Little surprises

Yesterday I had a double culture-check.

The first came after I offered to help one of the girls in the house with her math homework. When I looked over her notes from her lesson at school, I was very impressed by their neatness and thoroughness. It looked like she was copying out an entire math textbook. She goes to and English-medium school, which means that everything is taught in English (for those like me who had no idea what the term meant).

When I asked her about the main content from the lesson, I noticed something interesting. She remembered the definition almost precisely as she had written down, but she omitted one word. To give some context, we were talking about relations, and in her notes she had written 

"Relation is simply a set of ordered pairs."

When I asked her to recall the definition without her notes, she remembered 

"Relation is simply a set of ordered."

What I found interesting was that she remembered exactly the trivial word "simply" but not the operative term "ordered pairs" without which the definition doesn't make any sense. The conclusion I drew, perhaps erroneously since it's based on little in the way of scientific evidence, is that she is highly trained at recall, which she does with near-perfect accuracy. (If quizzed on one sentence out of six pages of notes, I would never have remembered a superfluous descriptor like "simply".) However, her ability to apply the concept she had memorized the words for was essentially zero. My attempts to get her to recognize relations in any context outside of her copied-out example met with mute incomprehension.

After a few more minutes, I discovered another series of puzzling aspects of her education. She was perfectly capable of multiplying two or three digit positive integers, but she had very limited ability to add or multiply negative numbers. She could correctly subtract 7 from 6, but not 1 from 0. Half the time she correctly used multiplication for rewriting exponents, and half the time she tried to use addition. It was astounding that a smart, 17 year old girl who had good attendance at a good school couldn't do basic arithmetic.

I am somewhat familiar with the curriculum for her level of mathematics, having already tutored one student at the same level. I know that she will soon be taught functions, logarithms, vectors, and the quadratic formula. I fear it will do her little good without a thorough re-grounding in basic mathematic operations. I also suspect this is a chronic problem (I had also noticed it to a lesser degree with my previous pupil, who by the way had access to a much more expensive education). I'm worried that most of the content is completely inaccessible to students because they don't thoroughly understand addition, multiplication, exponents and so forth. Worse, this lack is covered up by their incredibly well-developed ability to exactly but uselessly recall things written on the blackboard*.

My second, unrelated shock came later that night when I went to visit a friend at his house. During our conversation he mentioned he was married, and I said that I hadn't known, so he pulled out a family photo album. He pointed out his wife, and his little baby, and then another photo where he has his arm around a very ancient Maasai gentleman, and he proudly said ".. and that's my father." I thought I had misheard him. Father and grandfather sound very much alike in Swahili: baba versus babu. So I asked "did you say father or grandfather?" It was his father alright, 90 years old even though my friend is only 26.

I didn't even think that was possible. On second glance, the man in the photograph looked more like a great grandfather, wrinkled and stooped but still with a bright, sharp look to his eyes. My friend went on to explain that his father had taken five wives over his long life, and I was proudly assured that "he is still productive now!"

Go figure.

*By blackboard, I am rather charitably referring to the front, concrete wall of the classroom that was, in some long-forgotten epoch, painted black.

What a day

Today we had our first surgery in the new Operating Room. One little girl is now minus two tonsils. Everyone was very excited, double checking everything even though Dr. Duane has done literally hundreds of these operations and could probably do a tonsillectomy in his sleep.

Speaking of sleep, there was little to be had. On campus there was a late night emergency case that had the doctors out of bed. In town, there was a little bit of religious rivalry over the loudspeakers. I'm used to the Muslim call to prayer, singing out every morning over the PA at 5:40am. This morning, two of the Christian churches got in on the action with very loud, angry sermons being preached to the whole town over their powerful loudspeakers. They got the jump on the mosque by starting at 5:00am sharp. At first I was intrigued by the unique role of electronic sound amplification in religious practice here in Karatu. Now I just want to sleep a little bit longer.

I'm going to Arusha tomorrow, but I will try to upload pictures when I get back.

Logarithms

I've taken on a student.

Winnie is the 15 year old daughter of one of our nurses. Like many children from well-to-do families, she spends most of the year at some far-off, private boarding school. Now she's at home for the Christmas break, and her mother asked if I would be willing to tutor her in math because, as far as I can make out, her school didn't have a math teacher last semester. As a result, she is expected to know, and will be tested on, quite a few topics that nobody taught her.

Standardized testing is something of a national embarrassment for Tanzania. In 2012, over 60% of students failed the state exams required to continue on to higher education. Given the inflexibility of the standards in the face of teacher absenteeism, I am beginning to understand why. Keep in mind that at her private school, Winnie enjoys a level of educational quality out of reach to many if not most Tanzanian students.

