Al-Rahma Hospital and Kiswahili Lesson

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Again yesterday I had diarrhoea in the morning, sufficiently bad for me to go to the Doctor that morning immediately. I went to the government hospital again, and saw the same Doctor as before. He told me to keep taking the oral rehydration salts, ciproflaxin (an antibiotic which I already had from a previous doctor) and imodium. He told me to go to Al-Rahma Hospital for blood slide malaria test, widal typhoid and stool test. I did not take any imodium, as I wanted to find out what was wrong with me, and so provide a stool sample.

At the Al-Rahma Hospital I was taken to the lab to provide a blood sample, and given a container for the stool. It was quite interesting to compare the lab to the ones where I worked in Addenbrookes, the equipment looked older (by no means was the equipment that I used in Addenbrookes new). The job of the guy was also a bit different, having patient contact and taking blood samples himself, whereas biomedical scientists in the UK have little or no patient contact. Both the malaria and typhoid tests were negative, and feeling no bowel movements, I took the container for the stool sample away with me.

I then rested for a while.

In the afternoon I had my first Kiswahili lesson on Zanzibar. The teacher I had met the previous day came with a younger (middle aged) man. After a few greetings she explained that she was quite busy, and therefore the younger man would be my Kiswahili teacher. She introduced him and said her farewells. Jecha is a lecturer at the University of Zanzibar, and is a muslim from the south east of Unguja (Zanzibar Island). He now lives in Zanzibar Town with a wife and children. He asked my background and then sat a test to allow him to work out where I was with my Kiswahili. I did fairly well with the grammer bits, except for the noun class related items. Swahili has eight different noun classes, and depending on the class of the noun in the sentance, the other words in the sentance must match up with the noun. This is generally the bit of Kiswahili at which I struggle, as well as my limited vocabulary. He also helped me with the to be and to have nouns in Kiswahili, which are bit confusing, as in all tenses other than the present, they are the same verb. To have is just "to be with". In addition he set me some homework. I will have a lesson every week before I go to the mainland, and possibly more often after that.

There was a power cut in the afternoon, and this was not due to a power failure, but the running out of the meter. Meters here seem to work on a similar concept to pay as you go mobile phones, which credit being brought and slowly draining down. Our meter had run out, and so the electricity was cut off. It was corrected as soon as Bishop Douglas returned to the house, although it did mean some of my Kiswahili lesson was done with torchlight.

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