BACK HOME!!! AT LAST!

So I'm home again and it feels great.

My last day in Tanzania was on Sunday, August 18th. After collecting all the necessary paperwork from my students and writing my final evaluations, I was all set to go home.

So my itinerary included a 2 hour flight from Kilimanjaro to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Then, a 2 hour layover in Ethiopia. Followed by a 15.5 hour flight from Ethiopia to Washington D.C (with a refueling layover in Rome). It was such a long flight I was dying by the end of it. I was also getting really annoyed because every time I fell asleep, I was getting woken up by the flight attendents trying to serve me food. Sorry, but I just don't have an appetite at 3 AM. I honestly would have preferred to skip the airplane food for sleep, which I desperately needed. The flight was also very hard on me, my feet especially. I didn' leave my seat the entire flight (not even to use the restroom) so when it was time to leave the plane, my feet were so swollen I couldn't put on my shoes without loosening them as much as they could go. I felt pretty stupid because it's so unhealthy to remain sedentary for that long (blood clots)!

My mom greeted me at the airport and the first thing we did was stop by Costco so I could get some grapefruits and smoked salmon to appease my cravings. When I got home my Grandma already had borscht ready for me. I pigged out on all the foods I loved when I got home and it was wonderful.

Anyway, my plans are to come back to Duke on Thursday after a short rest. I have a couple of research days I need to do before school starts. I still haven't figured out where I'll stay yet since I'm not allowed to move into my room till Friday. I'll just be playing by ear :)

CLOSING WORDS:

Thank you all for reading my blog this summer! Knowing that I have such a large support group back home helped me extraordinarily, especially in my most stressful of days! Hopefully I will be returning next year. We will see how things go :)

End of Program Conference

The end-of-program conference was a success! In case you are curious as to what the schedule was like:

I really enjoyed watching all the students present their work from the second month. I feel so great knowing that the program was a success and the students accomplished the work EWH is out to do!

I just did the math after looking at the students' work summary forms. This year, the students returned 271 pieces of broken medical equipment back into use!!! I couldn't be any more proud of them :)

Last Day of Hospital Visits!

On my last day of hospital visits, I went to see the KCMC/Mawenzi students. Since I saw them the previous day at KCMC, I though it would be more useful to go to Mawenzi today. When I got there, my students were telling me about how they were having a hard time finding a 6V 20W halogen bulb for a microscope. They checked the stores in Moshi but couldn't find it. I wish they had told me about this bulb earlier because I knew where to look! Moshi has a great facility called Health Care Technical Service (HCTS), http://hcts.elct.org/. It was founded by Lutheran Germans and its purpose is to fix/maintain medical equipment for the hospitals in the area. All the Germans left and it's interesting to see how HCTS continues over the next few years because now it is being run by local Tanzanian engineers. One of them is actually and EWH BMET program graduate! (More info on the BMET program: http://www.ewh.org/programs/bmet-training-program)

I sent a few of my students to HCTS to look for more specific parts when they asked me for help. You might get lucky and find parts that you need because HCTS imports an assortment of bulbs and fuses and other supplies that can't be found in Tanzania. I really love this work shop. I came here last year to work on a Vitals Monitor and the people still remembered me from then! They were so happy we stopped by that they insisted we take a picture!

Had I known that these students were looking for the bulb I would have told them to come here days ago! Luckily, we still managed to get get the bulb and put the microscope back into use even though it was the last day.

While today was my last day of hospital visits, it is far from my last day of work. I still have to tie together loose ends for the end of program conference (on Saturday) and finish up all the paperwork for Duke Engage/EWH! Ah!!

Distinguished Visitors

Today, I spent my time taking the EWH CEO and COO around Moshi. First of all, it was so nice to have a personal car to take me around to the hospitals for once. I was getting pretty tired of taking public transportation.

We first went to Machame hospital. The CEO and COO were able to talk to Bob, an American who's been working at Machame hospital for the past 9 years, to get some feedback on the EWH program. They got the grand tour from the EWH students currently working there and asked them about their experiences. Overall, Machame is an ill-equipped hospital but very well managed. I think it was interesting for our guests to see.

SIDE STORY: At Machame, we walked into the sterilization room (where all the autoclaves are) and we found these precious gems sitting in bowls . We asked the doctor what they were and he said they were removed from some patient earlier that day. Tumors, I'm guessing? Wow. This can't be hygienic.