In any case, I had been contemplating offering a math review class open to anyone on the staff at FAME, so I agreed to tutor Winnie, thinking this would be a good opportunity for a small trial run. Dr. Frank, and numerous other expatriates, had warned me about the catastrophically poor level of math education common in Tanzania, so I went into our first session fearing the worst.

I needn't have worried so much. It turns out that Winnie had a fairly solid grounding in basic algebra and was by no means mathematically illiterate. She could do arithmetic easily without a calculator, recognize most notation, and solve simple systems of equations. Getting her to demonstrate her numeracy, on the other hand, is not far removed from pulling teeth. Here is an example of a typical start to a lesson:

Me: "Do you know what a 'quadratic expression' is?"
Winnie: "Yes."
Me: "Great. Can you explain to me what it is?"
Winnie: "No."
Me: "Well, can you write down an example of one?"
Winnie: Thinks "No."
Me: "Why not?"
Silence
Me: "Let's just start from the beginning then..."

Her mother sent me a checklist of topics that Winnie should have been taught by her absent-bodied professor. Ranging from logarithms to linear motion, there were far too many things to cover in the short three weeks we had, so I elected to pick out the most important topics and try to use them as vehicles for building confidence and creativity in using the mathematical tools she already has. It's been while since I've had a student so young, and I think that Winnie is used to being one of three or four dozen in a classroom. As a result, I ask for a bit more than she is used to being asked for, and her reaction is sometimes to go into lockdown mode. I doubt she's ever been in a situation where a teacher was willing to wait however long it takes for her to answer a question, and she can usually get out of answering by hesitating too long. Not so with me.

My efforts to get her to come out of her shell and provide the same type of attentive instruction that I had have given me a new appreciation for the sheer enormity of the challenge that education presents in a country where the age distribution graph looks like an inverted funnel. If it takes me, with teaching experience, enthusiasm and a very expensive education, so much time to have an impact on one student, what results can we expect from overcrowded public schools with undereducated, underpaid and sometimes unpaid teachers?

High Tech

Just because Tanzania is a developing country doesn't mean we can't use technology. It's just harder.

No piece of technology more advanced than an inclined plane works as billed in this environment. You have to fight for every functional moment. Examples:

Dr. Joyce brought a conductivity meter to test distilled water. The machine came from a reputable firm, was factory calibrated, and arrived new in the box. Doesn't work.

We set up Dr. Frank's simple and reliable battery charger to do some electrolysis rust removal. Very basic setup: water, washing soda iron cathode, iron anode, solid electrical connections. Doesn't work.

I bought a brand new, light-up watch in the market. Doesn't work.

Backup Internet modem... doesn't work.

Lamination machine... doesn't work.

Microscope camera...doesn't work.

To cap it all, we have a long succession of failed hard drives.

One of the major problems is dust. Karatu is dusty all year except for the rainy seasons, when it's muddy. A big chunk of our most delicate, and expensive, equipment is located in a special room in the laboratory. This room is one of three on campus equipped with an air conditioner (the other two being the operating rooms). Last time we had a massive dust storm blast through, the windows were left wide open. Why? The lab techs said the air from the air conditioner was too dry, and it gave them a headache. Dr. Joyce (one of our lab volunteers) was ready to pull her hair out.

The most recent problem is ants. They live in the rafters and come trooping down every day to eat the serum that gets tested in the diagnostic equipment. Dr. Joyce has one of the techs clean the wall twice a day with bleach to disrupt their navigation, but still they come.

Every day the techs go forth to combat an unrelenting onslaught of swirling dust and swarming ants. Except for today, since it's pretty nice out. But usually...

In some ways, though, Tanzania is far more advanced. Even in largely developed countries, like the US, we don't have anything nearly as high tech as laser ketchup.

PS I have started shucking and roasting the coffee I brought back from Kessy's house at Kilimanjaro. Early attempts have yielded mixed results, but I continue forward, undaunted.

Problem #7

When it rains, it pours.

The new surgical wing means that soon we will be able to do emergency C-sections, and that means we are on our way to providing labor and delivery services.

This means that we need a room to do it in. We have a room picked out, and a special bed on order, but the problem is that the room is right next to all the other patient rooms in the ward. This may lead to some unfortunate noise issues.

So my new challenge is to find a way to soundproof the delivery room using locally sourced materials and little to no money. The other issue is that my boss, Mama Susan, wants it to be an aesthetically pleasing space inside and out. It's a fairly large room, with two exterior walls, two windows, an inclosed bathroom, and a double door to the ward.

My resources are:
1. Me
2. probably up to $100 or so
3. a crew of groundsmen with extensive carpentry skills
4. a car (for fetching supplies)

I'm open to suggestions.

UPDATE microscope problem
It turns out that there is a problem with the camera itself, which I cannot fix. So I am trying to get the manufacturer, Olympus, to take it back for repairs. They aren't returning my emails or answering their phones so far though.

