Much has happened since last I wrote. MIHV started a drama troop event at market day to help spread messages about malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea. It was a lot of fun. The performance mainly consisted of singing and dancing.

The next day I began working at Karatu Lutheran Hospital. The first day was quite a challenge for me. I saw a lot of difficult cases, including a young man whose hand was crushed and he had to have two fingers amputated and a young HIV positive mother with a complicated C-section. Over the next few days there were many interesting cases, a young woman with very high blood pressure (we're still trying to figure out the cause) and a young woman with very severe anemia (the same). Most of the issues I am facing in the hospital are not unexpected, but it is certainly challenging to balance the realism of accepting things are they are and the idealism, that it is not the way it should be. For example, we were unable to give the woman with anemia a transfusion because they had no blood reserves. They could not get blood from the hospital 3 hours away because they did not have a cooler to transport it. The doctor I worked with and I offered to donate blood, but the bags were expired and in bad condition.

Last weekend. A Peace Corps volunteer and I went on a bike trip. We had planned on going through the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a cool mountainous region with many Craters and a lot of wildlife. However, the trip fell through because we found out we needed a guide, but obviously we could not provide him with a bike. Instead we decided to bike from Lake Natron up near the Kenyan border back down toward Karatu. This was a bit more than we bargained for. The road was almost entirely sand up to 6 inches deep, and we ended up travelling at a rate of about 2 miles an hour during the day before we gave up on the idea of biking the rest of the way home. The experience was still very enriching though, as we got to see Oldonyo Lengai, an active volcano, which is currently smoking, we spent two days in Engaruka, a Maasai village, where they were quite welcoming, and we saw some ruins from a settlement from hundreds of years ago, that were quite impressive and interesting.

Now I'm back in the office for a while, another thing I've been considering doing is teaching 1-2 periods of chemistry each day at the local secondary school, but I'm not sure it will work out. Other future travel plans include climbing Mt. Meru, visiting Dar Es Salaam for my friend Eveline's graduation, and travelling to southwest Tanzania to see if a hospital in the town of Njombe will be a good place for medical volunteers to visit.

This past week I travelled to Lushoto, which was very beautiful. I continue to have a bit of bad luck with travelling though. The guide I hired tried to take a shortcut through the rainforest because we had walked 36 km (~22 miles) the day before. He ended up getting lost and we found ourselves in very thick forest where I fell and twisted my knee a bit, then had to hike out about 10 km because there weren't any roads any closer than that. I decided to forego other hiking plans for a bit after that and I think I'll plan beach vacations until after I complete my climbs of Mt. Meru and Mt. Kilimanjaro. Hiking 36 km through the mountains again would probably kill any desire I had to climb anything.

Rainforests aren't quite as exciting as I had expected. Of course, I expected technicolor flowers and monkeys 10 feet away, which wasn't exactly realistic. In fact they're pretty much just like other forests, but the surrounding mountains were beautiful and the people were very kind and friendly. I also learned that it was easy to make friends with local kids by taking their photo and showing them the results, which was really fun.

The next things on the agenda are starting work in the hospital on Monday, making a reference book for local drug shopkeepers, and a bike trip though the Ngorongoro Conservation Area up to Lake Natron, which promises to be incredible, if for no other reason than I'll get to spend almost a week on my new bike, which is super sweet and came with an awesome bell that will be returning with me. I'm hoping at the end of October, beginning of November to head to Mt. Meru, then to Pangani to lay on the beach. The photos are from my travels this past weekend.