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.