Emily's Worldview

Oh wow, it's May?!? My, it has been a while. Time flies when you're working in a frenzy most of the time. Work is good. It's amazing, in fact. The problems I had with my staff are gone and meetings for the moment are more like a gathering of friends. In the villages, we are continually well received and recently several organizations we've been courting agreed to partner with us. Our numbers are great--number of people getting tested, number of HIV-positive people enrolling for services--and we have a thriving new branch in Babati, an even more underserved area. We recently organized a field trip for the entire Arusha staff to Babati. We descended on the small town and trained 80 people and tested 300 in two days. In the evening, we took part in the HIV-positive club's exercise night, running over red-dirt roads as neighbors said hello, dogs barked, and children ran alongside. It was a great way to exercise. I came back from the trip with dysentery, but never mind. Never eat fish in an inland village, that's another lesson learned.

But there's a cloud over all the good work that is going on, and that is money. Apart from the field trip (and recovering from my GI problems), I've mostly been in the office, feverishly writing proposals to get us through our fast-approaching crisis. It's frustrating because we're so good at what we do in the villages, so good at delivering and monitoring and following up our services, and so bad at raising money up to now. I mean, we are getting people living with HIV in dirt shacks out of bed and back to their daily affairs and we are getting grouchy old Masai men with four wives to get tested for HIV, and that's the easy part. Things are looking good in the long term fortunately; some of these proposals are sure to pan out (as sure as these things ever are), and we will always have the volunteer program to keep us going. But right now, we are facing down some serious cuts, and we need help. If you can, please click here.

And the other night, I threw a party, to celebrate a few of my friend's babies, to say goodbye to one of our staff members, and to celebrate one whole year in Tanzania. It was a great mix of everyone I know in Arusha, the international set, the Tanzanians of all ages and genders, gathered around and making speeches, then eating heaping plates of good old Swahili food--spiced rice and fried chicken and bitter greens and salad and meat sauce and bananas. There was a cake, so we sang the cake song ("Cake-y Cake-y") and told jokes and ate too much and kept the baby's fingers off of the snack tray. Moments like that are so much sweeter when I think about what I've been through already and the other life I am missing back home. Swiftly, beautifully, time passes.