After Machame, we went to KCMC, which is the national referral hospital. While the head of the engineering department (yes, they have an engineering department!) was away at a funeral, we still got a VERY thorough tour by the electrician. It was almost too thorough because the electrician was taking us into the ICU and even into patient wards. It's very interesting (and sad) to see such a lack of privacy in hospitals.

I've included a couple pictures of our tour:

First, the area where the sheets are hung up to dry. Note how huge this hospital is!

An X-Ray!

An ELEVATOR! An amazing find in Tanzania!

I had such a great time showing our guests around Moshi town. At the end of the day, we stopped by the airport to drop of the COO who had a flight back home. Our CEO is going to stay until the end of the program to help with the end-of-the-program conference and the student exit interviews.

Last Week!

I'm wrapping up my last week with the EWH Summer Institute program. Throughout this week I will be visiting the Moshi hospitals for the second time.

Monday: Kibosho Hospital
Tuesday: Huruma Hospital
Wednesday: Marangu Hospital
Thursday: Machame Hospital
Friday: KCMC/Mawenzi Hospitals

So far I have 3/5 of the hospitals done!!

Below are some pictures of the students and their fundi at Huruma hospital. In the pictures, they are testing out a new transformer for the American delivery beds in the hospital. Huruma hospital currently has 4 electronic delivery beds out of use because they are 110V and the hospital did not have a transformer for any of them. The students were able to contribute 2 new transformers with their parts budget. The hospital was very excited for their contribution.

I am very impressed with the Huruma students. They also fixed an ultrasound that their hospital only recently bought for $38,000. The software on the ultrasound got corrupted after a power surge. After some serious research and luck the students were able to reinstall the ultrasound software and put the machine back into use! They also made sure to plug it into a UPS to protect from future power surges. The hospital is very thrilled with their work here.

Today, I visited the Marangu girls. They are the ones I spent a lot of time with my 3rd week in Tanzania because their house was burglerized. They had an interesting experience at their hospital. The picture I have of them is in their office. While a little cramped they were still very productive. I'm very happy with all my students accomplished :)

Tomorrow I will meet up with the CEO and COO of EWH who have just arrived in Kilimanjaro Airport today. They spent their last 2 days at Bugando Hospital in Mwanza (by Lake Victoria). They are looking to establish a BMET program there which trains local Tanzanians to become Biomedical Equipment Technicians. While the EWH program is great for the hospitals, the downside is that we are only here for a month out of the summer. The BMET program provides long term engineering presence in the hospitals.

Updates Finally!

So now that I have some time, I have some updates for you. In a previous post I talked about the surprise visit I planned on the Arusha house. Since I was tipped off that some students had been sleeping in late and leaving work early, I had to put an end to that behavior and explain to them how serious the consequences were. Without hesitation, the students would be terminated from the program. If terminated the would need to pay for the airfare back home (roughly $1000) and pay back the financial aid they received for the program (and that adds up to multiple thousands with Duke Engage, around $6000, if I am not mistaken). Again, this is serious and I don't want to send anyone home.

Imagine how surprised I was to find ALL of the Arusha groups in the house at 9AM that morning. Busted. They all thought they did not have to go to work that day because it was a holiday (Nane Nane, a farm holiday). However, the day before I made it explicitly clear that they still had to go to work and the hospitals don't just "shut down" on holidays. Despite my warning, I still find them at the house at with some students still sleeping. I gave them a very stern lecture on their work commitment to EWH and emphasized that this behavior was not acceptable. I told everyone that it is expected that they work from 8AM-3PM (really should be 8 hours though) at a minimum.

Since I was heading to Karatu Hospital that morning (about 150km from Arusha), I left immediately after my speech and told everyone that I expected they go into work that day. I got some VERY apologetic texts from two of the four groups. I was glad that they took my warning seriously and I was happy with the apology because it was the first offense of those two groups anyway.

I'm very happy my talk with the students resonated and they took their work seriously from that point on. Some of the students that I knew were guilty of sleeping in came clean to me and admitted that they made a mistake. I really appreciated the honesty and there is no longer a need to pursue disiplinary action with them as long as they keep up the correct working hours.

So on Friday, ALL of the student groups went to work at 8AM...except one. He apparently went out the night before and got drunk. He was so hungover the next morning that he did not go to work until 10:30 AM on Friday. I couldn't believe it. After I made it so clear at how serious this situation is. I was furious. This student also tried so hard to hide the fact that he wasn't working that I had to resort to another surprise visit to catch him off work.

