Piki Piki Trip

When I get a chance to take a day off, I usually jump on the dirtbike and head off into the bush. My first trip was to Lake Eyasi, a big salt flat and soda lake about three hours away.

Last Tuesday, I went to Mbulu Mbulu, an area right on the edge of the escarpment of the central African rift. My friend Sokoine, who also works at FAME, wanted to come along too, so we had the experience of traveling with two guys on one little motorcycle on some very steep, rough tracks. We spent a lot of time in first gear at full throttle and just had to push the bike over a few of the rockier or muddier sections of trail.

The countryside was beautiful though: little farms squeezed between the Ngorongoro wilderness and the 1,500 foot drop off of the escarpment with the empty Maasai steppe beyond. We also caught a glimpse of the Oldonyo Langai volcano in the distance.

I had been in the area before when I tagged along on a mobile neurology clinic. I didn't pack a lunch because I knew a place where you could get peanuts and cookies in a little town along the way. However, Sokoine was confident that we could find peanuts at our destination, a little town at the very end of the inhabited zone along the cliff top. So we drove right by the first shop, giving a bird-in-the-hand to the wind.

We also stopped to help a man who had gotten his motorcycle stuck. It was weighed down with bags of grain, and there was no way he could get it out of the rocks by himself. After we heaved his bike back onto the path, he confirmed the presence of a store in the next community, so off we went.

There was indeed a store (read mud hut with a sign), but all they could offer us was one, dust-covered bottle of Coca-Cola. So we gave up on the peanuts, left the motorcycle at the house of a Maasai lady (Sokoine is also Maasai, and he assured me that any property we left with another Maasai would be safer than in a bank vault) and climbed the tallest hill in the area on foot to get a good look around. It was a steep, 30 minute climb, but there we found company on top because it's the only place in the area where you can get cell phone reception.

Sokoine took pictures, but he couldn't get the hang of holding the camera straight.

When we went back down, it turned out that the house we left the bike and helmets at belonged to the same guy we helped with the motorcycle earlier and he had come home for lunch. So he invited us to eat with him, corn-chowder and fresh milk, so it turned out we didn't need peanuts after all. I might have also agreed to buy 10 kilos of dried beans from him, but I'm not sure.

Sokoine's son, Ibra, also shows great promise as a future motorcycle adventurer. He will be turning one next month, but he already knows how to make motorcycle noises, and he loves to wear my helmet.

















BONUS EMERGENCY MEDICINE PHOTO

We had someone show up at the clinic today in a motorcycle ambulance, generously donated to the local government hospital by the government of Saudi Arabia.

Serengeti

One or our volunteer docs invited me along on a trip to the Serengeti National Park.

They were traveling with a "budget" operator, which still means a private vehicle, driver/guide and a cook. My preferred way of experiencing wilderness is on foot with a pack on my back and a good topo map. The idea of paying hundreds of dollars per day to be chauffeured around and have someone else set up your tent for you is not my typical idea of fun. However, the places we went were so incredible that I just didn't care. Would I do it again? No. Was it worth every penny? Absolutely.

We went through the Ngorongoro crater first, truly one of the geological wonders of the world. It was such a lovely place that I completely forgot about my camera until afterward. I will try to get some of the panorama shots from the folks I was traveling with to post. I did pull out my camera to take a picture of this lion though.

Good times.

Here's an elephant too.

Rain rain

I bought a little 125cc motorcycle.

The plan is to putter around to see the sights that are out of walking distance. This part of Tanzania is really geared for high-dollar tourism, which I frankly can't afford. Instead, I'll try to see the lesser known, and free things that only a few hours of puttering down dirt tracks can afford.

It's a little, cheap Chinese knock-off of a Honda design. As long as it runs for a year or two and I can keep up with all the little pieces falling off, I will consider it a win. The day I bought it, when I got back to the clinic and unloaded it from the pickup truck. I found a chameleon climbing on the front spokes. I have wanted to see one of these critters since I got here, so I will consider it a good sign.

So far the only problem (aside from little plastic bits breaking off) is that the exhaust is very loud. If anyone has cheap and easy suggestions for reducing the noise, I would love to hear them.

Oh, and it has rained every day since I bought the thing, so I haven't been able to ride it once. The mud here is unbelievably slippery, so I refuse to ride unless it is absolutely dry, as per Safe Motorcycling Rule #3: "Don't drive in mud."

The first trip I want to make is out to Lake Eyasi, the closest thing that passes for wilderness out here that you don't have to pay to get into. I went there the other day with a group of doctors who toured FAME and then offered to let me tag along on a visit to the Hadzabe bushmen who live in the area. I'm normally not into cultural tourism, but I wanted to see the area, so I went. It was actually kind of fun. The Hadzabe had a little routine that they did for tourists, walking through the scrublands, pointing out pretty birds and subsequently shooting and eating them, making fire via friction, shooting arrows, songs, dancing and a gift shop. We got there in the late afternoon and all men were just sitting around smoking marijuana or idly kicking one of their dogs. I wonder how much the flow of money from tourism has changed their lifestyle. I snapped a picture of the group of doctor-tourists watching the bushman in his element.

I also learned on that trip that the Japanese are by far the best at being tourists. We had three Japanese doctors in the group, and they were all super-interested in the cultural tour, they got their pictures taken with the little Hadzabe kids, they all wanted to try out the bow and arrow, and they jumped right in with the circle dancing. I think they had twice as good a time as any of the Germans who stood stiffly around and watched.

Meanwhile back at work, my office is filled with electronics and random pieces of medical equipment to be fixed, evaluated or thrown away. Dr. Frank is cleaning out his office, which means that he puts things in boxes and moves them to my office.

It's not as bad as it has been. When we have lot's of volunteers, the technical support duties escalate rapidly. Here is a typical day from last November:

Also, this morning I saw a couple of little frogs sitting in the flower garden. It would have made a great picture, but all the photographic equipment I had was the little camera on my phone. (Incidentally all but one of the photos in this post were shot on that phone.) I did my best, but I was wishing for anything with better focusing and resolution.

Market Day

Twice a month, a whirlwind of commercial chaos descends on Karatu: Market Day. (Mnada in Swahili.) Anyone who has anything to sell in a forty kilometer radius meets up in the big empty field and transforms it into a giant, writhing mass of cut-throat bartering. Need a goat? We have hundreds! Clothes? Baskets? Trinkets? Pineapples? A stove? A bedroom set? No problem.

When I drive a car there and park next to the entrance, I get swarmed before I can open the door. Hawkers of tourist goods (bracelets, jerseys, carvings and the like) can spot a white person at 500 meters despite the crowds and cover that distance in nothing flat. I've learned to either walk or to park the car behind the goat trading section, where none of tourist-hunters go.

Even my broken Swahili works well on Market Day. People are amazingly good at understanding you when they are trying to sell you something.

We have a new doctor from the UK, so I took her down there today, just to experience the atmosphere. I spent most of the time there fending off eager bracelet vendors who had zeroed in on Dr. Jo, but I still found time to pick up a nice leather jacket. $4 well spent.

Speaking of high fashion, here is a picture of Dr. Frank's surgical getup after an operation last week:

We had nine surgeries in the first nine days after the OR opened. Our visiting general surgeon, Dr. Duane, was seeing patients right up to when we had to practically frog-march him to the car, so that he wasn't late on his way to the airport.

BONUS PICTURE: Here is a gratuitous elephant picture we took next to the main highway on a trip to Arusha.

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?