In which I give you pictures and get philosophical

Welcome back to Nairobi!
For me at least.
There’s this very large main road that goes from Nairobi to Thika, called very imaginatively “Thika Road” and a company called also very imaginatively “China”(as it is from China) is doing a lot of construction on this road. They are also doing some destruction, because there was apparently this huge fiber-optic cable buried near the road that is responsible for providing internet to a LOT of people…and they cut it. So not only do none of the plug-in modems or routers work very well while they’re trying to repair this mess, even the wireless providers are having issues.

I don’t think this is related but also, the town water hasn’t been working for weeks so all the houses on the AG compounds have very limited water. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and you absolutely can’t take a shower at the same time the washing machine is going.
But at least there’s no electrical water heater smoking and shooting sparks at me like there was in Limuru. :-P

It’s been almost a week since I wrote! That is partially due to my internet deciding to run out at a very inconvenient moment, right as I was trying to read a facebook message from my sister…I tried to go and buy more air time. I like to buy air time in increments of 1000 shillings because you use the air time to buy packages. It’s cheaper to buy in bulk. So I went down to the nearest little shop and asked if they had air time. They had one card for 20 shillings. Ok, I bought it. That will give me about 3 MB of bandwidth, since no packages are cheaper than 250 shillings. If you don’t understand how much internet that is, I don’t really either but it is NOT enough to last very long. :-P So I went to the next stop. They had 1 scratch card for 50 shillings, and a bunch of 20s. So I bought them and when I got home had to scratch off 7 scratch cards and type the pin numbers into the computer and so on.
The first thing I did when I got back to Nairobi (After, of course, getting some fried food in the form of French fries) was buy air time in 1000shilling increments. But like I said, all the internet in the city is, I think, having issues.

I did manage to get over 100 new pictures from Limuru up on facebook, here:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.971909453505.2523324.428882&l=5f33e43b44
Even if you don’t have a facebook account you SHOULD be able to see them.

The last week I was in Limuru I just felt…weird. It was a combination of a bunch of things that culminated in me being really restless and wanting to just get out of there. Some people were frustrating me, it was the longest I’ve been in any one place, and I think my patience for being away from home and all things familiar was wearing thin. In retrospect, I think a lot of it also had to do with the fact that I’d stopped writing in my journal for a while…just because I was bored of writing. But I didn’t realize how much it was helping me to get stuff out of my head. The closest thing to having a friend to make my sarcastic comments to and laugh at the same things with me was writing there, and when I stopped getting it out it built up. Whenever I came back to Nairobi and lived with Americans for a few days I never felt like writing and I guess that’s because I wasn’t experiencing new and different things I needed to debrief about. I started writing again…not a really detailed description of each day but just a “brain diarrhea” as I’ve heard it called of how I was feeling at the moment and it did make me feel better.

The best thing I saw in the clinic all week was this girl who cut her hand right over her index finger knuckle. I could see the tendon all white and glistening in there, and it was cut. Not all the way through, thankfully, but definitely cut. I would think that more would be done than cleaning and bandaging it but that’s what we did.
The original attempted bandage was one of those tiny circle Band-Aids that comes in any “assorted Band-Aids” box that you always have left over at the end because they’re not good for anything except…what, needle sticks and pinpricks and usually they’re not even big enough for over-scratched mosquito bites…but Naomi opened one up and tried to put it on a 2-cm, deep-enough-to-cut-the-tendon laceration, but thankfully for all involved she decided it was too small before she actually put it on. Sometimes I don’t understand her. :-p

But. Now I’m back in “Little America” and I got a box of Entenmann’s doughnuts that Chrissy brought back from the US with her thanks to my Mommy Dearest and they are a bit crushed by a lot delicious…and this morning’s breakfast. I’m sure Mommy Dearest doesn’t really like that idea but it’s a special occasion. I have to eat them before they go bad you know. And the only way to do that is eat them fast!!

Cornell’s graduation was this weekend. I can’t fathom that my graduation happened ONE YEAR ago, because it feels like forever and ever ago…but I still wish I was back there frequently. Not that I don’t love being here, moving on with my life, the exciting things that are to come…but Cornell was an experience wonderful beyond words and I don’t think I’ll ever look back at it and not wish with at least part of myself that I could experience it again. (Minus the chemistry, that is) I see pictures on facebook from the people that are still there and I’m half jealous, half ridiculously excited for them that they still have so many awesome experiences ahead of them.
I sometimes worry that I’m gonna be one of those people who spend the rest of their lives wishing they were back in the ‘glory days’ of college…I hope I don’t end up like that. It’s sort of exciting though...because if the rest of my life tops how wonderful college was, it’s gonna be a good life. Even if it’s hard. Because college was hard, and I still feel a great deal of nostalgia towards it.

Anyway. The next step in the right-now journey is a church called ICC (International Christian Church, or Center, or something) that has a ministry for HIV/AIDs testing and counseling, called “Zinduka”. The new clinic is going there, and is set to open this weekend, we hope. Starting Thursday I’ll be going there, and next next week (as in the week of the 13^th) the Chicago team is coming to do a free clinic there as a grand opening/promotional sort of thing…then we safari! Get excited for that! Hopefully I will have awesome pictures to show you. :-D
as promised, I will now tell you whether Kathy, the woman I am living with for the 2 weeks I’m at Zinduka, is Kenyan or American.
She is Kenyan. :-P
And that is about all I know at this point, I’ll probably write again Thursday night to tell you all about the new setup. Toodles.

In which I ponder about perception of people and tonsils

Sooooo Remember I was writing about the kids’ tutor who said he believed everything but “I haven’t repented”? Well. On Sunday, as every Sunday, no matter what the sermon topic every Kenyan church I’ve been to has said “if anyone wants to get saved raise your hand”- kind of as an afterthought (albeit a sincere one) and this guy raised his hand and went up there and got saved. Ha! So I’d like to think my prodding helped him along that process just a little bit. :-P
(what was interesting to me was that the pastor then took like 10 minutes to talk about him to the church, while he was awkwardly standing up there, before praying…like “I know this kid, he has no dad, he repeated form 4 (equivalent of 12^th grade) twice to try and get better grades (the system here is, if you get a certain grade, the government will give you a huge scholarship towards university, but each field of study has certain grades you need…so think what happens is people repeat and retake the final exams until they get the grades they want.)and now he has Bs (up from a C+) and on and on…and I was thinking …I would NOT want all this information announced to the church, especially at a time like this. But I will call it a “cultural difference” and move on. :-P

Sunday I did my laundry again…ONLY enough clothes to last me until the weekend when I got back to Nairobi and live in a house with a washing machine for a few days (tee hee) BUT on Saturday I watched the kids do theirs and became significantly enlightened as to how I could do it better, and it was a much more pleasant experience than it had previously been.
Then I scrubbed this pair of sneakers I’ve been wearing through the mud since I got here and they got 27 shades lighter brown afterwards.

We are STILL picking the ends off green beans and cutting them up. But I like it so it doesn’t bother me. But what makes me sad is that they all get chopped up into tiny pieces. I think part of the goodness of a vegetable is lost when you just cut it into tiny pieces and mix it with rice. I’d like to bite a chunk out of a carrot, or have a mouthful of tomato instead of seeing that my rice is tinted red and thinking “there must have been tomato in here” ya know?

Someone brought a huge boom box to the house on Sunday, so there’s been music blasting from the radio LITERALLY from 6am until 10:30pm EVERY DAY since, except for from 7:30-9 which is designated study/homework time. As soon as 9(ish) hits and we pray for the food, the radio goes back on FULL BLAST and the kids all come alive. They dance down the hall, dance standing in line waiting to get their dinner, dance while they spoon themselves heaping platesfull of ugali, dance while they’re eating, and dance themselves into bed. It’s soooo funny.