As punishment, I asked him to come in on Sunday and make up the day that he missed. He did not take that well at all. He accused me of targeting him and said how unfair it was to have to come in a whole extra day for just being 2.5 hours late...Well, to EWH, extreme tardiness has the same consequences as an absence. Unfortunately, I can't even confirm that we went into work after my surprise visit to the house on Thursday. Having him come in that extra day is very lenient compared to the other option of sending him home.

I'm writing this from a coffee shop in Arusha right now. Since today is his make up day at work I've been checking up on him to make sure he is there. It really saddens me that I can't trust him and need to check up on him like a mother would. But I've been given too many excuses and been lied to too many times to trust that he makes up his honestly.

NOW, the post that I would have written had this mess not happened:

I visited Karatu hospital and that really good visit with them. The students there are doing so well. When I came by they were working on their secondary project: installing a laundry room for the hospital. Before they put this washing machine back into working order, the hospital would wash everything by hand.

The hospital also had another washer (but not spinner) that they Karatu boys had fixed. The fix included just cleaning a very clogged pipe. I want to point out that the water for this machine is heated by burning wood. The amount of smoke in this room was almost blinding. It's amazing that this washing machine exists. Even still I'm learning so much about the third world.

Here are some views of Karatu hospital. The landscape is very different here. It is VERY dusty. Among our group it holds the nickname "The Red Planet" because the dust will turn your clothes and shoes red and Karatu hospital is so isolated from the other hospitals.

Another shot of the hospital.

I noticed so many animals around here, much more than in Arusha. Here are some puppies and their parents hanging around on the hospital grounds. They are cute but extremely unsanitary. The laundry unit used to put out their clothes and sheets out to dry on the ground, over the dog poop. The Karatu boys installed clothes lines so now the hospital can hang the things they just washed instead of putting them out to dry on the ground.

The Karatu boys found an owl the previous day at their hospital. They found it lying on the ground with a broken wing and most likely a concussion. They kindly took it back to their house and tried to nurse it back to health. Here they are trying to feed it an egg. It was not really receptive to the egg, but it drank the gatorade we gave it later.

It's a very cute owl. They named him Goodwin. In Tanzania owls however are a very bad omen that means death. When they showed the owl to the hospital staff, they were met with screams and the staff running away!

Unfortunately, Goodwin died the next morning :( It's okay because he was unlikely to ever fly again since his wing was broken at the joint. We looked up online how to treat him and we found that it was better to euthanize the owl because it would never get better from this kind of injury. Very sad because Goodwin was so beautiful and soft.

Going back to Arusha from Karatu I usually take a NOAH. It's a car that comfortably seats 7 passengers (but they try to get in 8) and makes the journey non-stop. With the NOAH I can make the trip in 3 hours while if I took a dala dala it would take 7 hours. The NOAH is a little more expensive, 7,000Tsh versus 4,000Tsh but the extra shillings are well worth it.

Here's just a picture I snapped while driving back to Arusha. You can see some of Lake Manyara National Park in the distance. Last year I did a 2-day Safari there and the Ngorongoro National Park. 

This morning, on my way into Arusha I ran into a puppy. I stopped to pet it but then it started to follow me! I guess if you show an animal around here kindness, you instantly gain a friend. Wow, it was so cute. I wish I could take it with me but I slipped through a fence and closed it before the puppy could follow me further. I never saw such a look of disappointment before :( Poor little guy.

I'm safe! Just taking care of some things...

I thought it would be better to write up a quick post than no post at all. I've been dealing with my students for slacking off work and it's been time consuming and stressful. I will update on the situation when it's more or less resolved.

Other than the disciplinary problems I've had to deal with, things are good :)

Here, have another kitten picture for checking the blog!

Good day, bad mood.

I had a great day meeting with the students at Selian hospital. I promised some more pictures of Tanzania so I took some on my way to Selian:

Some dala dalas under repair, these mini buses keep transportation costs low to the public and can get you almost anywhere. You just need to be careful to get on the right one. On more than one occasion I've had to push back when the dala dala conductors try to get me into a dala dala I don't need.

"Welcome to the city of Arusha"

When I got to Ngaratoni, the dala dala stop near Selian hospital, I had to take a cab to the actual hospital itself. This town is a very good example of a typical Tanzanian village. Very poor and very dusty.

