The last week together and with our home stays

 

The major thing that happened this week was we moved to our respective hospitals but that wasn’t until Friday! So I should probably update you on what happened the rest of the week. The last week was quite similar to first four weeks. The Swahili classes had some interactions with the locals and some more lessons on grammar and vocabulary. The final day that is on Thursday we had a final evaluation and feedback session where everyone was asked to give both written and oral feedbacks.

Again this week we did not have any technical labs but just some reflection labs where we talked about how working in developing world can be. We also discussed about some forms that are very important to be filled like doing the inventory or performing need finding in our respective hospitals.

The last day before we left, Thursday we gifted our Swahili teachers farewell gifts and thanked them for their efforts and patience. During the labs we cleaned up our classroom, packed some working stuff and then coordinators briefed us about our hospitals and our stay for the second month. After getting home, our homestay took us out for the dinner. Later that night we had to pack up a lot of stuff but I managed to sleep early.

Farewell and thank you gifts

The next day we set out for our final visit to TCDC where we had transportation waiting for us to take us to our respective hospitals. It was a very sad to leave everyone and also our homestay. I gave my homestay farewell and thank you gift. The journey to Karatu, where my hospital was situated was long. First , we, me with two other guys( my partners I talked about and also shared a photo of them)  had to  drop of other people who were situated in Arusha, then we got dropped off at the bus stand from where we took public transportation to Karatu. It was a 2 hour-long journey cramped up journey and we arrived in Karatu at around 3 in the afternoon.

 The goodbye day

We were driven to our house by one of the coordinators in the hospital. It is a big house with huge drawing room and kitchen. We have our rooms and plus one room, where currently there are two Swiss medical students staying. They are really cooperative and told us about the town, we went out for the dinner we went. After the dinner we all were so tired that we went to sleep early.

The next day we set to Arusha again to meet our friends for the weekend. We visited a waterfall in Arusha, again it was about 6-7 kms hike one way. But the waterfall was beautiful and the water was really cold. Everyone enjoyed the trek and later we had dinner (Ethiopian dinner) in the town. The next day we returned back to Karatu again and cooked our own dinner and got ready for our first visit to the hospital.

The waterfall in Arusha