Welcome from Steen!

Written Sunday, March 15, 2009

It has been one week since we departed from Washington Heights and much of the week has been occupied by settling in – exchanging money, buying water, adjusting time zones, buying miscellaneous odds and ends – and traveling to our final destination where we will be spending the next seven weeks (first from New York to Amsterdam to Dar es Salaam and then from Dar to Mwanza to Bukoba on a separate day). We spent two days, Thursday and Friday, this week going on site visits to ICAP supported Care and Treatment Centers (CTCs). A bunch of us would pile into an ICAP 4 by 4 and drive for an hour or two before arriving at the site, where we would be greeted by local staff. This week, we went to Ndorage, one of the better hospitals in the region where, coincidentally, one of the staff member’s wife is currently in labor, and Rubya, the Muleba district hospital, where ICAP recently opened a brand new clinic for HIV patients. Tanzania has 25 regions of which Kagera is one and within Kagera there are 8 districts.

There have been many new sights, sounds, and customs. In some ways, life is quite different from our lives in the United States, but in other ways, customs and habits are pretty much the same. I will be posting a slurry of observations/descriptions from our first week now and from now onwards my little thoughts will be posted more regularly!