June 16-21

Well, hey there.  Sorry that I have not updated this in a week.  It has been a very long one!  But it’s Friday now…and I’m done with the course!! We got certificates and everything—“This certificate is presented to Rachel Dennie Nichols in recognition of the successful completion of the 2013 KCM University College-Cornell Collaborative Course in Global Health and Policy Issues in Tanzania”.  Yay!! Feels really good to be done. 

I was so nervous for our presentation today, but ours went really well!  I didn’t even stutter once!  The regional traffic officer we interviewed, and the motorcycle association chairman both came for our presentations so that was really cool.  We were supposed to have 20 minutes to present… but ours ended up taking close to 40.  Whoops!  But Francis said that was okay.  I don’t know how we were supposed to condense a month’s worth of research into a 20-minute presentation! 

This whole week consisted of sooo much work.  I left school early a couple days, but on those days, I had a lot of work to do when I got home.  Some days, we stayed working at the school past 5. Last night, Adrienne and I were up until 12:30 finalizing our papers and presentations.  We had so many deadlines this week—first drafts due, second drafts due, charts to do, etc.  It was a lot of work, but I think our final product was really good! 

I learned a lot this month, and actually became really interested in my case study!  I learned a lot of cool things, learned a lot of sad things, saw a lot of really sad things, and talked to some pretty important people.  So far, this has been a really good experience and I am excited to start work on Monday!

Other than working on my case study, I didn’t do much this week.  But, I did learn why our house compound is called “Shana”.  (When we take taxis home, we always tell the driver Shana, but I never knew why because there are no signs that actually say Shana).  Mesha told me that if we keep walking down the path past our house, there is a really rich guy who lives there—gated house and all.  His name is Shana. 

I also discovered that avocado and rice is really yummy.  One thing I am definitely going to miss about Tanzania is the cheap fresh fruit and vegetables.  One day this week I had 3 bananas, 1 ½ avocados, ½ an orange, 1 mango, 1 banana, ½ a tomato, and ½ a cucumber.  All of that combined was about $6! 

Tonight we are going to IndoItaliano and Glacier (a bar/club).  Tomorrow we are going on a safari at Arusha National Park.  

This is Mesha: