the help of our friend Shafiq at Emslees we would either still be in Nairobi, or have arrived via bus from there. We found once we arrived that this is not an uncommon problem-British and Precision have a failure to communicate, and even when you present them with the electronic ticket or hard copies, they refuse to accept it. What a complete mess!All is forgotten (though not forgiven) when we arrive in Moshi and find that our house is green outside and loaded with flowers and immaculate inside as only Rose can make it. The weekend was on. We headed downtown—argh. Rats (panya) had taken residence in the car, and the urine smell was disgusting. My nose is particularly attuned to such smells, and it was pretty overwhelming. Thank goodness Aleem had odor sticks and one quite alarming lemon one is currently stuck to the front of our car. One unfortunate panya didn’t get out quite quickly enough and we found him partially churned up in the driveway when we returned from shopping. (sorry no picture, too disgusting)
So, here are the salient issues that we are dealing with now:
1. Rose and Pauli are fine. Pauli’s lady friend Lucy is adorable and still here! Anjela is tall, and all of a sudden speaking English…thanks so much Dana and Malavika! Her teachers cannot believe the progress that she has made. Imagine…96’s and 98’s on English tests.
2.The Panya (rats) are back. Sadly, Pauli and Rose say that there are many because it is cold outside and wet—so, Pauli climbed upstairs with the poison because we find that the panya are eating the chicken food as well. The chickens are fine even though the panya have been practically living in our car and their food.
(Pauli taking Panya Poisen Up to the roof this evening.)
3. Speaking of chicken food….my chicken food fundi who was cured from diabetes in Loliondo, now is unable to walk again because of her diabetic neuropathy and her daughter tells me that she is really struggling to control the diabetes and hypertension. We hear of many people who are dying because they gave up their medicines when they went to Loliondo.

4. We have corn! Our sweet corn is a tiny bit past, and as tall as I have ever seen the corn. Remember the tractor? It seems to have given the garden a boost.

5.Avocados are falling 10 a day, limes begging to be picked, lettuce everywhere and delicious.

6. Other plants are happy--like the cactus!

7. It is cold. We are happy to have sweaters and warm blankets at night, but it is easy to forget that we are south of the equator and this is the coldest time of the year here. And it is cold.
8. We have a nearly dead tree hanging over the house. Will we get permission to cut it down? Only time will tell.
9. We have very little power. The biggest problem seems to be the power, umeme. There are now so many power outages that particularly on Tuesday and Friday there will be no power at all. We are contemplating a generator especially for the arrival of the visitors. But, they are so expensive, smelly, and dangerous that we are very nervous about it, and are looking for other alternatives.
10. Our car has many matatas, not the least of which is the brake light and the screeching of them when you brake and come around the curve. Argh It is grim.

9. We have not seen Kilimanjaro yet and are hoping that our pharmacist’s sister who is a seer will be able to wish the mountain out of the clouds by next week.

10. Friends can be screwed in the US and in Moshi. People lie, and the best people believe them!
11. Pauli has completed his masterpiece in the chair--the table is like everyone's so I won't include it, but the chair...great!
Sadly, the cushions seem to be missing!
We did have a good Sunday. Nikoli set the hash along with his dogs and dad Greg went along just to make sure that they didn’t get lost. He set a brutal hash. We all got lost about 10 times. He set so many crosses and then put the new path totally off the path. It was crazy. We went across the river twice and down steep paths, through corn, sunflowers and beans. Nikoli was laughing when we came running back from the wrong direction and totally exhausted. What a day. I cannot tell you how good a beer tastes after that kind of afternoon. What great fun though to catch up with Greg and Terrie, to see Sylvie and Nick, and chat with new people.

Staff meeting brought us around to the issues in Tanzania-Some lab equipment is down, a freezer is on the blink and poor Shanette is just back from leave. But, she worked on the problem even from the states. Great Scott! The staff are working like crazy to get multiple protocols through the long time consuming regulatory process. Hopefully, things will speed up as deadlines have been put all around. We prepared people for our visitors from Global Health and our Duke President who will be coming next week. Stay tuned. Of course they arrive on “Saba Saba” Day which is a National Holiday (7th month 7th day) We hear it isn’t as big a holiday as “Nane Nane” Day (8th month 8th day) but nonetheless people will be taking time off for the day. We have begged our own staff to stick around and hopefully we will have a group there. I did massive shopping and dropped off clothes to Furaja who is just has happy and sweet as she can be. She was very excited about Lyriella’s hand me downs, and tried to eat them with her two brand new bottom teeth.

OU--Mukesh says the car needs about 5 medium jobs. None of them a surprise, but we will tighten our belts....and no Umeme!