This week at the clinic has been vomit week. Either people have instant dizziness-nausea-vomiting reactions to the antibiotic I just injected them with, or little kids cough themselves into throwing up, or they just..do. It’s lovely, let me tell you. Good thing I’m not a sympathetic vomiter…though there are few smells I dislike more.
Sometimes I think Naomi thinks I’m the stupidest person ever. It may come from the fact that I frequently ask her “what!?” when she says things, but that’s because I don’t understand which words she’s said because of her accent, not because I don’t know their meaning. Maybe she hasn’t realized that? She often asks me to do things I’ve already done, and then…doesn’t know what to do with herself, almost…when she sees I’ve done it “Write a lab request form for MPS” (malaria parasite) I say “I did it” and hand her the paper. She goes “oh…”. I don’t get it..like she can’t fathom how I could have been that perceptive as to write a lab request form when she tells the mom she wants to send the kid for a malaria test. I’ll be in the middle of wrapping the blood pressure cuff around someone’s arm when she tells me “Take the BP” …great, got it. I ask her “what’s the dosage for *insert name of medication here*?” and she tells me the name of the medication. I say “what’s the dosage?” but when all I’ve said is “what’s the” she starts saying the name again really slowly and annunciating each syllable. I say “I GOT THAT, WHAT IS THE DOSAGE!?” Ha!
We don’t communicate well. Whatever else is going on I don’t know, but I am certain of that. :-P
I was telling my mom, if this was a med school rotation I would have to try and figure out a way to deal with this … if I was getting evaluated I wouldn’t want her to think I was clueless. but since I’m here for such a short time and I have no actual responsibility, and there will be no evaluation, I don’t feel like trying to figure out how to fix it, and I will just deal with the possibility that she thinks I’m stupid.

It also amazes me how difficult it has been to get a few specific kids to open their mouths to see if their tonsils are inflamed. Some of them are terrified you’re going to give them a shot …(with a tongue depressor? ?In the back of the throat!?...but to a 4-year old there is no such logic of course) and others are too sick and lethargic to make much of an effort…so the mouth opens like 2cm and you can’t see anything but the tongue. The tongue depressor is good for…depressing the tongue…but if the mouth won’t open it doesn’t help much, except to serve as something for the feisty kids to bite. So yesterday I actually put on a glove and used the “scissor finger” method they taught us in EMT class to open an unconscious person’s mouth to check if the airway was clear, to further open the mouth of this kid who was making a very unsuccessful effort to open his mouth. But apparently he decided after that, that he didn’t want his mouth open any farther, and tried to clamp it shut. Apparently I have a strong thumb because I won that battle. His tonsils weren’t even inflamed. Ha.
However TODAY there were FOUR people trying to get this one kid to open his mouth. He was resisting. Mom was holding his upper body and tilting his head back, aunt was keeping him from kicking the doctor who was holding the tongue depressor and flashlight, and I was holding his nose closed so he was forced to open his mouth (thanks Mom and Dad for teaching me that one…through telling stories of trying to force medicine down my throat when I was that age)…it was a circus in there. The poor kid was miserably sick and deathly afraid of everything in the clinic…including the scale.
I often wish I could get inside other people’s heads and understand what on EARTH they are thinking sometimes. :-P

Back to Naomi thinking I’m stupid (maybe) I’ve been thinking about this…Being here has sort of freed me to do completely whatever I want. In American society I always feel like I’m being watched and judged, and I act accordingly. Everyone says “I don’t care what people think” but the truth is we all do to some extent…and we act or dress or cover up our flaws accordingly. Here, I KNOW I’m being watched, and probably also judged, but I know anything people think is strange about me can just be chalked up to me being American, and so I don’t care. I can truly embrace the “I’m never going to see half of these people again” and make a fool of myself without feeling like a fool. I wear the most ridiculous outfits because it’s WARMER to wear sneakers and leggings with a skirt than no leggings and sandals. And when my shoes were wet I didn’t care that I went to ‘work” in filp-flops and socks, or that in the morning I shower and forget to even try to do anything with my hair. I say and do whatever weird little things I want and don’t mind the confused looks…maybe because I know I would get them no matter what I did. When I try to blend in (like hand-washing my clothes) they laugh at me and think it’s funny…so I might as well also run around the yard in circles every night, eat the small amount that I like to, sit with my legs curled up under me, etc…because no matter what I’m a strange creature to the people I’m surrounded by. Hence why I don’t care that Naomi thinks I’m stupid, and I even often play dumb to get out of awkward situations, or give myself time to think of a reason why I can’t go into town with pastor’s 25-year old nephew who also wanted to come to the house to taste my chapati (which is, like the number one requirement for marriage- you have to make good chapati)
So while I’m here I am for once completely free of all cares about what people think. Be jealous. Maybe when I get back home I’ll do the same thing and I will tell myself that people are justifying my weirdness with “She just spent the last 6 months in Africa” as opposed to the current “She’s American”.

This is getting long but I HAVE to tell you about my DREAM the other day! It was the best dream ever and when I woke up it still felt real and good and not like “oh no, it was just a dream and now I am sad and disappointed” because the thing I got that I wanted was not something you carry away with you and enjoy later like a new car, or whatever. I had a dream that I met my mom and dad and brother and sister and both sets of grandparents at some show…somewhere..and I don’t know why. But in the course of this evening I specifically remember giving my mom and dad both the best longest hugs ever and sitting on Mom’s lap for like 10 minutes. (I never sit on her lap. Idk why this was in my head other than I’ve seen a lot of sick kids snuggling on their mom’s laps the past couple of weeks and it put the idea in my head) It was wonderful and when I woke up I really felt like I’d recently gotten a hug from them. J The human brain is fascinating what it can do.

In which I make 78 chapati and pick the ends of 30000000 green beans

I’ve been keeping this suuuper detailed journal of basically everything I can think of over this trip. About once per month I get sick of writing in it and get really slacking for a couple of days. This is that time. So instead of writing in the journal I decided to write a blog post…because typing is so much easier than writing stuff out, especially when my pen gets moody and decides to go back and forth between behaving and being a headache.

So as you can see, the world did not end, so we all live on. I am going to tell you two things that are seemingly unrelated, and then I will connect them for you…. 1. It’s the thing to do here, in Christian circles, to begin every semi-public episode of speaking with “Praise the Lord” (everyone says “amen”) and then “I am saved” or “I love Jesus Christ as my personal savior” and then you say what you actually wanted to say. 2. There is this guy who comes to the house every night to help the kids with their homework. The connection is Friday we were having the Bible study, and before the Bible study everyone is supposed to share a small something…a verse, or sometimes they sing a song…whatever they want. So this guy says “praise God” (“amen”) “I am not saved, but I believe in Christ” and then went on. So while we were eating dinner later I said “I’m confused…explain to me what you believe that you believe Jesus is Christ but don’t consider yourself “saved”” so he told me that he believes Jesus is the son of God, and part of the trinity equal with God, and that He died for our sins…and that he himself is a sinner (the guy, not Jesus…:-P) but “I haven’t repented”. I don’t understand how or why one would believe these things but not take the very small but gravely important next step of official acceptance of that forgiveness. What is he waiting for? I always assumed the thing separating people from that decision was usually a lack of belief, not a present belief but apathy towards making a decision? Maybe it isn’t, or maybe it’s just this guy.
I told him the world very well might end tomorrow so he’d best make a decision soon, but he didn’t and the world didn’t. So today I told him God gave him another day to make that choice, but the whole thing doesn’t seem to weigh much on his mind. I can’t fathom that, but it’s his choice.

Friday was AWESOME in the clinic…medically. AWFUL non-medically. Warning this paragraph talks about small children and their 2^nd and 3^rd degree burns.
As in, two little kids came in with really bad burns, from separate unrelated occurrences. I was expecting a third because medical things are supposed to come in threes but there wasn’t.
The first was a 4 year old boy with a 3-day-old burn all up the outside of his left leg. On the calf was maybe 2 square inches of 3^rd degree burn, and the thigh had 3 or 4 of 2^nd degree. So we peeled off the skin and scab and gooped on silver sulfadiazine (I still love that word) and paraffin gauze and wrapped him up. What was strange was that he was wearing a pink dress (it’s not unusual to see little boys here in very girly clothes or shoes…the cultural connotation of ruffles and pink and “cutie” or “princess” written on clothes making them girly is non-existent here …but the boys don’t wear dresses. That wasn’t thaaaat weird because he did have this burn and who wants to wear pants with the whole side of your leg is burned? But his toenails were painted. That I’ve never seen on a male here. Oh well.
Burn number two was a 3-yr old girl, this burn was veeery recent. I think she somehow got boiling water spilled all over her ankles. I don’t know how this happened, but her toes are completely fine (thankfully) but the tops of her feet, 360 deg. around her ankle, and the heel just up to the bottom of the foot have no skin. It just all peeled off and was sitting wrapped around the bottom of her ankle like baggy socks. So we had to cut it off, which as you can imagine was highly unpleasant for the poor girl. Awful for her, but medically intriguing. So she also got gooped (or “ooged” as Heidi likes to call it…) and gauzed and sent home. She came back today for a bandage change which she enjoyed equally as much as the original I’m sure.
Oh PS both episodes, neither kid had any painkillers. They both got ibuprofen to take at home. It is beyone me why they don’t get something stronger, at least for the part where we go poking around their open wounds and peeling off their skin, ya know?

