Safe Arrival

My new home, with the tortoise making his rounds.

I arrived here Thursday night, to Killimanjaro airport which is a drive from town. It was well below zero when I left MN on Wednesday morning, so I am really grateful to Sandy for driving me to the airport - If I'd been busing it I would have had to take my snow boots and warm coat with me. And I would have had to lift my 45 lb suitcase (thanks Dad!) onto the bus. Getting it into the trunk was hard enough. ALL the liquid items will be staying here in Africa on my return. My flights and layovers in Amsterdam were uneventful. I stepped off the plane onto one of those outdoor stairways into 84 degree weather Thursday night. I was fortunate to be sharing a ride with Ashley, a Denverite who is working with a Maasai girls school and has been here before so she helped guide me through the visa process (which was basically just handing my passport and a hundred bucks to a guy in uniform and then waiting for him to return.) We found our bags which had been unloaded by the time the visas were processed and a driver was waiting for us with a sign outside the secured area. We loaded the land rover and set off for my new home. The reason for the land rover was clear as soon as we turned of the main (paved road) - all other roads are rutted 4 wheel drive dirt, flanked on both sides by large groups of pedestrians and not infrequently too narrow for 2 cars to pass. The house is beautiful and there is a guard at night (And maybe during the day) who opened the large gate for us. Apparently, there is no guard on weekends, however. There is a tortoise that lives in the yard who is at least 2 feet long and must be middle aged by human standards. The ceilings are high, the floors are concrete that is is washed regularly, and there are nets on all the beds. It is dusty here - I will get good use out of my 6 pair of khakis, and I assume that is the reason for the easily mopped floors.





Friday morning I rounded with the medicine team at Selian, seeing maybe 20 adult men and women who were inpatients, then we had chai and chapati (a sort of flat bread) before lunch at the hospital canteen. Friday afternoon was the trip into the new hospital in town (which just opened last week) for peds and HIV clinic. I was starting to get tired and hadn't had the opportunity to get shillings yet, so I walked to a nearby atm while my housemates were in clinic. My housemates are 2 fellow residents from the Minnesota med peds program, Ann and Dan, and Joel, a med-peds ID staff from southern California who is here for his 3rd trip and has a great grasp of infectious disease in Tanzania. We are lucky to have him as a resource. Dr. Jacobson, the main U of M connection and the director of the new hospital in town (and former director of Selian) took us all out for dinner at a Somali restaurant (after I had a nap) and I had my first Tanzanian beer - Serengeti. It was unoffensive. This morning, I am meeting Dr. Hartwig, the palliative care director here, who is kindly letting me use his internet, after introducing me to his program and giving me some suggestions of drugs and ideas to familiarize myself with.



So first impressions - it is warm, (wonderfully!) dusty, very friendly, relaxed, and incredibly different from home. I think it will be a great experience.