Jumping Back Into Tanzanian Culture

Well, for me (Georgia), it's been a wonderful experience to jump back into the Tanzanian culture and style of life. Generally, this lifestyle includes a very laid-back pace for work, and after we are done with our interviews, we get to experience that here…but I have actually been surprised with how fast and efficient we have been able to work during the past week and a half since the first team members' arrival (Georgia and research coordinator Jen Nolan, followed 3 days later by Leslie, and finally this past Wednesday, by Whitney). Our on-the-ground study coordinators have been wonderful, in fact, the first day we went in to greet Dr. Ringo, he already had 2 patients lined up for qualitative interviews! We had to be the ones to push back the meetings long enough for us to get our bearings.

All interviews started officially this past Tuesday, and we have been running full speed ever since. In fact, Tuesday was our longest day—we had 2 patient interviews, and two family member interviews, and we were interviewing from 8:30 in the morning until nearly 5:30 in the evening, with only a 20 minute break for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Since then, we have split up into two interviewing groups, with one of our wonderful medical student translators in each group, and have tackled the same number of people within a day but in half the time (thank god!). It has also been a blessing to work with these translators because they are such fountains of knowledge when it comes to cultural norms, the correct way to ask delicate questions, etc. On top of all of that, they are just wonderful people—Andrew and Phillip have been more than willing to lead us around town, even when it means sitting down inside of a small cloth shop for upwards of a half hour after interviews are over just so that they can help us girls bargain down the price of the fabrics and tell us what various Swahili sayings written on the fabric mean. Wonderful stuff!