"T.I.A"

“This is Africa” - a quote from a film we watched at the weekend called ‘Blood Diamonds’ about the Diamond trade. This nicely sums up many of our experiences here.

This week:

Bethany hasn’t been well. We took her for the now routine malaria blood test, but it came back negative. This doesn’t mean she doesn’t have malaria, it just means it didn’t show up. However, even if it had come back positive it might not mean she has malaria either because the tests are not that reliable: what can you do?

Another consequence of all the rain we’ve had recently is that we now supposedly have Rift Valley Fever in Dodoma. It’s a disease that can produce a haemorrhagic fever similar to that of Ebola - remind me why I’m here! It’s actually not been confirmed, although someone has supposedly died of it. I’m quite doubtful (based of course on my extensive knowledge and experience of tropical medicine. Actually, internet research again!) but the local Tanzanians are very frightened. RVF can be caught from mosquitoes, meat and related products and milk. Consequently no one is buying milk or meat; in fact you can no longer buy any meat in town. So I’m now looking in my veggie cookbooks for new ideas. You can buy chicken, but it’s like buying a bag of bones, there’s so little meat on it. Any recipe ideas welcomed!

On the up side it hasn’t rained that much recently, so cholera is on the decline again - it’s all fun here.

If you remember from other blogs, Sarah my house lady has 7 children, 4 of which belonged to her sister who died 2 years ago of AIDS. I had assumed that her sister only had 4 children but this week I found out there are actually 10, the other 6 are living in others parts of the country. Anyway, two weeks ago Sarah was informed that the oldest of these had died. However, she turned up at Sarah’s house last week, so I guess someone was misinformed. Consequently Sarah has to make a trip to try and find out what’s happened. Communication is quite hard work here with no postal addresses and few land lines, so I guess she will probably end up with 8 children and we’ll have another child to sponsor through school.

This morning Mzee Joseph (the old guy who goes to the market to get me vegetables) came to see me because he has a ‘shida’ (problem). Shida’s are many and varied here and I usually get to hear about them. His last shida was on Monday when he came to tell me that his cow had died (supposedly of Rift Valley Fever)!!! This morning he was arrested by the police because the insurance on his piki piki (motorbike) had lapsed and the police had impounded his bike. Having no money, this is a shida kubwa (big problem) because he uses his bike for his business. Anyway I gave him the money to sort it out, so hopefully it’ll work out and he’ll turn up on Monday complete with piki piki.

What can I say - T.I.A.