Ok I said I would do a second one of these posts so here we go…

Mawenzi has been a lot of the same… which basically means I have a day filled of trying to keep up fixing all the things that are brought to us in our lab. We finished up a lot of the bigger fixes and now have been getting down to some smaller ones like these Blood Pressure Cuffs. We have fixed and returned 32 of them in total (about half from junk storage and half from wards). I’m really proud of this because they are really useful for every ward, doctor, and nurse in the hospital.

Here is a sample picture of some cuffs before we return them. Most of the BP cuffs are donated from Germany and there are a lot of fixes with resetting the dials to zero since they’ve been dropped or trying to fix pumps and bags and things like that.

And I have gotten really good at testing blood pressure now. Josh has a perfect BP at 120/80 so I’ve done this to him about 100 times now making sure the dials work correctly.

This light has been the most annoying piece of equipment we have worked on but in the end I am pretty proud of it. We got it from the dentistry ward and it has a transformer that had exploded on the main shaft and all the fuses were blown. We could not find a replacement anywhere in Moshi because it was 220 V AC to 12 V AC which is really weird. We decided eventually to basically make our own light system using the surgical light’s frame. When I went to Arusha I bought a nice 220 V to 12 V DC transformer which we wired into the light. Then, since the bulb from before was AC, we bought a motorcycle light and hardwired that into the light socket. And it worked really well (even though it took forever)!

We had a lot of fun in Moshi and working at Mawenzi. Josh has been a great work partner and I’m hoping we can squeeze a lot more fixes into these last 2 days!

P.S.

Instead of doing another post I’m going to put a few pictures up of my trip to Machame this weekend. Francesca and Gauri live and work at Machame and it is beautiful!

We stayed at their house for awhile but then went on a long hike (long mostly because we got lost)…

There are so many random, fantastically beautiful places in this country 🙂

I am going to miss these days exploring and trying to get directions in Swahili a lot!