East Africa 1: Up in the Mountains (aka post 12?)

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Well, we have just finished our week with the vet school at the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Morogoro, Tanzania (about 3 hours by road west of Dar es Salaam).

Since Andrew didn't talk about it, I'll briefly mention our trip in from Dar- on one of those buses that you really ought not to take- by then we were pretty desperate to get on any bus due to a 3-4 hour late arrival in Dar. We did arrive intact though, and it wasn't as sketchy as I thought it would be (I was just happy to get here).

Morogoro is a bustling little town, at the foot of some mountains, which makes it picturesque. The people here speak mostly swahili (it's not a tourist town quite yet), so we've been trying to pick some up, with a lot of difficulty.

At the vet school, we got to see cases in the clinic and go out and visit the field. In the field we saw a potential Rabies case in a cow (not confirmed yet from pathology), Andrew got to apply a castration clamp, and today we saw some piglets up in the mountains. The ride up there was bumpy to say the least, but we got there OK to do some castrations and iron injections on some piglets. In the clinic, it wasn't as busy as back at OVC (likely due to lack of money, and it being a referral hospital as well). Among the interesting cases: (1) a monitor lizard (~1 m long) with a history of being hit on the neck by someone- it was abandoned at the school but we did x-rays, an exploratory laparotomy, and a post mortem on it; (2) a 6 week old fracture repaired 3 weeks prior where the skin graft had failed- the bone was right out in the open and infected and I got to help with the surgery; and (3) a Rottweiler with an unknown illness, without the help of lab results sent in about 4 days ago- things work much slower here.

Overall, we had a good time, and I think my personal highlights for this segment of our trip would be interacting with some final year (5th year) students and working on the monitor lizard.

Tomorrow we take an 8 1/2 hour bus ride (hopefully that short) with a more local company to Arusha, where we will prepare for our last project (Manyara Ranch) before heading home.

-Sarah

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