Wiki Mbili (Week 2)

At completion of week 2, I am feeling a ton more comfortable and at ease in clinic and around Moshi.  At clinic this week, we saw a variety of diagnoses/deformities that are more common here in Tanzania but pretty rare in the United States.  Prior to my time at CCBRT, deformities such as rickets and club foot I had only seen in pictures when learning about them in class.  It has been fascinating to  experience them first hand.  For those of you that do not know, rickets is a deficiency in Vitamin D creating an inability of the body to absorb calcium.  The most distinguishing feature of rickets is a bowing of the long bones, particularly the legs.  Club foot is a congenital deformity of the feet, which is prevalent in Africa and rare in the U.S.  CCBRT has a club foot casting clinic where they correct the club feet through a series of casts and manipulations.  Today, we were able to participate in the evaluation, assessment, and application of the cast for a 2 month old boy with bilateral club feet.

Manipulating the tiny (mdogo) foot.

Learning how to manipulate the forefoot.

The final product

This afternoon we attended a lecture at KCMC PT school, which is the only physiotherapy school in all of Tanzania located down the street from our house.  The lecture was discussing Cerebral Palsy, which was not new information for us, but it was great to see their school, classroom, and learning/teaching techniques.  Hopefully we will get a chance to visit KCMC again!

Out side of clinic, Kelly and I are becoming more familiar with navigating around town.  This mostly entails lots of walking on crowded streets, discovering new food joints, and bardering at local shops.  We are also attempting to become better at riding the dalla dalla.  The dalla dalla are the local buses which we can ride one direction for 20 cents.  Sounds pretty amazing, right?!  The down side is . . . the dalla dallas are NEVER full.  What I mean by this is they will cram as many people in as they can even if people are sitting on each others laps, people are hanging out the windows and strangers are handing you their babies.  But the price is too good to pass up!  

Since we are spending more time out and about we are meeting a lot of local people, even if we can't communicate very well.  Tonight on our walk home from the dalla dalla stop we met our neighbors :)  They insisted we take our picture with them! In addition to meeting our neighbors, we saw a man walking his two cows down our street.  First time for everything!

Enjoying a Kilimanjaro beer on our patio!

Our neighbors

Baadaye (See you later)!

Krista