Quite a bit has happened since my last post. The first was working at the eye clinic. It was really great. I worked with a British doctor, Dr. Savage, who has been working in Tanzania for 10 years, and a Tanzanian woman, Dr. Kombo, who is doing something like an Ophthomology apprenticeship with Dr. Savage. It was a really great experience. I learned a ton. We saw many, many cataracts and performed about 15 cataract operations over two days. We also saw some people who had some problems with their free cataract operations. I saw a woman who had a retinal detachment, a girl who lost her eye to shingles, and several other interesting cases that only nerdy med students would care about. I'm still looking forward to participating in other clinics and working in the hospital, but unfortunately the man I need to meet with, the district medical officer has been in the hospital with pneumonia almost the whole time I've been here.

The other project I've been spending quite a bit of time on is creating training materials to teach drug shopkeepers about how to prescribe drugs correctly with full doses, proper instructions, and according to the government protocol. There are a lot of system wide problems with regulation of pharmacies and some problems with the quality of health care providers, that make it seem more worthwhile to go directly to the drug shops, rather than seeing a clinician. The training will occur this Thursday, so I'm hoping we can get it translated before then.

I went on my first safari this past weekend. The game drives themselves were very good and I have some amazing photos that I hope to post soon, but the rest of the trip was a bit of a disaster. The car broke down on the way out to Lake Manyara. Then I joined another group for safari at Lake Manyara,after that we left to go to Tarangire Park, where I was supposed to have a luxurious tented camp waiting for me, but it was full, so I ended up staying in a guest house that cost about $3, you can guess about how nice it was. It was actually very tidy and had mosquito nets so it was fine, just not really what I was expecting. Then on the ride home we ran out of gas. I'm still haggling over price with the guy, but I think I'm going to have to pay full price for the trip. So I have decided I will start a small scale smear campaign against Fun Safaris. The next travels are into the rainforest. I'm setting it all up myself and I'll be camping, so I know exactly how luxurious it is.