I can count my happiness in mangoes. Today was a damn good day.
It was my second day of work. My internship is located at the MDH (Management and Development for Health) building, about a mile south of our hostel on the same road. I’ve spent the past two days learning more about what this summer will entail. For now, I’ve got two main projects I’ll be focusing on.
The first will involve collecting data about the HIV status of women and children enrolled in a Vitamin A supplementation study. The original study was designed to see how effective neonatal Vitamin A supplementation would be at reducing childhood mortality and morbidity (any illness/complication that doesn’t kill you). There have been many similar studies in other countries, but none have really been large or comprehensive enough to get a conclusive answer. The project I’m a part of has over 90,000 mom-and-baby pairs enrolled in Ghana, India and Tanzania. While the main part of the study is over, researchers are now curious about the effect of Vitamin A on HIV transmission from mother to baby. Like many a research project, they didn’t realize they were interested in this until all the data had been collected and analyzed. It turns out that Vitamin A, given at different times – for example, right after birth or a few days later – might actually have an effect on how likely it is for a mother to transmit HIV to her infant. So! After that long explanation, my role is to travel to all the hospitals in Dar es Salaam involved in the study and get access to the now-closed data on the women in our study. I’ll also be doing a similar thing in the rural Ifakara area, more than 300 miles inland, where the same study is being run on a non-urban population.
I will also be working on a project in Dodoma, the capital of Tanzania, a few hundred miles inland. There, the government has started a pilot public health program where they distribute birth kits to women. These might include clean linens, syringes, alcohol swabs – things that hospitals are often in short supply of, or don’t even have. We need to determine if these birth kits are a smart investment – are they improving women’s postpartum health and/or reducing mortality in childbirth? While my base is still in Dar at the office a mile away, it seems like I’ll also be doing a good deal of in-country travel related to work. Between that and my own plans to explore places like Zanzibar, Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti, and maybe even Mombasa, I might be spending a lot less time in the city than I thought!
For now, though, Dar is solidly our base, and I feel like Jeanie and I are getting more competent by the day (well, I would hope!). I took my very first bajaj ride to work today. While bouncing between the road and bumpy dirt sidewalk in the dilapidated rickshaw was not exactly peaceful, it was great way to travel: about half the cost of a taxi and somewhat able to navigate around traffic jams. It’s still way more expensive than a daladala, which runs about 30 cents a ride, but I haven’t worked up the courage yet to step into one of the crowded minibuses alone! Jeanie and I plan to take one to go downtown this weekend, but that adventure can wait a few more days.
The building I’m working in is really nice. It’s a 7-story glass-covered building. I work on the 2nd highest floor (Floor 5, since Floor 0 is a thing here). No elevator but the stairs are close together, so all good on that lazy front. Plus, the view is insane. We have a 180-degree view of Dar since we’re a corner office, and one full wall is taken up with a view of the Indian Ocean, shimmering maybe 1000 feet away. I’ve definitely gotten distracted at work by gazing out at the waves, palm trees, and big houses right on the shore.
While the two mentors I met in Boston, Emily and Abdallah, haven’t been around to orient me, my co-worker/boss Salum has taken over on that front. Salum, Abdallah and I share our corner office, complete with delicious air conditioning, our own desks, a table, tons of files on the studies they are running, and even an office plant or two. As Abdullah is out sick, Salum has done a great job preparing me for this summer. In the office, this has consisted of everything from getting me certified to do human research, to giving me all their study descriptions to read, to helping me use a new SIM card and hail a bajaj.
Today, though, he hit his role as a mentor out-of-the-park.
“So did you get to go running yesterday?” he asked me around 11.
“No,” I said mournfully. I’d been too tired and Jeanie had to go to work too early, but I was anxious to just get my legs pumping a bit. I’d done a few halfhearted squats the night before. It was time for a change.
“I am going running with my wife at the University tonight. You should come with us!”