For the program, the students are required to complete a secondary project to contribute something to the hospital that is not necessarily related to hospital equipment. For their secondary project, the students at Selian are building a new neonatal unit! They took an old storage closet, emptied it out, painted it, added curtains, and made it comfortable. The infant warmers the students had fixed in the first couple weeks will go into the unit. I was very impressed at the work they've done so far.

This is the "office" of the Selian girls. Yes, they work in a container but that's actually not too uncommon around here.

Now the reason WHY I'm in a bad mood:

Even though I had a great day, I'm very disappointed in some of my students because I learned they have been sleeping in until 10 AM and leaving work early. The students are responsible to be at work during their hospital's working hours (8AM-4PM). And yesterday I ran into one of the students in town just "hanging out"at 2:30PM when he should have been at the hospital.

I plan on paying a "surprise" visit to their house at 9AM tomorrow morning. If I find the students sleeping in, I will have to take action. This behavior is unacceptable and hurts our relationship with the hospital.

I hope for their sake, I will not find them sleeping in tomorrow.

Sometimes I feel like I'm back in the US

Had a good meeting with St. Elizabeth/Ithna Asheri students today. I love visiting a hospital and seeing that the students are doing well and getting things done. It makes my job easier.

St. Elizabeth has a fundi (technician) who works very closely with the students. Students are usually much more productive when they can learn from a fundi with many years of experience in hospitals. It's also easier for the students to befriend the hospital staff when they are introduced by a respected fundi. This makes it much easier for students to get equipment to work on.

During the time I visited, the students fixed a lamp (simple short circuit) and a head phone jack as personal favor for the receptionist. While repairing a pair of headphones may not be the most helpful fix for the hospital, it's still good for maintaining positive staff relations! I am not worried about this group at all.

I took the students and their fundi out to a restaurant in "Wazungu Square" (white people square). It's so descriptively named because the restaurants in this area cater to tourists in terms of dishes they serve and their prices. I had a panini...didn't think I would find one in Africa.

They even had gelato! Naturally, I got coffee flavored.

Sometimes I forget to take pictures at the hospital (like today) and just end up posting pictures of food. Sorry about that. It gives a very biased impression of Tanzania since I'm only showing you the nice areas. I don't have many pictures of Tanzanian streets/buildings/markets/people because I try to limit how many times I take my camera out in public.

I will do my best to take more pictures and give a more accurate picture of Tanzania.

Mondays at Mt. Meru

I had a successful visit today with the students at Mt. Meru hospital. Maybe not "successful" by some definitions because we didn't fix anything...but we at least made progress.

At Mt. Meru Hospital there was an oxygen concentrator with a lot of problems. You don't see oxygen concentrators very often in the US because hospitals can afford to buy giant tanks of oxygen. In the third world, the oxygen tanks are non-reusable and expensive. Oxygen concentrators isolate oxygen from the air (21% Oxygen, 78% Nitrogen, 1% Other gasses) and provide up to 95% oxygen to patients. With one machine, you are replacing the need for non-reuseable oxygen tanks.

The oxygen concentrator we worked on looked like it had been tampered with in the past because some of the wiring was redone. We actually had to fix the wiring on the motor-start capacitor because part of the wire was exposed...that's a recipe for disaster (it's a big capacitor!). There was also a leak in some of the tubing that the students fixed in a pretty innovative way. It's always hard to find exactly what you need in Africa, so the students got creative. After fixing the leak, we had to fix the pressure-release safety so that oxygen would not build up too high in the canisters. Once we fixed that we thought we were all good to go! Unfortunately we were wrong.

Despite the flow from the concentrator being strong, we realized it was not concentrated oxygen. The oxygen machine failed the flame test (a candle should burn bigger with 95% oxygen coming out of the machine, but we did not see this). I would be so great if we had a device to reliably measure oxygen concentration (something to look into for the developing world design class offered at Duke)! The flame test works but it's still dangerous and you risk lighting the oxygen concentrator on fire by bringing the flame too close.

If oxygen concentrators aged like humans, this one would be an old man. It made sense that the machine no longer reliably produced concentrated oxygen. This machine had just over 20,000 hours clocked on it. For every 20,000 hours in operation, the zeolite canisters, which are responsible for separating the nitrogen from air, need to be replaced. However, replacing the zeolite canisters are beyond the budget for the EWH students. The cheapest you would be able to find them is about $150...and good luck finding them in Africa!

