Days 5-8: Spending Time at the Hospital

After our weekend in Moshi (or housebound… depending on who you were in our group), we headed back to where we stay near the hospital.

On Monday, we met with one of the mentors for our program. He explained how sputum samples are taken from around the region, transported to the hospital, and then tested. Soon, the staff here will be engaging in training on surveillance research so that the hospital can keep tabs on infectious diseases, specifically tuberculosis, using these samples. Hopefully, my group will receive some geographic data so that we can create an interactive dashboard that displays tuberculosis cases across the region. It seems like they currently are collecting a lot of data but haven’t yet found ways to visualize the data.

Also on Monday, our mentor also gave us a dataset containing the results from sputum sample tests and the antibiotics that either worked or didn’t work on the bacterium in the sample. We are still fiddling with the data this week to see if it can be publishable. Because the dataset was not collected with research in mind, it is a bit messy!

We also received a very thorough tour of their new laboratory building. They have only been using it for about four months, so currently there are a lot of unused spaces and new inventory being moved in, including large refrigerators to hold biological samples. The entire building is conveniently laid out in terms of receiving and running tests on these samples. There are different lab rooms depending on the infectiousness of the specimen, and often movement through the rooms matches workflow. No one in my group is a biochemist or anything like that, so we felt a little overwhelmed by everything being shown to us, but the tour did help us understand the data we are working with. Additionally, it was cool to see the old facilities they are trying to replace with more high-tech technology that will improve the laboratory processes.

In terms of life around here, there is not much to do. We started walking to the hospital in the morning and/or home in the afternoon, which takes up some of our time and allows us to get a feel for the area. It truly is a beautiful walk, and on a day with no clouds, you can see Mount Kilimanjaro! Stay tuned for pictures on that 😉 Last week, we also laughed a lot. Not sure if I had ever laughed that much in my life… We had quite a few embarrassing moments in our first week, and there isn’t anything you can do about that but laugh!

For days 9-12, we embarked on a safari! I will write about it soon <3