And with barely more than that – “I’ll get you at your hostel” – he was out for the rest of the day while I plowed through literature on our study protocols. At 4, I walked back from work in the overpowering but somewhat diminished heat. It’s a nice walk – the only casualty is my sweat glands. Along the 20-minute route, I stopped to pick up four mangoes, 10 bananas, and 10 apples all for around $6 (could I do better in other countries? Maybe, but I’ll take these deals any day). I arrived at the hostel dirty but excited. In a few minutes, Jeanie and I had on our running clothes, full water bottles, phones and a room key. Soon enough, Salum honked and entered our courtyard. We piled into his spacious sedan and set off for his neighborhood, Sinza, about 20 minutes away. Sinza, he told us, was a more normal middle-class Dar neighborhood (“You’re living with the 1%!” he said, maybe half-joking). Like many people, he lives in a gated mini-compound, this one with two houses: one for his sister’s family and one for his. We were ushered into his one-floor house, kept cool by the thick exterior. When we entered, his adorable 6-year-old daughter Naomi was doing homework on a leather couch in front of the TV. She spoke perfect English just like her parents and was sassy in the best way, as some only children are.
While we waited for Salum and his wife Catherine to get ready for running, we watched the Tanzanian TV show that Naomi, her aunt and cousin were watching. As far as we could tell, it was a buddy comedy for the grade-school set: two chubby, pesky boys got into unexpected adventures while stealing their neighbor’s goat. The whole thing was filmed in wide long shots like a soap opera and set to the tune of a ridiculous jingle. We definitely got the comic effect without any linguistic comprehension!
At last I can bring us to our run. By the time we left their house at 5:30 or so, traffic was beginning to snarl, but we got there soon enough. We had about 45 minutes till sunset and an hour till darkness, so we quickly set out to run. Salum, Catherine and Naomi would be biking/running at the track around the football pitch (yes, I can say that because no one says soccer), but Jeanie and I wanted to explore the campus. I’m glad we did, because what a campus it was! As Salum told us, we couldn’t get lost because the football field was at the bottom of a hill and the rest of campus was atop the hill, so all we had to do was go downhill to eventually get back. We set off at a good clip with the sun dipping down.
The University of Dar es Salaam campus reminded me of an equatorial Wellesley College – almost a cultivated park with buildings thrown in. Instead of Japanese maples and eastern pines, though, there were giant exotic trees with thick dangling tendrils, matted half-dried grasses, cramped dorms with laundry hanging on any railing or string available, and even a troupe of vervet monkeys clambering around with their babies clinging to their chests. We ran up and down winding trails, dodged through an academic building, crested a hill and found ourselves at the Society of Jesus (and promptly turned around when we realized we’d left campus), scampered down a truly ethereal stone staircase among the giant tendril-trees, and finally turned up, sweaty and winded, at the football pitch as the sun was setting. Jeanie and I split up once we saw our “family” there. I ran through a trail cut in tall grass and around a maintained field. After a few more minutes, we met up with everyone on the track and went to the side to do some stretches together. I even did some glute-strengthening work – take that, hip injury! Once it was fully dark we went back to the car, gulped much-needed water, and started back.
We had about a 50-minute drive to our hostel ahead of us, thanks to the unyielding Dar traffic. As Catherine explained, the city is growing way too fast for the infrastructure to keep up. The result is miles-long back-ups on virtually every major road at all hours of the day. The city is going to make special bus lanes soon, but so far they’ve only been started on two big roads, and our route was not one of those. We were all sticky, but with the cooler night breeze coming in and Naomi’s lively backseat behavior, we still had a good time. For it was only as we left the University that Naomi came out in full force.
“Daddddy, I want ice cream!”
“No,” Catherine said, “You have to have dinner first.” And she turned at us to wink, saying that Naomi is always too full after dinner to still be hungry for ice cream.
“Mommy,” she tried again. “I would really like to stop at that toy shop.”
“What have you done to deserve a toy? Is it your birthday?” Catherine jibed.
“No, but I know you have money.”
“I don’t, we didn’t bring any money with us, so we can’t buy anything.”
“Daddy has money! Daddy always has money!” Naomi persisted.
“Your problem,” Catherine said, turning to Salum. “You tell her off now!”
