After sleeping in after a long night of dancing, a group of us headed out to get some ice cream and visit the Arusha Cultural Heritage Center. It was a gorgeous day to walk around so it was perfect to head over there. The center itself is shaped like a huge drum and shield with tons and tons of artwork and sculptures inside. It was fascinating to see all the different paintings, beadwork and photography they had to offer. After that, we headed back fitting 6 people in a taxi- which led to me sitting on a lap of course. I then packed up quick and headed to my host family’s house once again with plans to make a wonderful spaghetti dinner for my mama. Turns out she didn’t get my text about me making dinner so food was already ready when I got there! We talked over dinner about all sorts of things. It is always good catching up with my ol’ roomie Ash-girl to see how everything is going at her hospital in Machame as well. 

 
Sunday morning I had a wonderful pancake breakfast and headed to Cradle of Love for the third time to play with my favorite toddlers! They were ready and waiting to be played with so that was fun and then left after feeding them delicious ugali, beans, and mchicha. It was the coolest thing on Friday, I had been awing over a set of orphan twins whose mother had died giving birth and it turns out that after a couple days of care at Mt. Meru, they are actually going to Cradle of Love (picture of them below)! That was kind of neat to see that Cradle of Love was contacted right away, and they take such good care of orphans right when they are born. Then, since Aubrey’s host mama works as a cook at the center we took classes at last month, so we got to eat lunch for free- a meal they usually charge $14! YUM! Then, we headed to a festival called Nane Nane, which stands for the date 8/8. Although it is actually Monday, they have the festival all weekend. I had no idea what to expect and it ended up being very similar to a county fair with a lot of agricultural products. It was really neat to see! Also, I lived on the wild side this weekend and took my first piki piki ride (motorcycle). Instead of being packed into a tin can with 25 people, the alternate is to ride a motorcycle with no helmet! It was a lot of fun and I actually felt quite safe after telling the driver to go pole pole. And since it is a national holiday, none of us went into our hospitals on Monday so I stayed at my mama’s Sunday night again and finally cooked her a dinner. Monday was spent relaxing and getting some groceries for the next couple of days.

Today was not too shabby- In the morning we headed to the dentist office to continue to work on a piece of equipment other EWH students had started on last month. The machine itself looked in decent condition but one of the main tools- a water/air sprayer had not been spraying and air was leaking out of the handle. After some epoxying and figuring out the water trigger, we were able to get it mostly running. There is a loose rubber ring in the handle making the water unpredictable. First thing on Monday, we will be coming up with an alternate seal. Also, I checked back in with the lab and they found the other piece of equipment that isn’t working/programmed properly so I’m hoping just by googling it I can find the general manual since they don’t have one.  Soren and I packed up around 4 p.m. since that’s when the storage department workers head out.

 

Instead of leaving, I decided I’d go and check in the newborn room if they were using any of the equipment we had fixed. Turns out, they were! The oxygen concentrator we fixed the first week was on and running with the preemie I had seen all week, baby James (his picture was in one of my last blogs). It was great to see them using it, but it was not so great to see the little guy having such a hard time breathing. The nurse on duty was really nice and let me walk around and watch her do her work. It is amazing how much responsibility is placed in one person’s hands at the hospital. She had the evening shift from 2:00-6:00 and was the ONLY person on duty, can you imagine trying to take care of over 20 newborns, some who are in respiratory distress!? Little James, about a half hour after I was there, stopped breathing so the nurse had to direct all of her attention towards him trying to get color back in his pale blue skin. I couldn’t believe how “easy” or natural it was for her to do so. Once he was breathing again, she continued her work with the other babies administering shots and asked me to keep an eye on him. While she was feeding a baby, she asked me to repeat what she had been doing with him by basically squeezing his chest baby CPR style since he stopped moving. That was a pretty crazy experience seeing him start to breathe again. The nurse would also flick his little feet to get him to react which seemed to help a lot. At the end of her shift she had to sit down and do paper work in the little office next to the room so she appreciated that I’d watch to make sure he kept breathing and in the mean time, I asked if it was alright to hold some of the babies that were crying. Nothing like holding a little life in your arms and having her fall asleep within minutes of feeling warm and safe! I ended up leaving around 6:15 to be able to walk home before dark, but was so glad I stayed a little extra :) After that, I came home to cook some dinner and just relaxed until around 11:30 where a few of us tried out another Tanzanian club- Triple A. It was super fun and filled with almost 4 hours of straight dancing. I’m pretty good at keeping up with the locals now and of course always love to dance as long as there’s good music!