It's always disappointing when you can't fix something, but there is some consolation in diagnosing the problem. If the students find another oxygen concentrator with a broken motor, they can swap parts between the machines. I will keep my eyes open for spare parts when I visit other hospitals.

Also, don't forget! Do not smode near patient or device! :)

On a side note, one reason why I love Mt. Meru hospital is that there are really cute kittens that like to play where the EWH students work. What's a good day without kittens?

I saw a mouse run at my feet while working today so it's good that the hospital keeps some cats. Go little hunter, grow up and keep the hospital rodent-free!

My Week's Plans

Just checking in! Things are better here and I think I am mostly over my cold.

I got behind schedule in terms of my hospital visits because I was dealing with the burglary in Marangu for most of last week. I'll only be able to visit the Arusha hospitals once instead of twice. I already visited Tengeru Hospital last Thursday so I have 5 more Arusha hospitals to visit. My plan for this week:

• Monday: Mt. Meru Hospital
• Tuesday: St. Elizabeth/Ithna Asheri Hospitals
• Wednesday: Selian Hospital
• Thursday: Karatu Hospital
• Friday: Nkoranga Hospital

If all goes as scheduled, I will be done with Arusha hospitals this week and will spend my last week visiting the remaining 5 Moshi hospitals. The end of the program is only 2 weeks away, can you believe it?

Oh, I also wanted to share this picture with you. It's a Marabou Stork. These birds are EVERYWHERE and they are so scary. It's as big as a person and its beak is a foot long! They really creep me out. 

When you don't have anything nice to say...

I haven't been updating because I don't really have any good news to share...

 I don't have a picture of tea, but here's a picture of a 

macchiato latte. Tanzania has some really good coffee!

I've fallen sick and feel a little grumpy because of it. It's also been unusually cold (for Tanzania) this week and most days this week the temperature stays around 50 degrees F. It's also really rainy...not the best weather but at least I have an excuse to stay in and drink ginger tea.

I've been very frustrated with some of the hospital groups. Some partners are working so well together and others are really struggling. I'm particularly worried about the younger group pairings that don't have very much electronics experience. True, I was young last year but I learned so much by looking things up on my own when I got stuck. This year, too many students "do" before they "think".

In my opinion, a lot of the younger groups lack basic/practical/common sense knowledge when working on the equipment. I had a group that put in a 13A fuse instead of a 0.5A fuse... I mean seriously??? I won't go into what happened as a result but it was not good to say the least...

During the first month, the students had engineering lecture to teach them about the medical devices they will likely see in their hospital and the common problems they might encounter. They learn troubleshooting beyond what is covered in school that is very specific to machines in the hospital. Had these students been paying attention, and not on facebook through-out lecture, they would remembered that you should NEVER replace a fuse with one with a higher current rating!!

So to unwind from my hectic week I decided to make a cake for my home-stay. I made a coffee cake with coconut cream icing.

RECIPE:

All good things come from butter, eggs, and sugar.

Start with 6 oz of butter, then mix in 6 oz of sugar (I had to use icing sugar but normal castor sugar works too).

Blend the butter and sugar together until it looks light and fluffy.

Now it's time to add the eggs. This recipe calls for 3 eggs, but unlike me, you should add them individually and blend each egg into the batter before adding the next one. I got a little ahead of myself and added all three at once. Note how pale the yolks are here. All eggs are like that here, I wonder why.

Once blended, mix in 6 oz all-purpose flour and 1 tsp baking poder. 

Whip it till it's smooth!

Add 1 tsp of vanilla extract and 2 tsp of instant coffee melted in 1 Tsp of hot water.

The batter should look coffee-colored and smell/taste good :)

Bake at 180 C (350 F) for about 30 minutes. If you stick a fork in the cake and it comes out clean, then you're done. I ended up doubling the recipe to make this a double layered cake because I only had a 10 in cake pan (not 8 in) and I decided it would be a pretty shallow cake with only one layer.

Now for the coconut glaze. These coconut cream packets are readily available in Tanzania but in the US you need to work harder to find them. At home, I get coconut cream from my local H-mart, the korean supermarket. You might find it at Whole Foods or Harris Teeter but don't even bother looking for it at Kroger.

I used 3 Tsp of flour with 4 oz of coconut cream and 4 oz of whole milk. Whisk over medium heat constantly until the sauce thickens to a pudding-like consistency. In retrospect think it would have been better to use a heavy cream instead of whole milk but I did the best with what I had. Once the sauce is thickened, put it in a separate container and refrigerate it. You want the sauce to cool completely before putting it on the cake.

