Making a Difference

6 An Intern in Tanzania

AnInterninTanzania After the party it was time to plan my trip back to Africa. I had no intention of hanging around in Europe. I had come to Poland for the one and only reason to qualify as a doctor to go and treat my people. I had accomplished that so I wanted to head home to the continent of my ancestry, which I love. The Government of Poland gave me the ticket and booked me on their national airline, LOT. I had no restriction as to how much luggage I could take with me. I was allowed to take all my books and I must admit that I had a lot of luggage. I had lived there for seven years, so you can imagine the amount of stuff I had collected and the very heavy medical books I had to carry. I was happy to go back to Africa, but I was also sad to leave my friends and a little apprehensive as to where I was going. I was going back to my mother SWAPO, and to Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika), the country that had enabled me to travel with their travel document, for which I was very grateful. I also decided that if I couldn’t go back to Namibia I was going to render my services to the people of Tanzania, a country that had enabled me to realise my dream. I left for Tanzania via Nairobi; the plane was full of flowers as my classmates and other friends and families I knew came to send me off. I was very moved. The flight attendants were excellent and I was well looked after; I was treated like a celebrity. Well, in a way I was Poland’s success story, the first black women to qualify as a medical doctor at the prestigious Academia Medyczna Warszawa. The flight was in the evening and we landed next morning in Nairobi. I was met by a friend who had also studied in Poland and had returned and was working in Nairobi as an economist. I stayed with my friend’s family for three or so days in Nairobi but Kenya was in political and tribal turmoil. The famous and highly respected politician Tom Mboya had been assassinated four days before. The mood in Kenya was sombre and tribalism reared its ugly head. Making a Difference 46 Mboya was Luo and the family I was staying with was from the Kikuyu tribe. One evening we went out for a meal and the waiter wanted to know which tribe I was from. As a Kenyan he could tell that my friend was Kikuyu but he couldn’t tell my tribe. I was thus anxious to get out of Kenya and go on to Dar es Salaam before I was mistaken for someone from one or the other Kenyan tribes. My preference to do my internship in Tanzania was to thank the Government for giving me a travel document which had enabled me to travel to Poland. Without that document I was never going to be a doctor, thus I felt I owed it to the people and the Government of Tanzania to render my service to them. I left for Dar es Salaam on the next available flight and arrived safe and sound. I managed to take all my luggage along without being charged extra, although I was obviously overweight. I was welcomed by my SWAPO comrades at the airport and went to our SWAPO house in Magomeni, one of the suburbs of Dar. I also met Mzee Kaukungwa and many other comrades there, although I didn’t know many of them before. It was a wonderful feeling and a very happy reunion. I also met Meme Mukwahepo and Solomon Mifima and others. After a few days of rest I went to register for an internship at Muhimbili Teaching Hospital in Dar. I started in September 1969. I don’t know the history of Muhimbili Hospital but it was a clean and pleasant multi-storey building. I met two women doctors who had both trained in the Soviet Union. One of them was the late Dr Manto Tshabalala from South Africa, and the other one was Dr Ester Mwaikomo, a Tanzanian. They started their internship a couple of months before me. It is safe to assume that we were the first female interns in Muhimbili Hospital. The patients weren’t used to female doctors and would always ask where the doctor was (assuming...