Today was pretty uneventful until dinner was over and Abisi (Baba's oldest son who came for a visit) got a call from one of Baba's other sons. He had big news, he'd just been hired as the Tanzanian Land Officer. Everyone clapped, hollered, and whistled in excitement and glee. Baba and Mama were so proud and Abisi cracked everyone up when he referred to the man on the phone as Tanzania's landlord.
After dinner, Amber retired to our room and our host parents went in the living room to watch the news. Abisi and I sat at the dinner table and talked for probably an hour and a half about all sorts of things, but mostly music. We took turns spouting out hip hop artists' names and then giving our opinions on them and their work. As it turns out, we have very similar taste in music and our views on artists were so similar that we even said the same thing at the same time and completed each others' sentences a few times. We also listened to some music on my phone and sang along together. It was a lot of fun :)
Then, Abisi told me of his dream to get 6 pharmacists together and have everyone go get masters degrees in different things such as business, pharmaceutical engineering, quality assurance, law, and two others. Then, he wants them all to start their own pharmaceutical company. I was really impressed and we talked about the pharmaceutical industry in Tanzania. I suggested he work on a new malaria drug because the current treatment is malarone which, if you take it enough, you build up a tolerance and it is no longer effective. If he created a new treatment, he'd be able to sell it to the growing population of malarone-tolerant people. However, we discussed, creating a new drug is difficult because you have to engineer it, test it on animals, get it cleared for human trials, perfom human trials, wait at least 10 years after to ensure long-lasting effectiveness and determine long-term side effects, publish results, have other researchers duplicate your tests, get the drug approved by the government, market the drug, and forge bonds with doctors/pharmacies to sell your drug. Anyway, it was very interesting and I had a really good time talking to him before we both went our seperate ways for some much-needed sleep
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