From an email to Jeannette -- news of Arusha

So let me tell you a little more about life here! It's going well,
and God provides what I need each moment at a time. Like this
afternoon - we found an enormous 'Zain' store where they were able to
get me a new cell phone and reestablish (hopefully - the process is
still happening) my old number. This is because yesterday, on the way
home from work and a beer with a couple of the engineers still in
town, I was pickpocketed. No, this wasn't just my phone falling out of
my pocket -- as I was climbing way into the back of a dalladalla
(basically a large van where people cram on top of each other), some
guy offered to help Merete with something. In the meantime, he reached
in through the window and grabbed my phone. I was actually totally
unaware until she started yelling and lost hold of his blanket wrap
she'd grabbed just as she saw him do it. It seemed sort of surreal
then, and I'm so glad Merete was aware and doing something about it.
Speaking of that relationship - it's very different than my previous
Californian/Texan roommate, but I think communication is opening up
slowly and we're working well together.

Hospital work is crazy -- today we didn't seem to have anything to do,
until we picked up a blood chemistry analyzer that wasn't working
because "it blew." Well of course we had to see what that meant, so
we plugged it in, and 3 inch + flames shot out of the plug connection
at the back of the box. I was controlling the power switch and turned
it right off, but it was quite exciting (and fortunate that we didn't
hurt our instructor who happened to be holding it on his weekly visit
today). We finally got it working, though it's going to have to go
through a lower voltage power supply (US is 110V, the rest of the
world is 220V - you can imagine what kind of problems this would
cause!). Later this afternoon, we were asked to help re-plumb an
anesthesia machine to run oxygen over the anesthetic instead of
nitrous oxide, because it's much cheaper. After trying to run the
system backwards and hook it up to an O2 concentrator, all to no
success, we now have to go shopping tomorrow to see if we can find
adapters to plug the O2 tubing into the nitrous oxide input. The
system is designed to prevent us from doing it, but we're going to
try! (....sigh...)