Leaving Ilula

It is Thursday evening here, 9 PM.  The guests have gone home and I should be packing.  But I will write for a bit first.

Kelsey and I found a new watering hole since the Peace Garden has not been open since the big group left.  It is called Namanga Grocery, after a region bordering Kenya and Tanzania. I know the gang would have liked it too.  We first went there with Dr. Mango and found the store is owned by one of the nurses at the hospital, Georgiana.  Somehow we told her about guacamole, one of the few recipes I know by heart, and told her we would make it for her.  We gathered the ingredients with the help of an acquaintance of Anna’s, our caterer.  Esther came running out to greet us, so for the price of a soda, she and her son Dominic helped us make the correct purchases.  We invited them, Anna, Tura and Lucy, the housekeepers, to our guacamole party.  We also ran into Dr. Mango at Georgiana’s Namanga Grocery.  Of course out of politeness we joined him for a beer.  He informed us that Georgiana was out of town, laying the permanent gravestone for her father, a custom to signify the end of 40 days of mourning.  She was to be the guest of honor!  So we invited our friend Dr. Mango instead.  Why stand on ceremony? 

The guacamole was excellent and most liked it (not Esther).  I brutalized myself when I sliced my finger fighting with an unripe avocado.  I hate it when I do that! The other doctor, Kelsey, repaired it with plastic surgery technique.  (A steri-strip from my first aid kit.  I didn’t need the morphine.)  I have a dirty bandage on it with tomato stains (no blood).  In the morning I will trade the bulky bandage for a BandAid, supplied by Anna, my own supply decimated by other minor emergencies over the years and never replaced.  Wow!  That sounds like Africa!

We had a great time.  Sadly, we will miss Anna, charming, attractive and a good cook.

Tomorrow we will say our formal goodbyes at devotions and morning report.  Sometime before noon, we will go to Iringa and spend the night.  We will leave for Idunda in the morning with a big troupe.  (As I write this, we had a big lightening strike and the power momentarily went out.  I think Idunda may still be questionable.)

Kelsey and I were chuckling about how we have adapted.  This morning I said to her, “Now there’s something you won’t see in the hospital at home.”  It was a chicken walking around the hospital wards.  The walls need patching and paint.  There are no screens on the windows, some of which have broken glass.  The only imaging equipment available to us is ultrasound.  Thankfully, Dr. Saga reads them well.  There is an x-ray, but simple as it would be to flash the film, it is not legal without a certified technician.  We have no hemoglobin reagent (coming tomorrow?), so our clinical assessment must suffice, crude as it may be.  We can test for HIV and malaria, contenders for diagnoses 1 and 2 in incidence.  We use syndromic patterns for most diagnoses, like Typhoid and acute watery diarrhea.

Friday afternoon at Neema

We have left Ilula.  We had many goodbyes this morning, several repeated several times.  All the people at Ilula were gracious and helpful, tolerant of our lack of Kihehe and Kiswahili, the local languages.

The drive to Iringa is beautiful.  We arrived safely.  At one of the phamacies, Kelsey and I put in an order for drugs we are taking to Idunda in the morning and cabbed the two big boxes back to the NSSF apartments.  

Tonight it is Roger Bloomquist's birthday and 11 are going out to dinner with him.  We still won't match any Tanzanian choir in our "Happy Birthday" song.  Our present to Roger (and Trish) is our presence at their apartment over night and Monday.

I am planning on having Monday in Iringa to do a little shopping, for what I am not quite sure.  Then Tuesday already we are tagging along to Dar es Salaam and the final leg of our trip.  Kelsey will be meeting Amy and friends to spend a few days in Zanzibar and me, home.

If you have read this far, you surely saw the photo of Kelsey dangling off Gangalonga, but don't worry Gail and Vance, you also probably guessed we rescued her!  Of course, it was a cliffhanger, as you can plainly see.  To know she is well, simply look at the Isimila photo, taken after Gangalonga.

It is now raining a torrent.  This is much needed, but only tomorrow will we know if we can get beyond Idete.  (This is a lot like the end-of-the-season shows on TV isn't it?  So stay tuned....)