Wednesday was a day of slow progress, but slow progress is better than nothing! Soren headed out into town right away to find some parts we needed- a capacitor for a compressor and oil for the scale we had worked on which had too much rust everywhere to work properly. While he did that I continued to test the incubator and write out a guide for the nurses to use for setting the temperature. As simple as the machine may seem, there are actually quite a few steps and general things to know for when the alarm will go off and what will happen at different temperatures. Now one of our biggest concerns is that we’ve been getting many requests to fix personal items such as tea kettles, radios, and irons! Of course everyone assumes if we can fix big machines, we can fix the smaller, more “simple” things. It’s good to make friends through this but mainly a waste of time and energy when it can be put elsewhere. So from now on, we are just going to say we can only repair medical equipment. I am quite excited actually to be able to now problem solve on my own electronic devices at home if I ever have any  :D When Soren got back from shopping, we finished calibrating the scale and returned it to the TB ward. Then we did a quick fix on a water heater (there are so many different varieties of water/food heaters here it is craziness) and went into town to get extension cord wire. Since we’ve been working outside, it has been really hard testing things since we have to find somewhere to plug it in! Luckily we found a place with a good cord and got 10 meters so we can work better

 Thursday:

                Wednesday night I ended up typing up a manual with some pictures so the incubator would be ready for instruction and use. Nuru let me know in the morning that the labor ward had requested my assistance when I could and it ended up being yet again another problem with the entire power supply of the building. Almost all of the fluorescent light bulbs are out because they blow out immediately when installed in the faulty wiring. I wish I could think of something to help but even if we bought stand up lights, they’d need to be plugged into the wall which is all wired wrong. I’m still brainstorming! After lunch we delivered the incubator and I gave one of the main nurses we’ve been working with the instructions and showed her how to use it. It’s hard to say if they will end up using it. There are SO many babies born each day that it’s almost silly just to have one incubator and all the rest laying out in beds in just as warm of an environment. We got the oxygen concentrator -turned air compressor up and running with a new starter cap. All we need to do is find some hosing and a correct fit to be able to pump up all the hospital wheelchairs!

Today we finally got to return the rest of the equipment we’ve worked on the past week. Sometimes it’s hard to remember who exactly dropped anything off since there are so many different departments. This morning we met with the head doctor to discuss the major problem in the labor ward. With our multimeter, we tested most of the sockets in the labor ward and have concluded that instead of the ground wire hooked to ground with a 0 voltage reading, it’s also connected to the live wire. This makes the circuit live at ALL times. Not only is this a safety issue but the equipment can easily fail as well as the blow out the light bulbs. The head doctor was apparently aware of the problem but could do little to fix it since the company who renovated the building keeps saying they’ll come back to fix the circuit. We wish we could do it ourselves but it is just not a reasonable tasks since I know very little about wiring an entire building. Our next big project was to tackle two more pieces of equipment from the antenatal ward: an incubator and an electronic scale. The scale just needed some new batteries and a tape job so that was ready in minutes! With the incubator, we had asked what was wrong with it and the nurses replied it never worked since being delivered. After switching the male plug to one we could stick in our testing socket, it miraculously started working! I am guessing that for the most part, the staff just doesn’t know how to operate it since there are no others in the department. I spent the day cleaning it because it had basically been used as a storage unit for who knows how long. We tested the incubator out all day, figuring out when the alarm sounds and what the settings are. The biggest challenge now will be to train the staff that can use it. It may seem silly, but even the simplest of machines won’t be used unless of course the user is completely comfortable with operating it. Since this is the only incubator I think it’s really important to ensure they start using it.