Soooo today was also fantastic. It was raining this morning so for a while we had no patients in the clinic, and I remembered that I have the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings on my ipod, so I watched the Fellowship and the first quarter of the Two Towers…that was fun. J
Then I got home and some people were doing laundry outside while others were picking the stems off massive amounts of string beans, then cutting them into tiny pieces to freeze. So I sat down and started taking the ends off, and did that for a while before the post that holds up the clotheslines decided it did not like being pulled by 3 full ropes in 1 direction and 1 perpendicular to it, and fell down. So a bunch of us ran to pull it back up…I ended up climbing halfway up the post and hanging off it to keep it taught…for like 10 minutes…while they dug the bottom 2-feet that was buried in the ground and broke off…out of the ground. That was fun. :-P Then (after 3 brilliant ideas by Danielle..after each of which Simon said “I am using my brains!” (and I said “no, you’re using MY brains. :-P))they got the bottom of the post out and put the rest back in the hole. It was still leaning so then we had to jam some stones and other stuff into the hole to make it stay up….then we used the 2 feet that had been in the ground to support the post in the direction it had originally fallen.
I don’t know if ANY of that made sense to you, just from reading it…I hope so. The point is, my Daddy should be proud of my engineering skills today.

Then I made 78 chapati. (in case you forgot/never knew, chapati are flat, round bread-things…sort of like tortillas but with 500 times more oil and therefore 500 times tastier.) It was quite laborious, but I was complimented on being a quick learner…apparently the last mzungu MammaAlice tried to teach this art (it truly is an art) to failed miserably. We made dough in the usual way…water, flour, sugar, salt…and then kneaded it in a flat-bottomed basin using our fists to basically punch the dough into being mixed. There were 5kg of flour, so it was a lot of dough. Then we made the chapati the same way I made it last time and told you about it, but I was a much more active participant this time. The key, I learned, is to keep flipping it over and make sure it’s well floured, so the middle of the ball of dough doesn’t stick to the table… otherwise its harder to make it into a perfect circle. At first I was telling MammaAlice that she must be magical because hers seemed to just WANT to be circles, while mine wanted to be either amorphous or square. Eventually I figured out the flipping and flouring thing and it was better. Then I moved to the cooking them part, which always scares me because I have an extremely low tolerance for heat (right Heidi!?!?) and they often just grab them off the grill with their fingers. So a couple times I almost dropped it on the floor and one time had to use my leg to hold the rolled-out chapati because I had to readjust my hands so many times because I was scared I wasn’t gonna get the right angle to drop it onto the cast iron disc they’re cooked on. That one had a corner…so I ate it. :-P

Then we had dinner and I ate 2 chapati and spent more time picking the ends off green beans. I really had no need for another 2 chapati but I love them so I am full tonight. Which I figure is allowed since I’ve been avoiding being stuffed very well lately.
Thankfully, most of the beans are getting frozen so we might be able to stop eating them twice a day every day like I’ve been doing for the past 5 days.

My last blog post ever...if the world is going to end on Saturday, that is.

GET EXCITED!
In case you are not one of the TWENTY FOUR people who liked my facebook status informing people of this, I will tell you.
I have decided to do a masters of biomedical science starting this August.
I got an email from them Wednesday night saying I they reached a decision. So of course the email took like 4 minutes longer than it should have to load. I read it and saw it was just telling me to go to the application website to find my decision. SOOOO I went there and saw where it said “application status: submitted” and I don’t know WHY but that made my heart skip a bead with dread. Maybe because it’s such an institutional sort of phrase it felt like a “no”? But then I realized that that phrase meant nothing to me, and scrolled down to the place where there was a link to find out your decision. I clicked on that and it loaded me a PDF letter saying “we are pleased to inform you….”. I did a small happy dance (very small...I didn’t even stand up) and then called my mom. I realized it was Thursday so she wouldn’t pick up her phone because she’d be at work. Then I realized it actually wasn’t Thursday and she would pick up her phone. Which she did, and she was excited. Then I called my Dad and he was excited too. So while I was on the phone with him I decided to just stop prolonging the inevitable and do the online acceptance of the acceptance.

Because for the past couple of days I’ve reeeeeeally been leaning towards this program because…
1. 45 minutes to my house makes weekends, laundry, home-cooked dinners, brother’s athletic events, family birthdays, etc. SO easy to get home for.
2. Trimesters give me the opportunity to get grades out a month earlier than a semester system would
3. Guaranteed on-campus housing for that program
4. You take 4 of the 6 1^st-year med school programs, and then get the opportunity to test out of them and TA them if you go to the med school next year
5. And some other things but those are the big decision-makers.
As you see, the first thing on my mind really was being close to home..enough that I could just be there whenever I wanted to. Because after living 7 time zones away for 6 months, I really love that idea.

So orientation is the end of the 1^st week in August, and we start classes early, right after that. I might end up missing orientation or part of it to go to a friend’s wedding in North Carolina, but I’m so excited for the wedding and seeing the original old Cornell gang again that I don’t really care. J

The clinic:
There was a guy who came in moaning in pain holding his eyes and stomping his feet from pain. I thought he had something IN his eye but it turns out he was welding, and looked at that REALLY BRIGHT light the welding machine or whatever it’s called makes…the one my dad has informed me 5000 times that I shouldn’t look at or I could burn my retina. Welcome to Kenya, where OSHA doesn’t care if you wear goggles or not while welding. Because some other guy came in the next day with some eye issues because he’d gotten shrapnel in his eye a few weeks ago, had it removed, but was still having problems with pain and watering. WEAR GOGGLES!
There was a baby who had a seizure in the clinic…which was common for the baby, who’d gotten meningitis and since then has had a seizure…but I was on the other side of the curtain at just the WRONG time and only heard it and didn’t see it. When I went back in the room one of his eyes was rolling around not like the other one.
There was another lady that day who had pneumonia, typhoid, AND an amoeba. She got a LOT of drugs.
Speaking of, I think they overprescribe antibiotics here. They make sure they tell people to finish the doses otherwise you can create resistance, but I really don’t think half the things they give antibiotics for need antibiotics. Sometimes just the allergy meds are enough, ya know!?
There was a 46 yr. old woman who had not gotten her period for 8 years and then all of a sudden it came back..with a vengeance…the day she came into the clinic
Then there were these people who came and sat on the bench outside the clinic. I stuck my head out and told them to come in, they said they were just gonna wait a minute. Naomi was like “they just want to rest a little before they come in, it’s ok” and I laughed because I cannot picture anyone in the US intentionally waiting longer than they had to for…anything, and certainly not to see a doctor.
So after a full HOUR they left, came back, and finally came in. While I was asking the woman her name and such, a woman came in and went to the lab in the back, Jonah came in and ushered the sick woman into the lab, and me and Rachel and Naomi out of the clinic. I’m like ummmm what is going on?
Apparently this woman is HIV+, her husband is a drunkard, and she had a baby that died. I don’t know if it was stillborn, or died shortly after birth from AIDS, or lived a while and then died, but this whole thing was an intervention to get her to talk to a counselor.
I don’t know under what premise they got her to the clinic, because she’d been refusing to get out of bed, but we all just wandered around the church compound for a while and when we got back they were gone, so I don’t know what happened there, but that’s a sad, tough situation. :-/

