Tuesday, 8 January 2013

Kids, kids, kids.

Yesterday we went souvenir shopping for two hours and Chels showed off some very, very impressive bargaining skills. We walked away with most things at our ideal price! I didn’t buy too much, there are still two months here to figure out what to get everyone. I feel like souvenirs are not useful half the time and get tossed aside, so I want to get things that are unique but also purposeful. Never going shopping without Chels though!

Rod  (Mylene’s boyfriend) made us a delicious homemade dinner last night, we hadn’t cooked at home (except for toasting bread) at all. We had a cucumber and red onion salad with pasta and mixed vegetable sauce that has tandoori masala spice in it. It was deliciouss! I was actually happy to be eating vegetables, we haven’t really had any since we’ve been here. A lot of rice and oily foods that taste great, but are more than likely clogging my arteries.

We still weren’t too certain of how to take the inner routes to the hospital this morning so we took the big roads. I think it would be a lot cooler if we’re able to take the inner roads cause the sun doesn’t shine as brightly in the morning on them. We got to work sweating like crazy this morning and Amina looked at us and said (nicely) that we should take a couple minutes to cool down outside haha. I guess we were pretty gross.

Holy crap was work busy today!! We saw patients nonstop, back to back the entire time we were there. We were gonna go in today asking if we could work together at first since we weren’t familiar with treatment of the conditions they have, but even before we could Amina already assigned us kids. My first patient was an adorable little boy; at first it was hard to get him to do what I wanted since neither of us understood each other. The main objective was to get him to walk in a straight line, focusing on where he was going cause when he walks he doesn’t look at his peripherals. Amina explained what they normally did with him and I started with those. I mostly had him chase after a small soccer ball following a straight line and then he would be able to kick it. He seemed to love it, but then he kept yelling things at me in Swahili when I would make him run longer before he could kick the ball. I wanted to do something where he was having fun but alsot effective, but it was impossible to tell if he liked it. When he was leaving, Amina told me his mom said he liked me, so success with my first patient here! The rest of the patients I saw were mainly infants who have CP or hemiplegia and needed to work on crawling, walking, etc. Most of them wouldn’t stop crying no matter what we did! I felt so bad, I didn’t want to leave the babies with a negative impression of the OT environment, but we tried everything. I had another client that was a 3 year old boy, he was such a big kid! He couldn’t walk unsupported so I had to carry him outside to work on walking, he was soo heavy. 2 months of working with him and I’ll be jacked by the end haha. The last little girl I saw today was adorable; she had on a pretty dress and she was such a good kid! She did everything I asked her to do, no crying, no difficulties. Even though it was crazy busy, we still got off work just after noon. We were all drained though and took naps when we came home. No work tomorrow though! This work schedule couldn’t get any better. We were supposed to do community outreach tomorrow but it got cancelled so we had the day off to research treatment options for our patient list.

I think we’re gonna go to a beach nearby tomorrow and “study”. Chels still isn’t feeling too well, so she might not come. The beach is only 10km north of Stonetown, it’s called Fuji Beach and we have to take a Dala Dala to get there; that’s the local transportation here, it’s basically a truck that had seats added in the back. Dala Dalas are supposed to go at fast speeds and be kind of unsafe, but it’s part of the culture so it’ll be interesting to give it a try! Hopefully we don't get lost.

I finally ventured out on my own today to buy dinner since Chels didn’t want to eat and Mylene and Rod went out to dinner. I only went to Forodhani but found my way back on my own; I’m finally getting this maze of a town…kind of.

Our laundry machine got fixed today after being down since we’ve been here. I didn’t bring too much clothes since I plan on leaving everything here for the locals so I was REALLY close to running out of basically every type of clothing I need. For once, I was actually excited to do laundry. Clean clothes are now hanging out to dry (no dryers)! We also asked our landlord to have cleaning service for our apartment cause we don’t have any of the supplies we would need to clean. We’re gonna get the place cleaned about once a week and it’s only going to cost ~5000TSH each time, so cheap! That’s $3.33USD, split between 3 of us = just over $1 each. I wish this existed back home, I would never clean my apartment myself again!

I could bit yesterday by an unknown insect and now my ankle is swollen and hard. It's itchy and hurts, and pretty nasty. I iced it a bit tonight and it went down a good amount, but it'll be a pain for the next couple bites. I don't exaggerate when I say I am very prone to mosquito bites. I've consistently had at least two active bites since I've been here even though I spray bug spray at night, but no one else seems to be getting many. Hope those malaria pills are doing their job...

Another day gone by in Zanzibar and even though I'm pretty adjusted, it still hits me pretty often that I am actually here for 2 months. So surreal that this is happening! And with that I'll end this already super long post; if you're still reading at this point, I give you a high five from halfway across the world because you're awesome.

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