This first week in Dar has really flown by! We arrived in Tanzania on June 1st, last Friday. At the airport, we were greeted by two DIT students, Gilden and Hamida, and the DIT driver, Stuart. They spent the entire drive to our residence at the Raha Tower telling us about Tanzania and asking about Rice. Once we arrived, they helped us settle in and promised to come back in the morning, before finally returning to DIT. But this was just one example of how welcomed we’ve been. From teaching us greetings in Swahili, to helping us figure out ATMs and SIM cards, to checking up on us every day, despite being in the midst of a two-week exam period, our colleagues have gone above and beyond in ensuring that our stay is off to a good start.

We started off our week by meeting the DIT intern group that Grant and I will be working with. Gilden, Hamida, and Godwin are all second-year students, while Nyangige, Twalib, and Kasim have already graduated. They are all very friendly and were eager to get started on our troubleshooting workshop. Though their 3-year diploma allows them to begin working as biomedical technicians, most of them have had little experience with devices beyond classroom lectures. Kasim, in particular, currently works as a technician at Muhimbili National Hospital. Though he still has to get permission to work with us for the duration of the internship, hopefully he’ll be able to show us around the hospital and help us access more equipment next week.

So far, we’ve worked on different modules of the troubleshooting course we brought from Rice: microscopes, suction pumps, and refrigerators. We’ve focused a lot on the troubleshooting process: observing the failure, defining the problem area, identifying possible causes, ranking them in order of probability, and testing and repairing the equipment. We want them to understand how important it is to think about the problem, using the aforementioned process, rather than jumping in and trying to see what the problem is. While the process seems unnecessary for the simple devices we’ve looked at so far, it is definitely an important skill to learn for situations with unfamiliar or complex equipment. Thankfully, we’ve had positive and enthusiastic feedback from our fellow interns so far.

Microscope troubleshooting

Some more notes:

• We’re often greeted by “m’china”: Both Grant and I are Chinese, and there are quite a few Chinese people in Dar. Lots of Tanzanians know bits of Chinese. Gilden, for example, knows greetings and the numbers from 1-10. The fishermen at the fish market knew all the names of the seafood they were selling in Chinese too. And right across the street from our apartment, there’s a pretty authentic Chinese restaurant that we checked out on Saturday night.
• DIT is trying to start a bachelor’s program in biomedical engineering. However, teachers of first-year diploma students must have at least finished second-year diploma courses; teachers of freshman level classes must have at least finished the sophomore level. Similarly, senior classes must be taught by someone with a Master’s or PhD, but there aren’t enough current faculty with these degrees. Hopefully they are able to recruit enough faculty to offer the bachelor’s!
• I turned 22 on Wednesday! Grant made me a delicious cake, and the interns sang happy birthday to me at work. They sang the same song that we’re used to, with the addition of another stanza: “How old are you now, how old are you now, happy birthday dear Angela, happy birthday to you!” Finally, they told me that a birthday custom is to pour water on the head of the birthday person! Fortunately, I escaped this “shower” because we still had work to do on our suction pump.

A very yummy mango cake

Overall, this first week has been a great experience. We hear “karibu” (welcome) and “mambo” (how are you) all the time. I have definitely felt extremely welcome here and am looking forward to the rest of the internship!