Yesterday I got the following information from Danny:
I am leaving Limuru next weekend, the 28^th-ish. I’ll go stay at their house for a couple of days until June 2^nd, when I will go stay with someone named Kathy for 2 weeks while I work at the new clinic that’s being built. The 2^nd week of that stay there’s going to be a team from Chicago coming to do a week-long free clinic at the new site, so I’ll be involved in that. Then that weekend (June 19^th-ish) We are all going on a Safari! WOO HOO! And then I will come back and I think work at the other clinic in Nairobi for a couple of weeks before a team from Australia comes and we go camping in the REMOTE bush in the middle of nowhere in the desert of northern Kenya. I’ve been told by another Kenyan “the people up there are so primitive they don’t even wear clothes” should be an interesting “last hurrah” experience, because a week after that I LEAVE to come back HOME.
now…it’s still 2 months away, but the fact/realization that I can break up the rest of my time here into a few short chunks of time (2 weeks here, 2 weeks there, la de da) makes it seem SO close!
This is one of those times of life where I have to concentrate on the right now because there are still SO MANY more awesome experiences to have each day before I get to the big things like the safari and camping in the bush and coming home.
Also, apparently Kathy is a missions administrator…I don’t know if she’s a missionary or Kenyan…I’ve not heard the name Kathy here so I think she’s American but I don’t know. I’ll let you all know when I find out. :-P

Yesterday and today when the light got turned on at 6am when the kids woke up, I had the same thought: “I am facing up. Why am I facing up?” (wed) or “See!? (I don’t know WHO I was telling to “see…)I’m facing up again. Why am I on my back?”(today). I don’t know 1. Why I keep winding up on my back when I cannot ever remember waking up on my back before…especially when I can never fall asleep while lying on my back no matter how tired I am and 2. How I actually have the presence of mind to notice and wonder about these things in such a state. Although maybe my “such a state” is why I wonder about these things. I am so strange…

If the world ends on Saturday this will probably have been my last blog post, so I hope you enjoyed it. If not, I might just make another post on Saturday night, depending on how eventful the day is.
Today I was told “you white people say crazy things” because the guy who was on the news trying to convince the world that we were going to end was white. I didn’t disagree with her, because I have heard some crazy things come out of white people’s mouths. :-p

In which I get STUFF in the MAIL, and eat it.

For once my Saturday wasn’t a huge adventure. I quite enjoyed it, actually. For one thing, the weather decided it would be GORGEOUS again, and whenever we didn’t have a patient in the clinic I sat outside and even got a little bit of a sunburn. It was awesome.

What was not awesome is that I missed my Daddy’s birthday. I talked to him on the phone for a while but then he started getting yelled at because he hadn’t gotten in the shower yet. When I called the house to say happy birthday I was told he was in the shower, and talked to my Grandma, whose birthday it also was, and my Grandpa, and my sister while waiting for him to get out. Then Emmy went to see if he was done and he was still not even in. The same thing had actually had happened a couple of weeks ago. Obviously, I get my tendency to procrastinate from my father. I love you!

Recently in the clinic I’ve seen:
A lady with a 1cm diameter, 1cm deep hole on her inner right shin from getting pricked by a poisonous thorn…I love to watch peroxide bubble inside a wound. :-P
and (well this one I heard) a guy with really bad pneumonia, it was all over both of his lungs. This one was a good learning case. I FINALLY figured out WHAT Naomi has been saying, relative to the way things are already labeled in my mind. She’s been talking about “crepitations” and I couldn’t figure out what she was referring to by them. I’ve heard many times there are ONLY three official lung sounds: rales, ronchi, and wheeze. At first I thought she was using crepitations for ronchi, and then I thought it was rales. And she said something about putting the stethoscope on your hair, and paper. She said “when you put it on your hair, that’s the cause, and when you put it on paper, it’s the finding” and I’m like…what on earth does that mean? That doesn’t make any sense to me. If hair is the cause why are we listening to the cause with a stethoscope? If we can hear it, isn’t that the finding? And since when do the lungs get hairy? I know there’s those tiny cilia…but you can’t hear THEM, they’re microscopic and only in the trachea!?!?
So we got this pneumonia patient and I hear that “something is not right” as Miss Clavelle would say. So she asks me “how is the chest?” I said “I don’t know what to call it. It sounds hollow and echo-y” and she listened and said it was crepitations. And I am like….ok. Explain this whole thing to me again because I don’t know what you’re talking about. After a few minutes of her talking and me asking questions I finally figured out that she was saying hair is COARSE crepitatins and paper is FINE crepitations. AHA! (Gotta love accents…) Now I don’t know why she calls either of them crepitations, maybe it’s just the British system way of referring to rales, which is what you’re supposed to hear with pneumonia…but anyway, it’s been figured out and now I know what she’s calling things for future reference.
At least I know when there’s a problem? Knowing what exactly to call it is a special bonus I guess. :-p
We’ve had several people with malaria, typhoid, and intestinal amoeba…
Oh yeah, and there is a man who had a stroke and Naomi goes to his house (like 5 minute walk away) every 2 weeks to change his urinary catheter so I went with her this time. It was my first time walking around in bright daylight so I quite enjoyed the walk. For some reason the lab tech and the pastor who keeps the books came with us, and when we got back everyone else was winded. I’m thinking….it’s a 5 minute walk. So I asked how far she usually walks to work? About 20-30 minutes. So why was this walk winding? She said she thought it was the speed we were walking. So that I guess is the secret to the African ability to walk everywhere you need to go…you just walk as slow as you feel like, and you can do it forever. Also why nobody arrives on time for anything. :-P

Mentioning Naomi’s accent reminded me of this: There are many different Kenyan accents, depending on which tribe they are from and which language is their mother tongue. Most of the time I’ve been among people from the Kikuyu tribe (they are the most common people in this area of Kenya) so I’ve gotten used to their accent. Their English is difficult to understand because Kikuyu doesn’t differentiate between the letters “l” and “r”. So they will say “blight” when they mean “bright” and you can’t tell when they mean “load” or “road” except by context. Until you get used to it you have to take a minute and wonder what they mean before you get it. But I’ve gotten used to, whenever I hear something that doesn’t make sense, stick an l or r wherever they put the other, and often that does the trick. Naomi’s accent is different because she is a Kisi, and I haven’t gotten used to her particular “dialect” of English yet, I guess. In Naivasha Nancy was telling me there’s one tribe whose language doesn’t differentiate between p and b…and so it goes on.

When I left Nairobi a couple weeks ago, I knew I had some packages in the post office but couldn’t get them before I left. So today, Danny brought them up to Limuru when he had another errand to run. I love you guys. J
Package 1 was from the Pandolfos and package 2 was from Danielle at Cornell with cards from several of my chi alphans and I love every one of you because you all make me smile and laugh and just made my day. My taste buds are thrilled at little tastes of America. Also, I don’t think anyone around here has seen a marshmallow before, especially not in the form of a Peep, so it was really fun to watch the kids eat those.

Chi Alphans you make me laugh, a lot, and a giant piece of me is in Ithaca still, wishing I was having illegal bonfires with you guys. And here is a shout out to Justin Kerekes. Does it diminish the shout-out if I mention that you asked for it? Sorry if it does…I guess it’s too late. :-P I’ll make up for it by saying kudos to you for writing TWO cards. Though one was mostly about Jon. I was about to say I miss watching you two torture each other, but really it only goes one way.

Anyway, so as much joy as it brings me to get tastes of home, it makes me MISS everyone a lot. I see stuff on facebook from the people who are still at Cornell, or my family members, and I almost get mad that I’m not there because I feel like I should be there! If it didn’t cost a bazillion dollars and wouldn’t set me back another 4 years in my life plans I would go back and get another degree from Cornell in Italian or something, just so I could be there longer. :-P

Anyway.
This is a good time to announce that since it’s past May 12^th there are officially less than 2 months left in this journey. If a few specific people would move to Kenya I would never want to leave this place but because they’re in the US, I am excited to go home…but still very, very much looking forward to the rest of the adventures in store for me here. J

Also, I just ate a whole pack of fruit snacks. Not the little kid-sized ones. The big, Welches ones like you see in vending machines. I don’t think it was healthy but it was delicious.

In which I cut and eat someone else's birthday cake?!

Remember how I mentioned that I washed my clothes on Sunday afternoon? Yeah well my sweatshirts were not dry until Thursday morning. That’s almost 4 days. It’s cold here, and really damp.
EXCEPT for today, which was sunny and warm and gorgeous. I think because one of the missionaries brought a team of 20 people from Texas here, and God knew they wouldn’t a. have a good time or b. be able to handle the cold and rain if it was like it usually is. :-P It was nice for me to see them, among them was the missionary I met at the World Missions Summit in December 2009. He’s been back in the US for a year and just came here with this team for the couple weeks. They got a tour and I tagged along since I never got an official tour of the place. I learned something very interesting.

