dawn: adventures of a journeywoman

That is a hippo...they only eat plants, but do like to push over canoes of crazy white people.

Nakumatt...it has the power to save the richest Kenyan families!!!

My time in Kisumu was almost the opposite of the Measles campaign: days of alone time, sunsets, quiet reading, and ice cream. It was rejuvenating and I also got a little work done: making contacts at the CDC, buying materials and planning for my health education talks, and pricing out a filing system for the clinic. Most clinics in Kenya (including ours) don't have a file for each patient. When a patient arrives we treat the illness they have that day. Without knowing their medical history (treatments, illnesses, weight, etc.), we are not providing the quality of care that I think is possible in Shikokho. This is one of several projects I am working on in my remaining time. On Tuesday, I started my disease prevention and first aid classes at the primary school with class 7 and 8. The students were very enthusiastic and I was impressed with their questions such as: "You taught us that both malaria and HIV infect the blood. So why can mosquitoes transmit only malaria and not HIV?" Perhaps their attention and great questions were egged on a little by my giving American pennies (worth 0.7 shilling) as prizes for thoughtful questions or astute answers. The highlights of my time in Kisumu were visiting the Nakumatt, watching a Baliwood movie, and going on a boat ride on Lake Victoria to see the hippos. The Nakumatt reminds me a bit of my unsettling experience at the 3-story Wal-Marts in China: after living in a rural area where I must travel for 1 hour to find any place where there is anything to buy and 2 hours to the nearest town, being in a large superstore with aisles of toothpaste and cereal was puzzling. However, to build this huge structure (which also contains a bowling alley and movie theater), Kisumu had to put it on the outskirts of town, very far from any civilization. In addition, it is (quite obviously) so expensive that any Kenyan who did fight their way over to the "MegaCity" complex" couldn't afford any of the services offered anyway. My colleagues and mother shout when something is 10 Kenyan shillings (70 KSh=$1 U.S.) so they probably wouldn't have ventured to "Fanaa", the Indian film that cost 300 KSh (but included free popcorn and soda-which you can't beat in U.S.). Fanaa was definitely my guilty pleasure release of cheesy love songs and plot twists and turned out to be the perfect remedy after 12 hour days of screaming children and rioting mothers.
Exploring Lake Victoria was equally enjoyable: I took a canoe ride with 3 other (“mzungu”) friends and we got to see a few hippos. Or, more correctly as much of hippos as you can see on a sweltering African afternoon. We were told to look for the ever elusive Moses, as he was supposed to give a great deal on hippo rides but we apparently arrived at prayer time and he was busy meditating. The lake was also about as close as I’ve gotten to any other countries and I kept trying in vain to pick out Uganda and Tanzania in the distance.
So a big part of the program I’m with is the grant competition. During the first week we are supposed to do assessments and try to identify needs that can be addressed sustainably during our 8 weeks here. Many of my grant ideas had to be scrapped for various reasons and in the end I decided to propose a training program for 5 adult women and 5 secondary school girls on female mental and sexual health issues. I will train all the women to conduct 5 sessions as a team of an older and younger woman on these topics for the girls in the secondary schools and other groups of women in the community and surrounding area. The clinic gives almost free medical care to all the secondary students and we frequently have several girls come in a day with non-specific complaints that demonstrate a huge lack of knowledge of their bodies: i.e. I’ve had several girls who think they have a worm infection in their stomach each month about the same time (right before their cycle). So after 3 weeks of building up to the application process, I received word this week that my grant was approved in full, which is huge. I’m excited to undertake this project and to learn more from the women’s wisdom and perhaps instill a bit of my own medical factoids into their vocabulary and lives.
I’ll leave you with a few fun tidbits about Kenya:
1) It’s OK to pick your nose: in public, while giving a speech, etc.
2) Drive left, walk left, turn left-everything seems backwards for a right-hander!
3) There is an overabundance of delicious and cheap avocadoes…but no chips!
4) The best compliment you can give on appearance is looking smart.
5) If someone does a good job, everyone around them must pull up their collar to compliment them.
6) There are chips (French fries) everywhere…but no ketchup (only a sweet, watery Tomato sauce that is frankly hard to stomach).
More to come…