Mix 4 oz of butter and 4 oz of sugar (similar to step one). Once your coconut sauce cooled, mix it with the butter mixture. This is the foundation for a standard buttercream frosting but I made the mistake of not letting the coconut sauce thicken longer. Mine turned more into an icing instead of frosting. I am an impatient cook sometimes :)

Use the icing as filling and topping. Be generous with it!

Now you're done! Just grab some tea and enjoy.

Вкусно!

So I put a man in jail this weekend...

I haven't been updating my blog lately because my plans for the week got completely turned upside down.

When I signed my contract to be a coordinator for the EWH program, I did not expect that I would be dealing with a burglary in one of the student's houses.

One calm weekend was too much to ask for. I had just finished lunch on Sunday when I got a call from one of my students. I hate getting phone calls from my students. If I get a call, it's something bad.

"Is everything okay?" I ask.

"No." One of my students answers. "There's been a burglary at the Marangu student house."

'Shit...' I thought. "What was stolen?"

"Two and a half million shillings."

I couldn't believe it. 2,500,000 Tsh was stolen from the students' home. I don't have to tell you twice that two and a half million Shillings is a LOT of money. I've never seen a million of anything in my life, so the thought of two and a half million stolen was unimaginable. This money converts to almost $1600 USD.

My restful weekend had turned to something out of a nightmare. I informed EWH immediately then threw some clothes into my backpack and left TCDC for Moshi. I wasn't sure when I would be back but I didn't think it would be anytime soon.

The first step is to always file a police report. After some bad luck with a bus that broke down, I finally made it and met with the students. I got caught up on all of the details. From their story, I immediately knew we had a very promising suspect.

THE STORY:

The broken door frame from the door being kicked open.

The Marangu students left their student house to buy food and use the ATM in Marangu Town. The students locked the main door to the house and the two outside gates before they left. As they were heading down the hill into town, they saw their Night Guard heading up the hill towards their house.

When the students returned after an hour, they found the two outside gates open even though they had locked the gates when they left the house. The only other person to have the gate keys was the Night Guard himself. They found the front door kicked in and the lock was broken as a result. One of the students had hidden $170 USD and 2,254,250 Shillings under his pillow...but when he checked for it, the money was gone. It was unusal (and lucky for the thief) that the student had so much money in cash. He collected the money from other students meant for the Mt. Meru climb scheduled for next weekend.

We all knew it was the Night Guard who committed the burglary. It was stomach churning when we realized the thief was someone hired to protect things like this from happening.

THE POLICE:

We couldn't finish filing the report on Sunday because the offices were closed by 4:00 PM. We had to return the following morning. I did not want the students to go back to their burglarized house because it was far too dangerous for them, especially if the front door was still broken and the Night Guard was still around.

I had them sleep in the KCMC student house which had extra space and was close to town. We met again the following morning to finish the police report. At this point I was all too familiar with the process. After we finished, I was disappointed at the lack of action the police were taking. We HAD a suspect. We even had the Guard's name and phone number. What more did the police need to DO something about it ($$$?).

They told me to go to another police station. Fine.

I left with the students to the Himo Police station. The city of Himo is located at the foot of the Mt. Kilimanjaro, down the road from Marangu. I did not have high hopes of getting help from them...but I had to try.

The police did not know very much English. I tried my hardest to talk to them in my broken Swahili. I unfortunately don't know a lot of Swahili words pertinent to law enforcement (except for thief-Mwizi). Somehow they understood what I was trying tell them. They understood the urgency of the situation when I explained that we had a suspect and he was still at the hospital. I stressed that we had to act quickly before he fled.

The police did more than what I expected from them. They didn't just send us back to the hospital with an officer. They took us in the Police Land Cruiser with 5 officers and another officer armed with an AK-47 (Wow, it was such a big gun). Driving up to the hospital was surreal. Here I found myself driving with armed Tanzanian police officers in a Tanzania police cruiser to try to catch the thief. I have no idea how I convinced them to come with me, but I was sure as hell happy to have a "force" behind me when we confronted the Night Guard.

When we got to the hospital, we met up with Evans, the technician, and Nickson, the accountant. They were very useful in mobilizing the hospital to catch the thief. Evans was able to explain to the police all the details that I couldn't (since his Swahili and English is excellent).