There’s a gas stove in the kitchen (this I knew) , fueled by….cow manure. (this I did not know.) Apparently a few years ago the missionaries did a project where they dug a huge put and put in a huge tank. Into this tank they throw a few buckets of cow manure every day, and the bacteria break it down into methane, which is piped into the house to fuel the stove. Apparently all you have to do is mix it with water to get the right consistency and in it goes. The next step is to use it to heat water for the house. They’re also in the infant planning stage of getting a system like this for human waste in the slum of Mathare in Nairobi. THAT would be awesome. It would solve the waste problem, as well as help with the deforestation problem Kenya is facing as tree after tree is cut down for cooking fires. (they don’t build with wood, termites are way too abundant).

Thursday afternoon we found out that the above mentioned Americans were coming so there was some frantic thorough cleaning done. The good thing about not being able tobuild with wood is that everything is made with concrete, which is extremely washable. The kids just got a bucket and started washing the windows and the walls with soapy water and a rag. It all dripped on the floor and was used to wash the floor. To rinse, they threw cups of non-soapy water at the walls. I tried to picture myself doing that in my house but all that image brought about was how much trouble I’d be in when my mom caught me dumping water all over her hardwood floors. :-P
I spent almost 2 hours with a wad of steel wool scraping the goop from the smoke off the metal window bars in the kitchen. They were black where they used to be (and now are) yellow. One of the boys was scrubbing the smog off the formerly-yellow-but-recently-black-and-currently-yellow-again walls, the contrast was ridiculous. And I still have steel dust or something in my nail beds from that, but it was fun. You know, scraping and peeling, my specialties

Thursday evening I had my interview with one of the masters programs, and it went well, I think. I was really antsy for it to start while I was waiting for them to skype me but wasn’t really nervous. There was nothing special about the interview itself, it was just the questions you’d expect. We talked a little bit about my predicament with trying to make the timing of re-applying work so that I don’t have to take an extra year off, and they gave me hope for 2 reasons…1 being that this program has trimesters, which would get me a transcript a full month earlier than any other program if I did it, and 2 was that in general, their school and they thought other schools, would have no problem delaying a decision about my application until I could get in a first-semester transcript. This is a slight disadvantage because the general feeling is the earlier the better, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take to avoid another year off. So I now have even more information that I’m not sure how to act on. God give me wisdom pleeeeeeeease and thank you!

I’d been invited to the pastor’s house for dinner Thursday night…but they didn’t ask until Thursday at like 6. So I told his nephew, who invited me, that I couldn’t because of this interview. He told me he could carry my laptop to the house for me. …. … … I tried several times to explain to him that that wasn’t the problem, my laptop was very small and it wasn’t a problem to carry it, it was a problem to be eating dinner with a group of people when I needed to have a quiet room to talk to the people in.
Apparently he didn’t tell the pastor that, because 10 minutes before the interview started he knocked on my door and said “why don’t we go” and I said “where?” and he said to his house for dinner. So I told him about the interview, and that I’d told his nephew…he was never given the memo. Ok sorry, maybe some other time. Great.
Then I finished and went out into the living room, and a few minutes later the nephew shows up carrying two casserole dishes FULL of food. They said if I couldn’t go there to eat it, they would bring the food to me. Hahaha. So I was (surprisingly and thankfully) assured by MamaAlice that I didn’t have to eat ALL of it, so I took what I wanted. I also learned just about that time, that the day was pastor’s birthday. The guy looks about 40 but he turned 60 yesterday. So along with bringing me dinner, I was brought a heart-shaped cake with rock-solid frosting that said “happy birthday”. I still don’t understand why he gave me the cake. So after dinner I cut it into 14 pieces, which was a feat because how do you divide a heart-shape into equal sizes? And everyone ate some. I guess he wanted me to have a piece of his birthday cake that bad? I don’t know. (To those who were in Kenya with me the last time, it was the same deal as my birthday cake was…not-very-sweet-cake inside with rock-solid brightly-colored frosting like a shell over it.) So that was interesting. Apparently visitor status is even greater than “its my birthday” status (Emmy you can have a heart attack now. :-P)
The really awesome thing about yesterday though was I had a chapati at every meal. One at breakfast (dipped in fried egg, like last time), 2 at lunch, and 1 with dinner. Score, 4 in one day!

I’ve been slacking on my running lately because it’s been rainy and I’ve been cold (yes, I know, running makes you warmer….) so I think I’m going to go do that now.

Update: the blog website was down so this was written Friday evening but posted Sat. afternoon

I dont feel like coming up with a title for this one. Just read it. :-P

Soooo last you heard it was Sunday. Give me a minute while I think about what I did on Sunday.
Well first I went to church. Actually, first I sat on the couch in the living/dining room for a full hour writing in my journal while I waited for everyone else to be ready, then we went to church.

I was supposed to speak to the kids before they split into their Sunday school groups, but since we were almost 2 hours late, and everyone else was apparently only 1.5 hours late, we missed the time when they’re together. So I ended up talking to just the little kids, which was bad because if I had to pick one group it would have been better for slightly older kids to hear, but whatever I made the best of it.
Today the senior pastor asked me to speak to the young adults class on Sunday…and even though I’d already told someone else that I didn’t want to, I couldn’t think of a good excuse on the spot to give to the pastor. So once again his reason was not that anyone thought I had any good word from God to talk to these people about, he told me he wants me to talk to them so they can hear someone from another country speak. Awesome. I’m so valuable as a fun new toy…it doesn’t matter what I do, I just need to stand there and look…white. He seems to think my telling them “I want to be a doctor and that entails being in school for a long time” will inspire mid-20s girls to not abandon their life goals and marry the wrong person just to be married sooner, and that man will abandon them and their kids in a few years. I wouldn’t put that much weight on my influence….

Anyway…There was a pastor visiting from Uganda (I miss Heidi) and he was quite funny. He was reeeally short, and just had really funny mannerisms, and couldn’t decide whether he would speak in English or Swahili (which he learned from Tanzania, cuz most Ugandans don’t speak Swahili) He wanted a DVD player to play a CD so he could sing for us, because he’s made a CD, but there wasn’t one ready. So he started preaching, going back and forth between English and Swahili, until the senior pastor got up and asked another pastor to come up. The visiting guy, David, goes “why, does he have a DVD player?” Pastor says “no, to interpret for you” Haha. Because half the congregation doesn’t know English. He mostly preached in English and had the translation in Swahili, which he chose over Kikuyu, the local language, because he wanted to know what the interpreter was saying. Apparently one day he was being translated and the translator had a big problem with the congregation and used that opportunity to give a message about his issues with the church instead of translating David’s message. Afterwards people were angry and he was confused until he found out why. :-P
Every now and then he’d correct the translation. “no, what I said was…” or, he’d start talking in Swahili, and the other pastor would translate to English. It was like a circus. :-P He was speaking about "where your treasure is, there your heart will be" At the end he told everyone that if they came up and promised to help pastor fix the car that I told you about, with the clutch problem, that he guaranteed God would give them whatever they had been asking God for, this was the reason they weren’t getting it- because they weren’t putting their treasure in God’s work aka the pastor.
Now…I’m all for the idea of the church coming together to help the pastor fix his car, and blessing the pastor…but for someone to say “I know my God, and I guarantee” that God will do anything you want…that is a bold statement, and one I don’t agree with much. We don’t know God’s will. God has reasons completely beyond our understanding for moving or not moving. God could be waiting for one of 20000 other reasons before he does what someone’s been praying for. Maybe what they’re praying for isn’t even in God’s will and he is planning on never doing that thing. We just don’t know, and THAT is faith. “God I want this, but if you don’t want me to have it now, or not ever, then that’s really want I want, so do what you want” is so much better than “Lets make a deal. I’ll give money to the pastor, and since I’ve proved myself to you, now prove yourself to me”. Meh.