In the meantime, we are pursuing the stopgap measure of adapting a different camera. I already wrote about trying the point and shoot option. This has not produced very satisfactory results.

Thanks to Vickie suggesting phone cameras. As outlandish as it might sound, this may be a viable option. Thanks to Nathan for telling me about Skylight, a product that lets you take pictures with recent model iPhones through the microscope eyepiece. I've been in touch with them, and they agreed to donate a skylight for FAME. I hope we can work it out to arrive before the end of December. That just leaves the problem of finding a an appropriate iPhone. Mine is first generation, and it has very limited photographic capabilities. We really want a 4S or later model, and I thought that Dr. Frank had a stockpile of them somewhere, but it turns out that all of his are older models too.

UPDATE gym equipment problem
I finally got around to pouring my concrete weights. Below is a picture of one of them in the frame:

I borrowed some leftover bricks from the new volunteer bungalow, and built a fairly creditable bench as well. As soon as my shoulder gets better (I'm having some rotator cuff tendonitis issues), it will be ready to go.

Coffee, surgery and banana beer

Things remain interesting.

Our surgical ward is soon to be opened! Soon we will be able to do life-saving procedures here instead of referring them to Arusha-- some three hours' drive away.

The only downside is that the offices had to be reshuffled to clear out the surgical ward, and consequently I got booted from my nice big office to my new closet. This was not unexpected. When the most junior, least important staff member has the nicest office on campus, it's not a stable situation.

Old Office

New Office

 In other news, I just got back from a trip to Kongo, a little village on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. A friend of mine (who stays in the same house in town), has four weeks off work (he's a teacher), and he invited me to come meet his family. One five-hour bus ride, one one-hour dala dala ride (mini-bus), one boda boda (motorcycle taxi) ride, and one half hour walk later, we arrived.

Kongo and its environs are everything that I expected of equitorial Africa-- small villages clumped on steep tropical slopes, banana and coffee cultivation, everything green except the red soil.

I had a great time, and actually managed to take a few pictures too.

Here is a view of the landscape around Kongo.

Here is one of myself, my friend Kessy and his faithful steed-- the piki piki (motorcycle).

I also got a chance to learn about making coffee. It's one of the main cash crops in the area. I got some practical experience with every step of the process from planting to drinking. I knew surprisingly little about where coffee came from before. It turns out that the fruit is pretty tasty all by itself.

Here are some coffee beans in different stages of the coffee making process. From left to right, unripe fruit, ripe fruit, extracted beans, dried beans. The ones on the far right are ready for roasting.

I also learned about banana beer, the local home-made alcohol of choice. I had tried Karatu's local brew--millet beer-- on market days. That stuff tastes like someone ate a bowl of gruel, chugged a bottle of vodka and then vomited it back into your cup. Proper etiquette for drinking millet beer involves blowing the mold on the surface away from the edge of the cup before you drink. They serve it in giant plastic mugs that probably haven't been washed since they left the factory, and the men imbibe gallons of the stuff.

The banana beer on the other hand isn't so bad. It has a sweet flavor and not nearly so much mold.

Here is Kessy with a generous ration.

The hospitality I found at Kessy's house was very nice. The whole family was extremely welcoming, interested in teaching me about Tanzania, and interested in learning about America as well.

Here is the whole household together.

They sent me off with a kilo of coffee and an invitation to return. Then Kessy saw me to the bus station in Moshi, where we encountered a terrible choice.

I had brought a really excellent novel for the trip: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. It was so good, I finished it on the trip there and had nothing to read on the way back. Fortunately there was a book store close to the bus stop. Unfortunately, the only English offerings were this...

  or this...

I'm sorry to say I made a horrible mistake. Next time I'll learn about juicing.

Quick thoughts

I don't have much time to write, so here are some quick notes.

1. People here wave with both hands, but they don't actually wave their hands. They wave at you by putting both arms in the air like freeze-frame jazz hands.

2. Squat toilet pro tip-- take your phone out of your pocket first.

3. There is always a rainbow and always a giraffe. If you don't see them, you just aren't looking hard enough.

4. I have a new project: trying to soundproof the future labor and delivery room. Women should be able to scream if they want to, but we don't want the other patients getting the wrong idea.

5. For some reason, a lot of people (mostly tourists on vacation) bring toothbrushes to donate to us. You can buy toothbrushes everywhere in Tanzania, and they only cost 500/- (about thirty cents). Why don't people bring things we actually need, like ant traps?

6. Our laboratory is under attack. The ants like the serum that gets tested in the lab equipment, and it's a constant struggle to keep our most delicate (and expensive) equipment protected.

Hope to have more time to write and post pictures tomorrow.