Mission Accomplished

The first three months are about to come to a close. I head home for a few months and then return to Tanzania in January.

Angus O'Shea, the executive director of the Touch Foundation gave me the following piece of advice after my arrival in Mwanza.

"Try real hard not to get anything done in the first three months." Angus did provide a bit of explanation for that advice, not a lot, a bit.

Mission accomplished.

While meeting with me to discuss a proposal I had submitted for the casualty department, the director general of the hospital shared that an expert from the U.S had made similar suggestions in the past. "But I don't know where she went. The funding must have run out."

It is way early to draw conclusions. Observations must be qualified as "initial".
I am trying to place myself in the shoes of the Tanzanian physicians. The picture is skewed at a teaching hospital with hallways full of medical students, thanks in large part to the Touch Foundation.

But...what must it be like to be one of fifteen hundred m.d.s in a country of thirty seven million people? What must it be like to come to work every day to a place where babies die and surgery is canceled because the elevator is broken or the rains have soaked the surgery linen? What must it be like to wait for donations to equip your department or have an experienced nurse transferred from your understaffed unit to a more understaffed unit? Could I have a long term perspective and continue pushing hard to move three steps forward only to find myself two steps back soon thereafter?

As an outsider seeking to be an agent of change, my goal is to construct that mission of change in a manner that is least dependent on me.

Signs of hope abound in the people I have met such as orthopedic surgeon who approached me with his dream of creating a Trauma Center at BMC. That is where hope best resides, in this Tanzanian orthopedic surgeon, his general surgeon colleague and in the medical students, interns and residents filling the hallways and classrooms at BMC.