Theeeeeen I came home and had lunch, and decided it was time to do some laundry.
I hate laundry.
I have always hated laundry.
I especially hate it when I have to hand-wash things and my forearm muscles get exhausted from wringing things out so many times, and no matter how many times I rinse things out I can’t seem to get the soap out of them, and I can’t really rinse them as many times as I’d like because the water in the house cut out for a day so it had to be carried in buckets into the house from the tank outside…..so I think my clothes are clean…there is definitely enough soap still in them that they at least smell clean. :-P The sweatshirts take at least 48 hours to dry in this cold dampness, so I had to be careful to save one sweatshirt and not wear it until laundry time so it would be clean at least until the other 2 dried.

at one point I left the last thing, a pair of jeans, soaking to give my hands a break and called my various mothers for mothers day. One of the girls said she wanted to help so I allowed her to go wring out those jeans. It took about 30 seconds but it was nice not to have to do that myself. :-P
Then we were playing around outside, and I was teaching some of the kids how to do cartwheels, which was highly amusing…even spotted a couple of back walkovers…and by “spotted”, I mean, I did all the work and they just let me throw their legs over their heads. Oh well. :-P

Then I STILL don’t know why, but MammaAlice came outside running and laughing (and she is a big lady) and we were all like …what? So we followed her, running. (the kids ALWAYS want to run now…every evening they’re like “Daniela, are you running today!?” ) anyway. Someone said she was going to the store so 6 or 7 of us decided to follow her. It was pretty dusky outside but I just followed the crowd of kids and we got THE funniest looks from people on the street…to see a mzungu running through the streets of the tiny little town with a group of kids…it even made me laugh. So somewhere we lost MammaAlice and it was just the kids, we would up at Pastor’s house but he wasn’t home so we said hi to his daughter and ran back. I don’t know what possessed us to do it, but it was funny. When we got back I changed into my usual running attire and actually ran for 20 minutes like usual, with my usual companions. Then we ate dinner and went to bed, I guess.

Oh, AND, in between writing the Saturday blog post and actually posting it, the water went back on. So I only had one day of bucket showering before I was blessed again with an overhead stream.

Today there were basically NO patients (actually, there were like 5 but they were all really quick in-and-out “I just need my blood pressure checked” sort of things) and we were all bored out of our minds all day. I think I spent the ENTIRE day playing free cell on the old desktop computer they have. Is it bad that I don’t even remember if I did anything else all day? Maybe a few games of solitaire. Anyway. The computer has a good stock of worship music and sermons that came from I don’t know where, and the pastor turned on a sermon in the morning and it just went through the playlist…so I heard like 6 sermons today all by the same guy. Which was actually nice, because I really liked the pastor and it felt like home to hear an American accent and all these American cultural allusions…I kept thinking “I don’t know why these Kenyans have this pastor on here, they probably miss half the illustrations and all the jokes because they’re so cultural”. But for me it was good.

The lack of wood stove in the house has allowed me to spend a lot more time out and about in the house hanging out with the kids, helping them do whatever little things they’re doing, and being more accessible…I can tell they’re more comfortable and familiar with me even after 2 days of it, and I like that a lot. Only downside is it’s colder now that the stove isn’t pumping heat into the rest of the house along with the smoke. I think I’ll take being cold over lung cancer though. Slightly colder than comfortable doesn’t cause damage, smoking KILLS. :-P

In which I spend an afternoon harvesting potatoes, and kill a chicken (my present from the owner of the potatoes!)

So, like I said in the last post, Saturday was both awesome and full.
It started out with an interesting breakfast. I’ve eaten LOTS of chapati here…even some for breakfast. I’ve eaten lots of eggs here, some fried, and for breakfast. So when MammaAlice told me she was going ot make me an egg and chapo, I thought I would get an egg, and she would then heat up the chapo she was holding at the moment. When she handed me the place I saw that I was wrong. There was fried egg stuck to the middle of both sides of the chapo. I guess she put it on top of the egg while it was cooking and then flipped it over? Idunno. I’ve never seen that before, but it tasted good, so no complaints. J

Sooo then I went to the clinic. We never have any patients in the first hour, (it’s too COLD to leave your house unless you HAVE to) so I decided to play with the lab’s microscope, since the lab tech wasn’t there. I took a slide, a toothpick, and scraped some cheek cells out of my mouth and put them on the slide. I let it dry then stained and counterstained it and let it dry again, then stuck it under the microscope, went up to the oil immersion lens which I believe is 125x? I forget. but I saw my cheek cells and it was awesome. Then I tried something that I wasn’t sure would work, but it DID- I stuck my camera up to the lens, zoomed in, and got a picture of my cheek cells. Pretty cool. I showed Naomi and Pastor Jonah but I don’t think they were as impressed with me as I was with myself. :-P

We had maybe 3 patients before I was told that Pastor Simon wanted to take me…somewhere. I didn’t know where it was or what we would do there, nor did I remember the name 4 seconds after Pastor Jonah told me, so I wasn’t particularly excited. So he came and wanted his blood pressure checked, so I did that and then we left. I found out we were going to visit his mom, who is 85 and absolutely adorable and still quite active and he looks juuuust like her.
Before we got to his mom’s house, we went to visit pastor’s farm, about a half hour up HIGHER into the mountains. Somehow, this 27-year-old car has an altimeter, which reads ~2100meters in Limuru but got up to 2500m on the way to the farm. There is a woman named Ann who lives on the farm and is paid to take care of it and run it for pastor. We had lunch at the farm and I took some pictures because it was GORGEOUS up there- SO green, with tiny lakes here and there, puddles and mini-rivers along the road and in all the low spots in the fields…I loved it. In the house was a calendar with 10 different pictures of Obama next to a poster of Obama that said “from Kisumu to the President of the United States of America” with a bunch of pictures of him, one of which was a one dollar bill with HIS FACE on it INSTEAD of George Washington! Blasphemy! :-P So I took some pictures of THAT. The house was made of planks of wood not quite touching each other, going vertically, and tarp on the inside to make the wall continuous. The sleeping room shared a wall with the sitting room but you had to go outside to go from one room to the other, and the kitchen was a few feet away. There was an outhouse sufficiently far away. They have a few hectares of land and grow mostly potatoes, so we took a sack of potatoes with us when we went on our way. The village is called Njabini- which is the Kikuyu word for the sound you make when you squish through wet grass- that’s how much rain they get there. Pastor said it gets the most rain of anywhere in the country, or close to it.

So then we went on our way to the village Pastor’s mom lives in, called Mukiere- which means “one who wakes up early” apparently because the men used to wake up early to go to this place and sleep during the day. Ha! Pastor said, and I’ve noticed it too, that in Kenya, the women do the hard work. It’s common to see men alone or in small groups sitting on the side of the road, lying under a tree, etc. but you never see a woman relaxing. They are always at work in the shamba weeding or planting or harvesting, or if they’re on the side of the road they’re walking carrying some huge burden. I didn’t even really think about it that much until pastor mentioned it, but it’s true.
Anyway. The clutch on the 27-year old car decided to stop working on and off on the last road before his mom’s house and we juuuust made it to the gate to her house/farm when it completely died. We stopped the car and got out to open the gate, then when Pastor tried to drive the car through the gate it wouldn’t go, so we just left it there. We met his mom, who as I have said is adorable and old but active, despite her hard life of being one of two wives to an alcoholic, and raising 7 children (the other wife had 8) At some point we wandered outside, I made friends with a calf who licked my hand but didn’t step on my toe this time. I saw a cow with a ring through its nose for the first time in my life. Which was cool. :-P We wandered around to the mom’s shamba…the whole place was just GORGEOUS. Scattered houses among the hills and mountains and GREEN and MOUNTAINS and gorgeous GREEN and MOUNTAINS. So the mom is a potato farmer also, apparently. Pastor went off to try and fix the car, his mom went to get digging rakes and buckets, so pastors wife and I went into the shamba and she taught me how to find and dig out the potatoes. I thought we were going to take out only enough to make a dinner but soon realized we were actually going to harvest them. So we spent the afternoon digging for potatoes. It was AWESOME fun. There were not enough digging rakes for everyone so I used my hands. The soil was moist and heavy and rich and DARK and it was SO much fun just hanging out on my hands and knees pulling out giant chunks of weeds and then potato plants, then digging with my bare hands and finding potatoes, its like a treasure hunt. Everyone should spend at least one afternoon of their life digging for potatoes with their hands. I apparently impressed people with my potato diggings abilities because every time I dumped a couple handfuls into the pile they looked up and looked at me and said “Gai” (I have known for a while it’s an exclamation for surprise or anything you want it to be, but I just learned it’s Kikuyu for “God”. So of course I’ve picked it up, but now I decided to stop saying it, but I need something to replace it with in order to do that successfully….still trying)
So we did that. Then pastor came back and said it was time for us to go, the car was all better. So we went and washed the giant amount of dirt off ourselves, and then we went over to the chicken pen and a girl caught a chicken and then pastor’s wife told me it was for ME! I’ve never owned a chicken before. So that was pretty cool. :-P It got its legs tied up and I was told to eat it tonight, so it went into the trunk and we took it home. Of course the car decided to break down a couple more times on the way home but we managed. :-P
When we got home, I was excited to tell everyone about my chicken. They took a roster from the pen here, and both were eaten for dinner. I requested, and was granted, to kill my chicken and pluck its feathers. So after watching one of the boys slaughter the rooster, I did the same to my chicken. I’ve never directly taken the life of anything larger than a bug before, so it was a momentous occasion in my life. :-P So the chicken was laid on the ground and I stepped on its feet like I was shown, then the other foot goes on the wings, then you hold the head with your left hand (I didn’t want to hold its head. I made the boy who was showing me how do that) and then you just slice the neck with your right hand. They don’t have a lot of blood, they’re small. But they TWITCH for a LONG TIME even after you take the whole head off and THAT was just strange. :-P So then we put it in hot water and pulled off all the feathers. We brought the two inside and the boys gutted them and disarticulated them into the edible parts. I was told whoever slaughters it has to eat the stomach but vehemently declined the “honor”…all the innards went to Dennis, who is apparently the only one who likes them. I have a video of him eating intestines, then cracking the skull open with his teeth and eating the brain. Blech.
Anyway. So the meat went into the pot and just boiled for way too long. It was nice to have meat but chicken doesn’t taste all that good when it’s overcooked, but I was eating a chicken that was MINE and I KILLED so that was pretty awesome.

