Health care in Moshi

We toured a local hospital this week and oh goodness if I get sick here please just put me on a plane home. One of the other volunteers here right now is working at the hospital so she walked us around and gave us a quick tour the other morning. The operating room has dirt all over the floor, the limited number of tools did not look sterile and the operating table looked awful. It was a short table hardly long enough for a whole body with a mat about two inches thick on top. There was a sheet falling off the side that was used the cover the mat but I am not certain of how often it is changed. Laura, the volunteer giving us the tour, during the day said that they just line people up on the tables and they go in one after the other for surgery. She did walk us past some of the wards that house the patients and they looked like old Vietnam war hospitals. The patients were sleeping on what looked more like a cot than a bed, there was an old mosquito net tied up above each bed, the rooms were really packed with people, they smelled bad, and there were bugs flying around everywhere. Can you imagine feeling sick and not being in comfortable quarters. We complain at home if we are in a room with one other person and here they are with at least a hundred. We concluded our tour by walking past the psychiatric wards where one gentleman kindly proposed to all of the women in our group. Fourtunately, none of us accepted his heart felt offer.

Another volunteer, also Laura who is now my new roommate, is working at the dispensary and came home with a great story the other day. Quite a few of the dispensary patients are there to get tested for AIDS and pregnancy so she was asking the nurse about the education process for things of this nature. The nurse told her that within the city of Moshi people are well informed about AIDS, pregancy, and the use of condoms but outside in the villages they really don't know much. She even mentioned that in the villages they know of condoms but they don't know the proper use of them. It is not uncommon for someone to use a condom, wash it out, hang it on their clothes line to dry, and then have a neighbor ask to borrow it.