I arrived!

Hi guys, well I arrived here in Tanzania on Sunday arvo after a few hiccups getting into the country.

At immigration they quizzed me heaps about what I was doing here and couldn't understand that I was a volunteer here for 5 weeks and not getting paid. They thought I was trying to work in the country on a tourist Visa, they were also worried I would stay longer then the 5 weeks! Then I got to customs and had another drama! They x-rayed my bags and saw all the gifts I had bought for the local people - hair clips, sticker books, balls, heaps of baby cloths (everything you had all donated). They made me open my case and wanted to look at it. Then they thought I had bought it into the country to sale, they wanted to know how much it cost and again asked what I was doing here! After about 1.5 hrs they finally let me into the country. I was later told that it was likely that they may have wanted me to give them some money (bribe them) so they would let me through. Nieve that I am it did not cross my mind so we would have been waiting along time!

The house I am staying in is nice, it has a security guard, with high fencing and barb wire round for safety. We also have a cleaner and a driver too!

Monday we started our course. We have 16 midwives for a 2 week rolling course, their knowledge and level of understanding is very basic. Midwifery is not a qualification over here. You train as a nurse and are then expected to know how to be a midwife. It took over an hour to just teach them how to use a pregnany wheel and calculate a womens due date.

Today I went around the 4 main hospitals here. It was like being on another planet. On the postnatanl wards the lucky women shared a bed with another women, the unlucky ones had a mattress on the floor. In the neonatal ward the babies were all lined up along a adult bed next to one another. There was a 26 week gestsion baby just wrapped in a towel. In the UK and Oz this baby would have been in an incubator with numerous drips and tubes, oxygen and drugs keeping it alive. Here it was just wrapped in a blanket - unlikely to survive. I saw many sad things today most of them to hard to put into words.

Tomorrow I am going to work in one of these hospitals, I am extremly nervours, but if I can make a difference to just one womens experience/lives then it will be well worth it.

I will blog and let you know how I went.
Take care, be happy and remember every day how lucky you are:)