African Adventures: The End of Week 2

Week 2 at CCBRT is in the books!

I want to start this post off by talking about some of the food I've eaten so far. Every day for lunch we have two cooks at CCBRT that prepare lunch for us. We pay 1,000 Tsh and it's pretty plain food. Usually its rice, beans and cabbage. We've had ugali once, which is a staple here in Tanzania. It's a stiff porridge made from maize and millet flour. It looks like mashed potatoes, but tastes like play-doh. My favorite so far has been the pilau, which is brown rice with spices. I've had so much rice and beans (yes I have eaten beans) while being here so far... that's a trend I'm pretty sure is going to continue.

A pretty typical lunch. Rice, cabbage, some type of meat (pretty sure its beef)

The other day the cooks wanted to ask us if we wanted this extra sauce on the side. They don't speak English so they ended up having us put a little on our finger and try it. I had no idea what it was, except it was called pili pili. My mouth was ON FIRE! Come to find out these suckers are way too spicy for me! Apparently they are also called "African Bird's Eye" or "African Red Devil." I choose Red Devil because they were NOT kind to me.

One of my favorite things we have eaten so far are called samosas. We like to call them "egg triangles" because they are filled with meat and some other things and taste kind of like egg rolls.

Samosas and of course, rice.

Today we started a case with a little boy who has bilateral club foot. CCBRT is known for their Ponseti clinic, which happens on Fridays. Ponseti is a method that treats children with club foot by a series of weekly casting and then foot abductor braces.

For those of you reading this that don't know what club foot is, it's a congenital deformity that affects one or both feet causing them to be rotated, which left untreated makes it extremely painful and difficult (if not impossible) to walk once the child gets older.

These are just a few of the pictures I got of the manipulation and casting process. I'll have to post some pictures of the weekly progress as we go along.

Later in the afternoon we visited the only school for Physiotherapy in Tanzania at KCMC. There was a guest lecture on cerebral palsy. I thought it was interesting to see the school and listen to the same lecture as the KCMC students were getting.

It was interesting to sit in on a lecture that was basically the same information we learned, but taught a completely different way.

We had an interesting time trying to ride the dala dala to town and back. We decided since we are going to be in Tanzania for a while that we need to start using the dala dala more often, especially since it only costs 20 cents each way. I think next time I'll try the boda boda, which is basically a moped that brings you places for even cheaper. On our walk back we got some snacks, and made friends with our neighbors.