African Dreams

                                      It's been a whirlwind of activity at the end now. I got to do a last minute visit to a cancer ward at the Kitui County Hospital. The county hospital has a nice campus, with separate buildings for different departments.  I imagine that the separation and the open air buildings reduce the amount of contagion, though the wards themselves have up to 30+ patients in one open room.  Not a lot of running water visible, and latrines are down the hall or in a separate building.  I don't know how the very sick cancer patients manage, especially those who don't have family members at their bedside. The hospital does mostly palliative care, and have some group and individual support counseling. Surgical cases and radiation is sent out to Nairobi or other larger cities. Saturday I squeezed in one last CPR class for hospital and nursing school staff; at l...

I’ve been feeling like I might be a disappointment to some of my sponsors because I have done very little clinical work here. The teaching and mentoring were really important, but did I really make an impact on any one particular person?  A friend in Portland asked me why I wanted to do this mission. I told her I wanted to look into the eyes of a mother who had just lost her child and tell her that I knew how she felt. Sometimes a pebble cast into the pond can have a powerful effect in unexpected places on the opposite shore. The person who’s probably  given me the most supervision here was the nursing school head tutor. His wife recently gave birth to a baby girl who died a few days later. A year ago, they had lost their first child after 2 weeks. He is a nurse, she is a pharmacist. Two educated Kenyan health professionals who received prenatal care and took all available precautions. And yet, for reasons they don’t yet understand, they lost 2 newborn babies. Today he returne...

Yesterday was Easter, and though I'm alone (Leigh is still on Mt. Kenya) I managed to have a good weekend anyway.  I pulled together the meager ingredients needed to make oatmeal cookies, and boiled a few eggs to dye.  The local children came by and I broke down and gave them some candy and cookies and colored an Easter Bunny for them.    In the spirit of new beginnings and life, I am reminded to be grateful for the bugs-- for without them there would be no organic produce.  In spite of the mud produced by the nocturnal downpours, I made my way to the market as I do every Saturday where I can buy a bounty of fresh produce: mangos, papayas, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peas, beans, cilantro, avocados, etc.  I often come home with several kilos of fresh flavorful produce and spend less than US$10.  I will miss that colorful shopping experience when I get home to our sterile American supermarkets. Sunday  morning I went down to the church which was d...

This week things are kind of slow because it’s the week before Easter, and a lot of people have taken a holiday. It started with a Palm Sunday procession from a field to the Catholic Church, with dozens of school children sweeping us up in the crowd carrying their palms. Instead of it being a solemn event, the teenage girls surrounded us, asking questions like,”What country are you from? Do you speak Swahili? Do you have any sons?” When I asked if they were looking for  American boyfriends, they broke into peals of laughter. The Mass, while lovely, went on forever and was only half over after 2 hours so I snuck out the door early. I have had the wonderful opportunity to practice singing with the student choir a few times. The sound of a 4 part choir harmonizing in Swahili does something to my nervous system I can’t describe. I was given the lyrics and recorded their voices. I don’t know what the words mean but I practice when I’m alone and it fills me with joy. Since last Sunday af...

  Last week I got a new batch of students to teach Physical Assessment to. I used to really enjoy teaching this material to graduate nursing students at home, but I had an entire semester in which to do so. Here, I have 6 hours to teach associate degree students so I had to pare it down and hustle. Most of my other classes here have had 10-15 students so I was surprised to see 39 students file into the room. They were brand new students and were much more enthusiastic than the previous ones. With the others I was led to believe that their silence and passivity was due to my radically different teaching style and perhaps inability to understand my accent. In Kenya, teaching students and staff management involves being called out publicly for your errors in a kind of shaming manner. Probably how we educated and supervised people about 50 years ago in the US. So naturally the students sit quietly hoping I won’t call on them. Well, not this bunch! They actually answered questions and l...

There are some children who live near the campus who like to visit the volunteers because we are a curiosity—the mzungu circus. Ryan started the bad habit of giving them candy, so now, like stray cats, they come for more. I ran out of candy a while back (or I should say, I got rid of it because of bugs and what it would do to their young teeth.) Then I gave them some cookies, and then some potato chips. These are not hungry children. Their parents are the hospital staff. So I bought some crayons and this became an activity everyone enjoyed. The other volunteers are sick of them because they can be a bit pushy and boundary-less. We usually just visit on the back porch but sometimes they come into the house and start rifling through our things. When I tell them not to touch Leigh’s paints and ukulele or my jigsaw puzzle, they say “why not?” and keep doing so. So I chase them away and they come back the next day. Mostly, all the children are irresistibly cute, even when they chase us down...