So here is a funny thing about Tanzania… everywhere you go they use celebrities. The place where Dr. Sedute gets her hair done is the Beyonce Salon. I know where to turn to get to the house because it’s right past the barbershop with a giant picture of Will Smith as their sign out front. All the busses are themed for various celebrities: you could take the Eminem bus on the yellow line in the morning and then on the way back in the afternoon hop on the Kobe. On TV tonight we were watching a show that featured O’prah as the main character. On the way to the hospital this morning we stopped at a gas station with a convenience store called Viva La Bam. Seriously.
Additionally, pretty much all the clothes here are second hand so I see a lot of funny gear from the U.S. Just today at the hospital I saw t-shirts from Jackson Hole, from a summer camp in West Virginia commemorating the summer of ’97, and one from the University of Illinois.
The other weird thing about the second hand clothing here is that it makes it that much harder to guess the gender of babies and kids. Up until about seven years old it’s almost impossible to tell the gender of the kids here just by looking at them, adding to the difficulty is the fact that they’re dressed in whatever random second (or third or fourth) hand clothes the parents have. Today we saw a little boy in a pink flowered sweatshirt and a little girl wearing a Thomas the Tank Engine turtleneck. You don’t notice how much you take cues from clothing until you keep realizing that you’re wrong. Fortunately most of the parents in the ward only speak Swahili so they don’t notice that we’ve been using the wrong pronoun for the last ten minutes.
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