Then I went to bed.

Sunday had some cool things happen too but this is getting too long so I will add them to a post on Monday or Tuesday.
I always do this to myself, and wind up having TOO MUCH to write at once. Weekends are always an adventure around here!

In which I get to be the doctor, and keep you in suspense about my weekend. :-P

Well.
Either this is going to be a REALLY long post or I’ll break it up into two. I always want to write a post, then put it off for a day, then plan on doing it the next day…but that next day is so full that I not only don’t have time to write, but it makes the amount of stuff I have to write about that much more. Vicious cycle.

Random things with no chronology: Yesterday afternoon the water decided to stop working again. After maybe 4 days of getting to take a shower with water falling on my head, I’m back to the bucket.
Today they moved the wood stove outside to a little tin-sided building. Now there’s just a gas stove (that they don’t use for dinner because it’s too small for the GIANT pots you need to cook for this many people, but usually they use when cooking anything small enough. So I actually did a happy dance when I saw they’d moved it. Now there’s NO SMOKE in here, and I can breathe ALL DAY long! No more waking up to smoke and spending the evening shut in my room or hiding outside or breathing through my hood to avoid it. The kids were laughing at me for being so happy. I was singing this song that I learned here that goes “I’m happy today, so happy, in Jesus’ name I’m happy because he has taken away, my sins away, I’m happy, so happy today” to “because he has taken away the stove today”etc. They thought that was funny.

Ok. So. My interview at program #2 is scheduled for skype or phone as backup, on Thursday at 2pm EST. My application to program #3 is going to be reviewed Tuesday. I got my deadline to program #1 extended until June 1^st so I don’t have to rush and make a decision. Have I mentioned how nice it feels to know that no matter what I can go to school in the fall? I’ve discovered that program #1, which I really like, is designed to take 3 semesters. It MIGHT be possible to do it in 1 yr but they don’t recommend it…but I don’t want to take ANOTHER year off…but I might have to anyways because of the timing of med school applying and transcripts from these programs coming out. So there’s lots to figure out there, but I’m trying to just be patient until I get all the information.

On Thursday Naomi decided it was my turn to be the doctor. I sat in her chair and asked the basic “what’s your name, age, etc” questions, then asked what the problem was and with Naomi’s help translating and asking the questions I didn’t think of, wrote it all down and made up a diagnosis. The first was about as easy as they come, a 30-ish yo lady with itchy, visibly watery eyes and an itchy throat, starting when the weather changed. Seasonal allergies. Antihistamine. Shazam. One down. Then came in a 12yo girl who cut her thumb on a knife and it was all swollen. Clean and dress the wound, antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs. I was on a roll. :-P A lady who went to Mombasa last week had malaria and a respiratory tract infection, and a 3-yo had chicken pox, though Naomi called it something very strange but I forget what it was. But anyway. It was WAY more exciting than it should have been to pretend to be the doctor. I wasn’t THAT good at it because I had the language barrier thing (though the incredulous looks I got when I started asking questions in Swahili were priceless. Only problem is once someone thinks you know Swahili, they’ll talk to you in it….and my ability to speak it far surpasses my ability to understand it, it’s too fast usually.) but I was in the middle of thinking how to say some questions in Swahili when Naomi asked them, check plus for Danielle, and just the feeling of actually being a doctor was awesome. Even though I didn’t know what to do half the time and I didn’t know which drugs to prescribe way more than half the time. It reminded me though how much more is learned from clinical experience than from just hitting the books…not that that helps me at all, since after I leave here I’ll basically be beating those books to death for 3 years. But it was/is/is gonna be fun while it lasts.

Thursday evening I was running outside, as usual, and as usual the kids were watching me. One of the girls, Tabitha, was standing right on the edge of the circle I was running staring at me. I asked her “why are you watching me?” she said “I want to join you” I said “do it!’ so she ran with me for the rest of the time. A couple minutes after, some of the other kids started running with me, and eventually I had 5 of them following me around the yard in circles. Then they started cheating by cutting corners and running across the middle, cutting in front of each other…but I told them, once I got to the complete back of the line, that we were running for time, by my watch, and not laps. HA!. :-P So then I slowed down to a walk and the whole thing just seemed really funny to me, that I was being followed around in circles by these kids…so I started singing the Star Spangled Banner to make it even more absurd of a situation. Dennis was behind me and singing something, I don’t know if it was a different song or he was trying to catch what I was singing. I told him I was singing the US national anthem and so the kids started singing the Kenyan national anthem, following me around in circles while I was singing the US national anthem. It was just strange. :-P

on Friday I talked to my sishter on the phone and she told me she got me a mother’s day card for my madre. Which is awesome because I’d been thinking I was gonna send her text to write in a card! So I will tell you about this card because it’s awesome and is perfect for my relationship with my mom. The front says “good moms let their kids lick the cake beater” and shows a picture of a cake beater dripping with batter. The inside says “great moms turn the beater on first” HA! How perfect is that!? So I sort of got to give my mom a card. (PS Happy blog-official mothers’ day to my mommy and my grandmas- I LOVE YOU and I MISS YOU and I’m so glad I got to hear all of your voices today but what I really want is to give you all a hug. Individually, and one all at the same time, just because I can. (or can’t)

Friday afternoon I got home from the clinic and MammaAlice (yes, it is one word. :-P) was like “remember, you’re speaking tonight at fellowship!” (meaning, all the kids get together and have a Bible study on Friday evenings) and I was like “Whaaaaaat, you said Sunday!” (She’d asked me to speak to the kids on Sunday for 15 minutes before they split into their Sunday school classes, and her reason was “because they have never heard a mzungu speak before” which sort of annoyed me…I don’t mind doing a 15 minute Bible lesson but I HATE feeling like a freak show freak that just gets shown around to all the interested people. Like… what else interesting can we do with the kids…oh, I know, they’d think a mzungu is cool, lets have her speak”. Now, this is probably NOT what went on in anyone’s head except mine, so I’m trying to remove my bad attitude, but it was there for a while) Anyway. So she said “no, Sunday AND today!” grrrr. So I had to quick quick come up with something, but it was easier than I was expecting because I’ve been doing a good job of writing stuff down as I read my Bible, so I had a lot of things that had jumped out at me to pick from to elaborate on for both of them.
So I did the devotion and it was fine and then MammaAlice recapped what I said (I think..it was in Swhaili) for 15 minutes (the same if not a greater amount of time I used originally) and then prayed for at least another 15 and then we had dinner and I went to bed. And they wonder why I never want a big dinner. Because 30 minutes later I’m lying in bed, and there’s no need to eat any more than is necessary to keep myself from getting hungry for another hour or two until I fall asleep! :-P

Saturday was AWESOME and FULL. Therefore I’m going to make it into a separate post. If the internet works tonight as it decided NOT to do a few minutes ago, I’ll post one today and one tomorrow, and if it decides to stay dead you will get both on Monday.

