Tanzania is a great country to visit. Destinations like the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, Mt Kilimanjaro, Lake Victoria and Zanzibar offer some of the most amazing travel opportunities across Africa and they are all in one country!
The climate is tropical, so some periods are hotter, wetter or more humid than others, but generally whichever month you travel to Tanzania there is something wonderful to see and do!
Safari- available throughout the year
Scuba diving - available all year
At the moment I am planning my elective placement to Dar es salaam as part of my Midwifery course. I am so excited to have this amazing opportunity but nervous that I now have less than six months to fund the trip!
I decided that I would hold a clothes party. I had been to one before that a friend held where people take along clothes and then other people rummage around and go home with other people’s clothes.
Dig out old clothes, shoes, handbags - anything you don't want to raise funds for your elective!
I thought this was fantastic so I emailed friends and spoke to family and asked them would they be willing to donate any unwanted clothes, bags, shoes etc and I would charge a pound an item for clothing and then a donation of their choice for the rest. It became such a huge event that friends of friends were ringing saying they had clothes for me and would they be able to come. This got me thinking that there was no way I could fit everyone into my home. So I asked the local bowling club if I could borrow there club house for the evening. It had a bar so we had a great night. As it was to raise money they let me have the venue for FREE!!! Fantastic start I thought.
It’s a fact of life; everyone likes to ‘big themselves up’ from time to time! And while we can go on until we’re blue in the face about why you should choose to do your overseas placement with Work the World, the best people to ask are those who did choose us and are on placement right now.
This week we asked students in each of our destinations “why did you choose to do your elective placement with Work the World?” Here are some of the responses…
Students on placement in Mendoza, Argentina
In Argentina the leading answer was the opportunity for students to brush up on their Spanish with our fantastic week-long Intensive Spanish Course. Amanda Woods, a medical student from Alabama said “interacting with patients in a Spanish speaking company is definitely the best way to improve my Spanish…the programme has everything I was looking for.” Amanda also found us to be one of the only companies she researched offering placements in South America and to include the placement, accommodation, food and in-country support in the total cost.
Campaigners in Tanzania have criticised schools that make HIV-positive pupils wear a red ribbon on their uniforms.
Although headmasters say it is is simply done at parent’s requests to ensure students do not get involved in strenuous activities that may affect their health, campaigners say the the stigmatisation is against the law and revealing another persons health status is against the law.
According to UNAids, approximately 5% of the population live with the disease – about 1.4m people. The HIV and Aids Prevention and Control Act is in place to ensure they are protected, and campaigners say that anyone with concrete evidence of stigmatisation can to be taken to court and be sentenced for up to three years.
The school in question is based in Kibaha, a suburb of Dar es Salaam, but other schools support the labelling – some using tabs on collars to identify children with a disease. Mohammed Lukema, head of Kibaha Primary School, told the Telegraph that the idea “was raised by parents, teachers and school leavers and seems to have been happening for some time. The general feeling was that it wasn’t a good thing because life is hard enough for students living with HIV without making life harder for them at school.”
RCM reported today that the redevelopment at Bournemouth University’s midwifery campus in Portsmouth boasts the latest training equipment and high-tech audio-visual kit. Professor Gail Thomas, midwife and dean of health at the university, commented
New facilities at Bournemouth!
‘The developments at Portsmouth will enhance the experience of our east-based student midwives, providing them with high quality skills laboratories, lecture and seminar rooms and general learning space……the skills room contains a birthing bed, costing over £7000, a birthing couch, a profiling bed and a Resuscitaire, costing about £8500.’
So far, when anyone from home asks me to describe what it’s like here, I tend to say, ‘it’s just so different from anything else I’ve ever experienced before’. I still haven’t come up with a better description. Things aren’t better or worse here, they are just……different. I wish I could walk around with a video camera to give you a real sense of it but you’ll have to be satisfied with a few snapshots instead. These were just some moments where I thought…’you know what, that’s different’.
For example….
Construction techniques.... they're different!
The fluorescent lemonade... that's different!
Many students who plan to undertake a healthcare elective in a developing country are driven by the idea they can make a real difference to the hospital or clinic they are going to be working in. They see it as a chance to move from the role of spectating or doing basic work under supervision, instead using their skills to help those less fortunate. But is that a realistic expectation?
An elective in an developing country can offer lots of opportunities, but as Mitchell Blake in the Medical Student Journal of Australia found out, things can be very different to how you imagined…..
“Prior to my first day, I talked to some international students who had been working (there) for some weeks. I had expressed my enthusiasm to practice as much medicine as possible and maybe make some management decisions, I was laughed at. I also expressed my interest in developing my procedural skills…“You won’t get to do that much,” replied one of the international students quashing my hopes, “you’ll be lucky to take blood.” Indeed, venepuncture was the only procedural skill I practiced on my elective.”
Neil, my fiance, was keen to see what the Physiotherapy department looked like at Mt Meru Hospital so I went off and did a little investigating for him. I came across the lovely Flora, who is head of the ‘department’ and who is possibly the nicest person I have met at the hospital.
The infrared
The day I went there was an inpatient day where she goes around the wards so there were no patients in the department. Tuesdays and Thursdays are outpatients and I think she sees about 20 a day. They are mostly rehab cases following burns or fractures but there is the odd case of Guillain-Barre or paralysis.
They have fairly basic equipment but Flora was quite proud to show me the TENS machine and an infra-red light that they use for back pain.
Mt Meru looming!
Well tomorrow I am going to climb a mountain. No, not Kilimanjaro. That would just be so obvious! Instead I am going to try and conquer Mt Meru. It is a lot less touristy than Kili and a bit shorter (I think its peak is 1km lower than Kili) but at 4550m it is still a pretty big hill. Apparently there is lots of wildlife on Mt Meru like buffalo and giraffes so we will be walking with a ranger rather than a guide so that he can keep us out of danger (presumably by shooting anything that comes too close!).
I changed departments at the hospital this week. I had to say goodbye to the wards and theatre and all the little burns kids who had surprised me so much with their strength, and take myself off to casualty.
Ester
The picture is of little Ester – the girl I saw previously who hugged me. I still can’t believe she’d come up and hug me after what we’d put her through in theatre. Any child at home would have run the other way at at the sight of me! She is also a good lesson (as are most of the other kids on the wards) about why your mum always used to tell you not to play with matches. Ester was alone while she was playing with them and so no one was around to help her when her clothes caught alight.
So now I am in casualty and seeing pain on a whole other level all together. As I left to come write this, a man was carried in with a broken L femur, R hip, R humerus AND L clavicle. He already looked like a bag of bones (he was painfully thin) but now sadly, it was a bag of broken bones. The road accidents here are brutal.