A History Lesson

Here's Megan at Mount Vernon on President's Day, providing everyone with incontrovertible evidence that George Washington could not have actually thrown a silver dollar across the Potomac River.

P.S. The cherry tree story is crap, too.

30 Days in Tanzania

Here's the short version: I traveled with a colleague to Tanzania to check and see if rural health facilities were receiving the malaria medicines that the U.S. government has been sending through my project. The idea was to visit far-flung health facilities to see if they have sufficient stocks of antimalarials, and try to pinpoint problems with the supply chain, training and infrastructure so that we can help come up with solutions to ensure that the people who most need the medicines receive them.

I spent the first week in Dar es Salaam, refining for the Tanzanian context the survey we would be using and training local staff from the Tanzanian National Malaria Control Program who accompanied us on the visits. There were 9 of us total, and we split into four teams that traveled to different areas of the country for a week. We took some GPS devices with us so that we could plot the health facilities we visited, and then compiled this map. My team of three went to the 6 health facilities in gray at the bottom of the map near the border of Mozambique in the region of Mtwara.



It was about a 9 hour drive to Mtwara, where we spent the first night. A good two hours of the drive took us over the most rutted, dusty road I have ever been on. I've never been sore after a car ride before.

Mtwara is a port city, and we got there in the late afternoon with just enough time to find a hotel on the beach and get in a short swim in the Indian Ocean.

In the morning we met with the Regional Medical Officer to get permission to visit the facilities under his jurisdiction, and then drove on to the district of Masasi, which was another 4-5 hours inland.

There actually was some leprosy in the area, and a little more disconcerting, there was an outbreak of Ebola in the refugee camps near one of our teams in the north.

We spent a lot of time counting boxes of medicine, and speaking with nurses and doctors.



There were cute kids everywhere.


Good thing Kim made sure that I carried a bunch of treats with me to give away.



After a week out collecting data, we returned back to Dar es Salaam to crunch the numbers and prepare a presentation on what we had found for USAID/Tanzania and the National Malaria Control Program. We then traveled by boat to the island of Zanzibar for another week of data collection.

The Zanzibari Malaria Control Program wanted to visit a couple of facilities on another island, Tumbatu, because they had been unable to go there for supervision in the previous year. We chartered a little boat and headed over to Tumbatu, which probably hadn't seen white people in quite some time. We were something of a novelty.



The tide was out when we got there, and we had to trudge through 200 yards of anemones and sea urchins.


The captain lent me his shoes so that I didn't injure myself.


School had just got out when we were at our first facility, and we gathered a crowd of kids in their uniforms. They were content to stare at us, but whenever we tried to snap a picture, we'd start a stampede.


Aside from the obvious curiosity, everyone was really friendly.



Zanzibar was an incredible place to work. It is one of the most impoverished parts of Tanzania, but it is also a world-renowned tourist destination. The capital is Stone Town, and it is comprised of myriad crooked, narrow alleyways which meander through whitewashed middle-eastern inspired architecture, weathered by years of sea spray and winds. The Zanzibari are known for their incredible woodwork, and the doors, beds, boats and stairways are all great examples.







Most days we worked 10-12 hours, including weekends, so eating became our tourist outlet. And we ate well.

I was surprised to learn that there is a huge Indian influence in Tanzania due to the colonial policies of the British, and as a result, much of the "local" food is actually Indian. It's really good.


Of course, on the coast and on Zanzibar the sea food was spectacular.

I was on a malaria prophylaxis while I was in Tanzania, and I also tested myself with a rapid diagnostic test before I came home to make sure that I was malaria free. So no worries -- I won't be introducing Plasmodium falciparum to the local Virginian vectors.

Stolen Blog Post

Since Mike has the camera in Africa (he thought he needed a picture of a zebra more than I needed to document memories of our kids in Utah with family. Just kidding, I can't wait to see all of Mike's adventures), so I recruited Crystal and her camera to assist me in one of my grand experiences.
So thanks Crystal for all of your help, and your clever blog post. You would make Mike proud. Click here for cute little Henry's 9 month photo shoot and Megan 1st time Skiing.