TCDC Update

So I realize that I have been talking a lot about extra-curricular activities, so I decided that I should give an update of how preparation for the next month has been going. As I talked about before, we all come to TCDC, a training center that teaches courses in Swahili and also in development, every day for class. All morning we have instruction in Kiswahili. This week has been focused on learning commands, which will be very helpful when writing instruction booklets in the hospitals, and learning words for the equipment that we will likely be working on. Yesterday we all sat down with a native speaker for an hour and a half and had a conversation in Kiswahili. This did not really faze me since I literally do this every evening with my host family, but some of the other volunteers were a little overwhelmed. I am getting much better at being able to pick out words, though I usually have to ask them to speak slowly {sema polepole}. And the more Kiswahili that I learn, the more Spanish that I forget. After less than a month in Tanzania, I feel much more comfortable speaking in Swahili than in Spanish {after 4 years of Spanish class}. And I am so much more motivated to learn the language because it enables me to impress my host family and bond with natives who don't speak much English. I am hoping that it will help me form a relationship with the hospital workers next month.

So the afternoon is all instruction in engineering and working in a hospital. Nelson has been continuing his lectures on specific medical devices, how they work, what typically breaks, how it can be fixed. When we first got here, our afternoon labs were more technical in nature, but for the past week or so they have been more discussion-based. Although it is obviously important that we know how to fix broken equipment in the hospital, it is also extremely important to know what to expect when working in a hospital in the developing world, expectations for what we can accomplish, and to have a plan for how we will approach our work (for example, it is important to take an inventory of the hospital's equipment first). Yesterday and today, since we have finished all the labs, we have been opening up the equipment that we have for donation and looking at what is inside. Although this is great practical practice, many of us were weary about opening up a piece of working equipment with the risk that it may not work anymore once we put it back together. It took our lab TA 40 minutes and a a lot of banging on the machine to get one of the screws off of the centrifuge that Alex and I were disecting. We had a lot of frustrated engineers yesterday. But as long as everything is still operable after today, there is no real damage. I would hate for someone to break a piece of equipment that is meant to be donated to a hospital obviously has a great need for it.