Notes from the Field 2009

By Robyn Browning

Before I left for Tanzania, I already knew that things rarely turn out the way that you plan them. It appears as that goes double for things in Africa. The few plans that I had for my time here didn't seem to materialize, and the project I came to work on turned out to be vastly different than I had imagined. But that is life.

My trip to Karatu fell through, which is pretty disappointing for me. However, it gave me an extra day of being on safari where we visited Tarangarie National Park, home to nearly 3,000 elephants and many other animals such as giraffe, lion, leopard, wildebeast, waterbuck, warthogs, tree pythons, zebra, baboons, ostrich, elant, mongoose (which I should get extra credit for spotting and correctly identifying), monkeys, impalas, and water buffalo. This was on Sunday, after we had spent the previous day at the Ngorogoro Crater where we saw many of the same animals, in addition to a black rhinoceros. hippos, pelicans, hyenas, flamingo, cheetah, and a good show of lions mating.

As for my project, I definitely learned a lot about public health issues in Tanzania and about appropriate technologies that are being developed and implemented to help improve public health. I was hoping to work on something that I would be able to see go into practice here, but it was just not possible within the time frame that I have had here. I would guess it's my background working in social services that compels me to want to dig it and help as many people as I can, but as we learn in public health, the first and most important step is to listen and develop relationships with the community. With only five weeks, that was a task that could not be accomplished. So I will take the lessons I have learned here and apply them to the rest of my coursework at the SPH. Perhaps I will be able to return again one day to work on the issues that I have discovered to be important and of great interest to me.

I will post photos when I return home to Minnesota at the end of the week.