Habari!

Well life in Tanzania is nzuri sana. Everyone we have met so far has been incredibly nice, happy and welcoming. The sun is extremely hot, and by the afternoon all you really want to do is have a cold shower or lay in bed and nap (a combination of both would be ideal!!). There are these beautiful trees everywhere called Jacaranda that have gorgeous purple flowers. We were told it is the season for them and that more should be blooming soon. Even the birds are bright, beautiful colours. Basically, everything is really great so far.

The first few days of placement at KCMC have been amazing. There are three rooms in the OT department at KCMC: adults, paeds and counseling. There is also a staff room, where we have our tea break every morning!! That’s right, every day they bring in delicious milky tea (or chai) and bags of peanuts for us to snack on- yuuum. It seems like so far we’ll be in the adult physical department, so mostly clients with stroke and spinal cord injuries. We’ve seen only clients with strokes so far, and it’s been really interesting. My first reaction is that the therapy seems more phyiso-based, as we do mostly stretch and strengthening exercises, and we focus equally on upper extremities as we do gait. Yesterday our preceptor treated a client with expressive aphasia, so on top of doing the upper and lower extremity exercises he worked on his speech by pointing to body parts and having him tell them what they were…and he also sang familiar songs with him! It was beautiful. There is apparently only one Speech Language Pathologist in Tanzania, so he supplements the speech exercises with the OT exercises.

Speaking of beautiful songs, KCMC holds a service in their chapel every morning, and our preceptor sings in the choir so we went this morning to see what it was like. The best words to describe it would be moving, beautiful and uplifting. They even danced as they sang, which made it even more amazing. We actually bought a copy of the choir’s CD- we’re hoping to learn the words to some songs so we can eventually join in! I don’t know if you can post songs on here, but I’ll give it a try!

Today we also met two girls from Sweden that are also doing an OT placement at KCMC. They invited us to play soccer with the international students at KCMC, so that will be really fun (and funny…if you’ve ever seen me try to play soccer…). And something REALLY interesting that we learned today is how widely used the Canadian Model of Occupational Performance and Engagement is!! Sorry non-OT readers, it’s basically the model that guides how we frame our thoughts and actions in practice. They call it ‘the Canadian Model’ rather than the CMOP-E, but still pretty exciting. Our preceptor and a newly graduated OT student from KCMC also said they often use ‘the Canadian model’, so that’s really, really cool!

OH and one last thing.. Yesterday we rode the dala dala I mentioned! Whaaat an experience. They seriously put our bus system to SHAME. You know when you want to get on the bus but the driver passes you because the bus is ‘full’, and then as it passes by you notice there's TONS of room in the back and it's just because no one moved back... Ya, it’s the COMPLETE opposite of that. They use minivans rather than full buses, but a trip involves: either leaning on top of someone, or practically sitting on top of someone else, or getting squished closer to someone than you would if you were going in for a hug, while desperately trying to find something to hold onto, as other braver riders are hanging out the open door... basically, it’s amazing.

Well, that’s it for today. Hope you are all doing well!