Naomi then proceeded to sing some rhyming English nursery songs and tell us emphatically that, while she loved school, she would NEVER go on the weekends. It was so fun to be around a family, and once Salum and Catherine had invited us to go out to a club and bar with them this weekend, it seemed like we had been semi-adopted by them. They may not be that much older than us, probably no more than 30, but we feel very looked-after. Our trip tonight and promises of future excursions, both exercise and more nightlife-oriented, makes them the perfect combination of friends and parents. I am so happy that we found them, or rather, that they found us!
We got back around 7:30. After I showered and washed out my running clothes, Jeanie and I set off for a night of fruit-mania. We brought all our produce up to the 4th-floor roof deck for dinner, as we’ve been doing every night, and proceeded to have two mangoes, six bananas, and a good deal of peanut butter between the two of us. I was feeling both full and healthy, and it came as a further surprise when Father Aloysius offered us each a bowl of pudding left over from their dinner. It’s been a sweet night in every way.
Things are beginning to really feel familiar, at least in the small sphere of Dar that we’ve explored so far. As we drove back from running tonight, Macklemore and Daft Punk blasted from the radio as a humid, almost Boston-in-the-summertime atmosphere surrounded us. People keep thinking my name is Rihanna – hers is a foreign name much more recognizable to Tanzanians than Leanna. I have been getting comfortable with the basic Swahili I know before learning new words (yeah, that’s my excuse), but really, I am employing it! And to paraphrase Macklemore, Leanna wasn’t great at Swahili because at birth she was great. Leanna was great because she practiced Swahili a lot.
I am now reading Stranger in a Strange Land, a book I’ve always wanted to read since it was mentioned on Lost (story of my life), but one that also brings home a lot of lessons about cultural interaction! Other planets, other continents, same diff. I’m nowhere near fully acclimated – for goodness’ sake, I haven’t seen 90% of the city – but if I can bargain for mangoes, I can do anything. Plans are already stirring for future travels: Zanzibar two weekends from now, where we’ll be staying with another Harvard student and snorkeling and beach-ing all day long, and a possible Kilimanjaro climb in 3 weeks.
Yeah, I know, we all thought my posts would get shorter. But I’m pretty good at stretching the truth. Now, if only I could make those last squares of toilet paper stretch a little longer, too…
It was my second day of work. My internship is located at the MDH (Management and Development for Health) building, about a mile south of our hostel on the same road. I’ve spent the past two days learning more about what this summer will entail. For now, I’ve got two main projects I’ll be focusing on.
The first will involve collecting data about the HIV status of women and children enrolled in a Vitamin A supplementation study. The original study was designed to see how effective neonatal Vitamin A supplementation would be at reducing childhood mortality and morbidity (any illness/complication that doesn’t kill you). There have been many similar studies in other countries, but none have really been large or comprehensive enough to get a conclusive answer. The project I’m a part of has over 90,000 mom-and-baby pairs enrolled in Ghana, India and Tanzania. While the main part of the study is over, researchers are now curious about the effect of Vitamin A on HIV transmission from mother to baby. Like many a research project, they didn’t realize they were interested in this until all the data had been collected and analyzed. It turns out that Vitamin A, given at different times – for example, right after birth or a few days later – might actually have an effect on how likely it is for a mother to transmit HIV to her infant. So! After that long explanation, my role is to travel to all the hospitals in Dar es Salaam involved in the study and get access to the now-closed data on the women in our study. I’ll also be doing a similar thing in the rural Ifakara area, more than 300 miles inland, where the same study is being run on a non-urban population.
I will also be working on a project in Dodoma, the capital of Tanzania, a few hundred miles inland. There, the government has started a pilot public health program where they distribute birth kits to women. These might include clean linens, syringes, alcohol swabs – things that hospitals are often in short supply of, or don’t even have. We need to determine if these birth kits are a smart investment – are they improving women’s postpartum health and/or reducing mortality in childbirth? While my base is still in Dar at the office a mile away, it seems like I’ll also be doing a good deal of in-country travel related to work. Between that and my own plans to explore places like Zanzibar, Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti, and maybe even Mombasa, I might be spending a lot less time in the city than I thought!
