Our Introduction to KCMC

I am so glad that we managed to squeeze onto the 6:30 am bus from Dar, because otherwise we would have tried to find our housing in complete darkness. As it was we arrived around 4:00 which gave us time to get settled in the daylight. The international office assigned us to two cottages, which is more than we need, so we picked up keys for both and went to take a look at them. The “doctor’s compound,” as it’s called, is about 30 cottages of different sizes (A, B or C, each with slightly different configurations of bedrooms and bathrooms), each on its own little garden with a fence around it, with rows of dirt roads running between them.

The doctor’s compound is a short walk from the hospital compound, which is separately walled and has multiple buildings including “hostels” for nursing and medical students which are more like apartments, a chapel, teaching theaters, clinics, pharmacy, and various offices for different sub-specialties. KCMC is the only referral hospital in northern Tanzania. It’s so close to Mt. Kilimanjaro that it looks like hikers could fall off the slopes right into the courtyards, because the mountain hovers over everything like a giant painted backdrop.

We opened and looked over both cottages, and decided to stay in the larger of the two, a 2-bedroom house with one bathroom, polished concrete floors, a kitchen with a tiny 4-burner stove/oven, a dish sink and a laundry sink, a refrigerator, electricity, and a telephone. It has a hot-water heater that you turn on with a switch overnight if you want hot water in the morning. It has a sofa & 2 chairs, a coffee table, a desk, a dining table with chairs, and dressers/closets in the bedrooms. Other than that it was completely empty. Out in the garden there are banana trees, flowers, some tall shade trees, vines all over the fences, and a vegetable plot with corn and ripe beans (speckled & red, a bit like Jacob’s Cattle beans or spotted kidney beans). Apparently the people who keep the grounds or maybe the “house mamas” as they are called, do the planting and harvesting? We will find out.

The other cottage was much smaller but had been lived in more, most recently by a medical volunteer from an American university who had lived there for 10 months (!) and left a detailed note along with a number of useful items. We immediately dubbed him St. Andy, our Fairy God-Doctor, and we gratefully appropriated the pots/pans, silverware, dishes and dish drying rack, a bucket, a small stack of sheets and towels, an assortment of electrical adaptors, and one twin bed, all of which we carried across the garden and into our other cottage. We made up comfortable beds – we have enough mattresses on bedsteads for 5 of us and Halle was on a mattress on the floor – with mosquito netting over each person.


Here's our cottage - very comfortable!

We haven’t seen any mosquitoes, actually (although malaria is endemic here so we are all taking malaria prophylaxis) – the weather was clear and fine, with a spectacular sunset lighting up Kilimanjaro pink on the snow, and cooling off quickly after sunset.


We strolled the hospital compound, striking up conversations with people, and ate at the staff canteen (rice + sauce which was like beef stew + shredded cooked greens) for dinner since our house had no food, and turned in rather early—or at least I did, everyone else stayed up a while playing cards. The night noises are quite different from home. There’s something that sounds like a squeaky hinge, very high-pitched, like how bats sound in the movies, and birds that squawk like gulls or ducks, and—unlike Bhutan—no dogs barking. And the stars are very, very bright.