We first went to check out the scene of the crime, the Marangu student house. The police inspected the gates and the front door. They took down the floor plan of the building and had the students describe where the money was kept before it was stolen.

After that we went back to Marangu hospital with the police to meet with the head doctor and a few other member of the hospital staff. Once the staff found the Night Guard, the police had him lead us to his house to search for the stolen money among his belongings. He was acting very suspicious and guilty throughout this time. He tried to go into the house first (likely to hide the money before police could find it) but the police refused him entry and entered first.

Because only one of us (the victims) were allowed to enter the house, I went in. "House" or "home" was a very generous term to describe his living conditions. There were no lights and there was no kitchen or bathroom or toilet. It was just a single-room mud hut. I was surprised at the Guard's living conditions. It was not because he was poor or jobless though. He had a huge drinking problem and there were piles of empty alcohol containers littered on his property. It looks like he spent most of his money on alcohol instead of improving his living accommodations.

It was so dark in the house that we had to use our cell phone flash lights to search. Almost immediately the police found 200,000 Tsh in the pocket of one of his jackets. Any sort of doubt that he was the perpetrator vanished. At this point, the police were brutal towards the thief. How the police treat thieves in the third world is nothing like in the US to say the least. They slapped and kicked him many times and beat him with a wooden stick until the stick broke.

The police continued to "question" the thief to find out where the rest of the money was hidden. However, the thief was stubborn and wouldn't admit anything. It was some time before the police found the rest of the money. They turned the entire room upside down and found the rest of the money stuffed in a pair of shoes. From that point on, the police did not hold back. I felt no pity for the thief. In the third world, there is no mercy for thieves. And often times street justice leads to death. When the Night Guard stole the money form the students, he knew this would happen if he got caught.

As the police where preoccupied with the thief, I left the hut to count the money that was recovered. A lot of the money was still untouched but we found 204,250 Tsh missing (about $130). The thief would not tell them where it is...he still claimed innocence. What a scumbag.

Eventually the police got the name "Jessica" out of him. Jessica was his girlfriend and he supposedly gave that money to her (or at least the amount that he didn't already spend on drinks at the local bar the previous night).

The Night Guard was arrested and the police took him (and his girlfriend) back to the police station. The students gave their statements and the Night Guard was was put in a cell for the night. The girlfriend was let go when the police realized she had nothing to do with the actual burglary itself.

We went back to the Himo police station to bring the Night Guard to Marangu court the next day. It was very scary at first because they put us in the same car with the thief. Even though he was in handcuffs, it was weird. I kept on giving him the nastiest looks the entire drive.

The court was not what I expected, here's a glimpse of it. Our thief is in the red hoodie...on his phone...while he's handcuffed.

The judge listened to our side of the story (from our statement) and listened to the thief after us. He had the guts to plead "Not Guilty." What a joke. Everyone in the courtroom started laughing.

It was not long before they convicted him and the judge was working on the sentence. I was impressed at how quickly these events took place. Less than 48 hours after the theft did I find myself sitting in Tanzanian court awaiting the thief's sentencing. The Night Guard got 2 years in prison. I was very happy. I would have liked a longer sentence but the judge was lenient since this was his first offense. I think if we had a lawyer or went through the same process in the US, the thief would have gotten a much longer sentence.

It's okay though. 2 years in Tanzanian prison is like 10 years in a US prison. I am at peace with the verdict. The recovered money was returned to the students and the 204,250 Shillings that were not found will be paid to the students by the security company responsible for hiring the Guard. This is what 2,050,500 Tanzanian Shillings and $170 Dollars looks like:

The hospital is now looking to terminate their contract with security company. The security company was not even hired a month before this incident occurred!

We personally saw to it that the Night Guard was put into jail. Sometimes, if you leave it to the police to do it themselves, they might just let the prisoner go (if they get paid off, e.g. by a girlfriend). We tried to get a sneaky picture of the thief and the student whom he stole from. The irony that the two of them were sitting next to each other while we were taking the thief to jail was almost funny.

And here is the officer taking him to the prison. The thief's last moments as a free man.

I will be going back to Marangu on Friday to make sure the company pays up the remaining money.

Overall, I couldn't be happier with how this ended. These past few days were some of the most stressful of my life. It feels so rewarding that it ended well. I've never been in a situation like this before and I'm SO happy I didn't screw this up :)