For now, though, Dar is solidly our base, and I feel like Jeanie and I are getting more competent by the day (well, I would hope!). I took my very first bajaj ride to work today. While bouncing between the road and bumpy dirt sidewalk in the dilapidated rickshaw was not exactly peaceful, it was great way to travel: about half the cost of a taxi and somewhat able to navigate around traffic jams. It’s still way more expensive than a daladala, which runs about 30 cents a ride, but I haven’t worked up the courage yet to step into one of the crowded minibuses alone! Jeanie and I plan to take one to go downtown this weekend, but that adventure can wait a few more days.
The building I’m working in is really nice. It’s a 7-story glass-covered building. I work on the 2nd highest floor (Floor 5, since Floor 0 is a thing here). No elevator but the stairs are close together, so all good on that lazy front. Plus, the view is insane. We have a 180-degree view of Dar since we’re a corner office, and one full wall is taken up with a view of the Indian Ocean, shimmering maybe 1000 feet away. I’ve definitely gotten distracted at work by gazing out at the waves, palm trees, and big houses right on the shore.
While the two mentors I met in Boston, Emily and Abdallah, haven’t been around to orient me, my co-worker/boss Salum has taken over on that front. Salum, Abdallah and I share our corner office, complete with delicious air conditioning, our own desks, a table, tons of files on the studies they are running, and even an office plant or two. As Abdullah is out sick, Salum has done a great job preparing me for this summer. In the office, this has consisted of everything from getting me certified to do human research, to giving me all their study descriptions to read, to helping me use a new SIM card and hail a bajaj.
Today, though, he hit his role as a mentor out-of-the-park.
“So did you get to go running yesterday?” he asked me around 11.
“No,” I said mournfully. I’d been too tired and Jeanie had to go to work too early, but I was anxious to just get my legs pumping a bit. I’d done a few halfhearted squats the night before. It was time for a change.
“I am going running with my wife at the University tonight. You should come with us!”
And with barely more than that – “I’ll get you at your hostel” – he was out for the rest of the day while I plowed through literature on our study protocols. At 4, I walked back from work in the overpowering but somewhat diminished heat. It’s a nice walk – the only casualty is my sweat glands. Along the 20-minute route, I stopped to pick up four mangoes, 10 bananas, and 10 apples all for around $6 (could I do better in other countries? Maybe, but I’ll take these deals any day). I arrived at the hostel dirty but excited. In a few minutes, Jeanie and I had on our running clothes, full water bottles, phones and a room key. Soon enough, Salum honked and entered our courtyard. We piled into his spacious sedan and set off for his neighborhood, Sinza, about 20 minutes away. Sinza, he told us, was a more normal middle-class Dar neighborhood (“You’re living with the 1%!” he said, maybe half-joking). Like many people, he lives in a gated mini-compound, this one with two houses: one for his sister’s family and one for his. We were ushered into his one-floor house, kept cool by the thick exterior. When we entered, his adorable 6-year-old daughter Naomi was doing homework on a leather couch in front of the TV. She spoke perfect English just like her parents and was sassy in the best way, as some only children are.
While we waited for Salum and his wife Catherine to get ready for running, we watched the Tanzanian TV show that Naomi, her aunt and cousin were watching. As far as we could tell, it was a buddy comedy for the grade-school set: two chubby, pesky boys got into unexpected adventures while stealing their neighbor’s goat. The whole thing was filmed in wide long shots like a soap opera and set to the tune of a ridiculous jingle. We definitely got the comic effect without any linguistic comprehension!
At last I can bring us to our run. By the time we left their house at 5:30 or so, traffic was beginning to snarl, but we got there soon enough. We had about 45 minutes till sunset and an hour till darkness, so we quickly set out to run. Salum, Catherine and Naomi would be biking/running at the track around the football pitch (yes, I can say that because no one says soccer), but Jeanie and I wanted to explore the campus. I’m glad we did, because what a campus it was! As Salum told us, we couldn’t get lost because the football field was at the bottom of a hill and the rest of campus was atop the hill, so all we had to do was go downhill to eventually get back. We set off at a good clip with the sun dipping down.
The University of Dar es Salaam campus reminded me of an equatorial Wellesley College – almost a cultivated park with buildings thrown in. Instead of Japanese maples and eastern pines, though, there were giant exotic trees with thick dangling tendrils, matted half-dried grasses, cramped dorms with laundry hanging on any railing or string available, and even a troupe of vervet monkeys clambering around with their babies clinging to their chests. We ran up and down winding trails, dodged through an academic building, crested a hill and found ourselves at the Society of Jesus (and promptly turned around when we realized we’d left campus), scampered down a truly ethereal stone staircase among the giant tendril-trees, and finally turned up, sweaty and winded, at the football pitch as the sun was setting. Jeanie and I split up once we saw our “family” there. I ran through a trail cut in tall grass and around a maintained field. After a few more minutes, we met up with everyone on the track and went to the side to do some stretches together. I even did some glute-strengthening work – take that, hip injury! Once it was fully dark we went back to the car, gulped much-needed water, and started back.
We had about a 50-minute drive to our hostel ahead of us, thanks to the unyielding Dar traffic. As Catherine explained, the city is growing way too fast for the infrastructure to keep up. The result is miles-long back-ups on virtually every major road at all hours of the day. The city is going to make special bus lanes soon, but so far they’ve only been started on two big roads, and our route was not one of those. We were all sticky, but with the cooler night breeze coming in and Naomi’s lively backseat behavior, we still had a good time. For it was only as we left the University that Naomi came out in full force.
“Daddddy, I want ice cream!”
“No,” Catherine said, “You have to have dinner first.” And she turned at us to wink, saying that Naomi is always too full after dinner to still be hungry for ice cream.
“Mommy,” she tried again. “I would really like to stop at that toy shop.”
“What have you done to deserve a toy? Is it your birthday?” Catherine jibed.
“No, but I know you have money.”
“I don’t, we didn’t bring any money with us, so we can’t buy anything.”
“Daddy has money! Daddy always has money!” Naomi persisted.
“Your problem,” Catherine said, turning to Salum. “You tell her off now!”
Naomi then proceeded to sing some rhyming English nursery songs and tell us emphatically that, while she loved school, she would NEVER go on the weekends. It was so fun to be around a family, and once Salum and Catherine had invited us to go out to a club and bar with them this weekend, it seemed like we had been semi-adopted by them. They may not be that much older than us, probably no more than 30, but we feel very looked-after. Our trip tonight and promises of future excursions, both exercise and more nightlife-oriented, makes them the perfect combination of friends and parents. I am so happy that we found them, or rather, that they found us!
We got back around 7:30. After I showered and washed out my running clothes, Jeanie and I set off for a night of fruit-mania. We brought all our produce up to the 4th-floor roof deck for dinner, as we’ve been doing every night, and proceeded to have two mangoes, six bananas, and a good deal of peanut butter between the two of us. I was feeling both full and healthy, and it came as a further surprise when Father Aloysius offered us each a bowl of pudding left over from their dinner. It’s been a sweet night in every way.
Things are beginning to really feel familiar, at least in the small sphere of Dar that we’ve explored so far. As we drove back from running tonight, Macklemore and Daft Punk blasted from the radio as a humid, almost Boston-in-the-summertime atmosphere surrounded us. People keep thinking my name is Rihanna – hers is a foreign name much more recognizable to Tanzanians than Leanna. I have been getting comfortable with the basic Swahili I know before learning new words (yeah, that’s my excuse), but really, I am employing it! And to paraphrase Macklemore, Leanna wasn’t great at Swahili because at birth she was great. Leanna was great because she practiced Swahili a lot.
I am now reading Stranger in a Strange Land, a book I’ve always wanted to read since it was mentioned on Lost (story of my life), but one that also brings home a lot of lessons about cultural interaction! Other planets, other continents, same diff. I’m nowhere near fully acclimated – for goodness’ sake, I haven’t seen 90% of the city – but if I can bargain for mangoes, I can do anything. Plans are already stirring for future travels: Zanzibar two weekends from now, where we’ll be staying with another Harvard student and snorkeling and beach-ing all day long, and a possible Kilimanjaro climb in 3 weeks.
Yeah, I know, we all thought my posts would get shorter. But I’m pretty good at stretching the truth. Now, if only I could make those last squares of toilet paper stretch a little longer, too…