Return from Rovuma

I am getting closer to home--I write (again) from Johannesburg, being in the middle of a long layover between the trip down from Dar es Salaam and the night flight to New York. I have been provided, though, with a comfortable hotel room with good internet access and so can't complain.

Thursday and Friday were spent visiting the Rovuma District of Tanzania--it's in the far south of the country, next to Mozambique. The Mozambican rebels used to hide in the hills on the Tanzanian side of the border to get away from the Portuguese; I liked finally visiting it. It is a remarkable part of Africa; much cooler than Dar and very lush and green. The crops looked very good--steady rainfull is the norm. Alas, malnutrition is still a problem, especially in the time just before harvest when last year's saved food tends to run out.

Again we visited hospitals and clinics and talked with the various officials responsible for health in the district. Their problems are overwhelming--the area has bad roads and little electricity and people assigned to work there often simply fail to show up. They have plans to begin training more local people as nurses and clinical officers--but they will need money for that. I hope we can help them find it.

We stayed in a pleasant enough hotel which actually had electricity most of the time and hot water as well. TV reception from a satellite dish was very good so there in the middle of nowhere you could watch CNN and the BBC without difficulty. Our one complaint was that meals took an incredible amount of time to prepare--more than an hour would elapse between ordering and receiving food. One explanation was clear--chickens seen wandering the yard would disappear when we asked to eat chicken and I guess that takes a good bit of time. But what do you think they would have done if any of us had asked for beef? They surely couldn't have killed and served a cow; I guess they would ride into town and get it there. We stuck to chicken and fish and ate a good bit of what I call shima--the white corn mush that is the staple all over East Africa.

The pictures are again from clinics and hospitals. The chicken was seen in one of the courtyards of the district hospital; I would guess he won't last long. The cloths that women wear had been washed and laid out to dry but it was raining. The little boys spotted us at a clinic and were fascinated to see white people; they kept getting shooed away so I couldn't get much of a picture.

Home tomorrow. It will be nice.