In which I am offered a (masters) acceptance and interview, and give my first IM injection

I haven’t spoken to my Emmy in a while. I tried to call her last night when she got off work but her phone was still on silent so she didn’t hear it. So I went to bed, at like 10. At 11 I get a phone call from “unknown”. Whenever mom tries to call me, that’s what it says. I was asleep and the call woke me up and I didn’t want it to wake up the other girl in the room so I just hit ignore. It called back. I hit ignore again. Repeat TIMES TEN. On the TENTH call, after my brain said “this must not be Mommy, and don’t they get that I don’t want to talk to them!? I’m sleeping!” I finally decided to answer it.
It was my mom. Nobody has ever accused her of being one to give up easily. I said “WHAT?” she said she just wanted to tell me that I got accepted to the masters program at one of the schools I applied to- actually, the program I like the best, if all other things were equal. So then I couldn’t o back to sleep for another 2 hours, my mind was working so fast. They want a “yes, I’ll come” or “no” by May 15^th. That’s less than 2 weeks away. And I hadn’t heard from any other schools yet. So my brain was and still is on a string of rambles, weighing the pros and cons of each program, each way to go about doing things, but there are so many unknowns still that I have a huge number of possibilities.
So it’s GREAT news, I know I’m going SOMEWHERE at least but there’s still a lot to figure out. I told God “thank you VERY much, now if you could show me, somehow, what exactly you want me to do I would appreciate it. J”

Today when I got home from the clinic I checked my email and found that I’d been offered an interview at one of the other programs. They offer in person, skype, AND phone interviews. Perfect. J

Clinic has been greeeeeat. Yesterday was awesome. There were THREE people with crackles in their lungs. Crackles means fluid, and fluid usually means pneumonia. Lucky for them, antibiotics kill pneumonia. There was one little girl who came in with her dad (I LOVE it when 6-yr old girls come in and their dad sits down on the chair and the girl stands between his knees and holds onto his arm, which is wrapped around her waist, while leaning her head on his chest. It makes me feel good to know that she knows that her Daddy loves her. BUT it makes me miss mine!) and she had something that required a shot. She was NOT going down without a fight. It started out with screaming, led to running out the door. She was brought back in, and ran away again, screaming “Sitaki (I don’t want) operation!” I told her there is no operation, but that didn’t help. When her dad tried to carry her back in she screamed and kicked and held onto the door frame with all her might, but eventually enough people held her down so she got the shot. Afterwards, she was angrily pointing at Naomi and shouting “You! You!” It was funny. Amusingly, the same exact thing happened today, though instead of screaming that she didn’t want an operation, she screamed “Ninapona!” which means “I’m better!”- as if that would convince us not to give her a shot. :-P oooh kids.
Also, a man came in limping, using a branch for support. He had 2, 1.5cm shallow puncture wounds on his left wrist, so we cleaned and dressed them, and when we got him on the exam table to look at his hip, discovered that (OK well maybe Naomi already knew, but I only had a basic understanding of what happened- he fell- since they were talking in Swahili) he had 2 more puncture wounds. One was just behind his hip bone and the other was just slightly off midline. I thought for a minute something had gone in one of the wounds and come out the other, but was told he just fall and was poked by a couple sharp sticks, or something. So we cleaned and dressed those wounds, he got a tetanus shot and a diclophenac (pain killer/anti-inflammatory) injection in the gluteus maximus muscle which I DID, as my FIRST EVER IM INJECTION (there’s a story for the grandkids…) So that was exciting. :-P
Today there was an old woman who came in for something else but had a big pulsing what-i-assume-was-her-carotid-artery in her neck. Her blood pressure was high, but she’s already being treated for hypertension, so somehow it was decided it was no big deal, she got more bp meds and went on her way. Maybe it’s just my love for the medically dramatic that puts these things in my head, but how do we know it’s not an aneurysm about to burst? I dunno. I also hoped the lady with neck soreness today was meningitis, just cuz that would be cool, but it wasn’t….so they say. :-P
I think my problem is that there are a couple really worst-case scenarios I know the symptoms of…but those symptoms are also symptoms of lots of minor things as well. But I don’t know that, so I always assume the worst. I can’t “hear hoof-beats and think horses, not zebras” if I don’t know what horses sound like…also since I’m in Kenya, I actually should think zebras, or at least wildebeest.

Monday evening I worked out in my room a little then went outside to run for a bit, just back and forth in big circles around the yard. The kids of course like to watch me and make fun. After they all got bored and went back inside and I finished running, I decided to brush up on my gymnastics, just for fun. I’d done a back walkover in the hallway for them the other day, I forget how that came about…but they wanted me to do lots and flips and stuff, which I wouldn’t/couldn’t do in the house. So it was in my head, so I was just playing around when one of the kids saw me. Next thing I know they’re ALL standing in the doorway watching. So I told them to stop hiding, just come outside, and I’ll do some stuff. So I id some walkovers and backhandsprings and basically just wowed them with my (in my mind) pathetic leftovers of a mildly successful high school gymnastics career. :-P

I’ve been doing this new thing where I sneak half of my breakfast (today I wrapped half a “pancake” in a plastic bag, yesterday I hid a banana in my sweatshirt) to the clinic and eat it around 11:30, since lunch doesn’t come til around 1:30-2 some days. It’s a big breakfast but I get hungry again and rather than eat more, I’d like to just spread the food out. So that’s been working very nicely.

Last night we had meat for the…2^nd time since I’ve been there. Just “fried” (with no oil/fat…so, grilled?) pieces of beef with onions and what not, along with cabbage and ugali. My goodness it was DELICIOUS. I’ve been craaaaazing savory food for a while. Not just well-seasoned starches, which have minimal innate flavor…but foods that actually have some flavor themselves that can be enhanced with seasoning instead of just having the seasoning being ALL the flavor. It was awesome. It was not much, like 1/8 of the meat Emmy would eat at any given dinner, but I savored each piece and it was a little bit of heaven.

Now I am going to go attempt to figure out my future as much as I can through phone calls and internet research and emails to a few key people. Thanks for tuning in. J Ciao

In which I am misinformed about a non-existent presidential assassination, and make a new friend

This morning, someone came running to the clinic asking if I was there. When he saw me, he told me that Obama was killed. Actually, what he said was that Americans were celebrating because Obama was killed. My head goes “What!?” and my heart skipped a beat at the shock. “The president was ASSASSINATED!? And Americans are celebrating!?!?” my brain asked itself. Before I could voice the question, he said “Obama Bin Laden was killed!” OH. The shock goes away as I realize what actually happened, laugh at the irony of the situation, then start to feel some sense of pride and accomplishment on behalf of the US for FINALLY getting Osama. I would have called my mom to get the news in full, but it was 2am in NY when I heard it. Thankfully, the flashlight I carry around with me also has a radio, and I managed to pick up a radio station from Nairobi, a re-broadcast of the BBC news. Every other station I heard was in Swahili, and though I caught the words “Osama” and “al quaida” I knew I wasn’t gonna get much info.
So there I was standing in a patch of morning sunlight furiously spinning the hand crank which powers my flashlight/radio listening to the news.
It’s really interesting feeling American or patriotic when not in America. I certainly have just about zero emotional attachment to Obama; I’m mostly ambivalent towards him. But when the BBC played the recording of his announcement, before he even got to the good part, as soon as I heard his voice I just felt this American pride, or something building up. Like…after hearing the British voices talking about it for a while, to hear an American, and to hear the US President, felt like being home. I’ve never actually been excited to hear Obama’s voice before today. When they played the recording of people outside the white house singing “Osama, Osama, hey, hey, hey, goodbye” a la Remember the Titans, I couldn’t help laughing and feeling proud of how witty we Americans are. :-P
I told a few other people around me, who were like “oh, cool” and one person who was like “I don’t know how anyone can celebrate the death of another person” and I’m like hmm…not the reactions I was looking for. :-P So when 4am EST rolled around I called mom, but though I KNOW she was awake, her cell phone wasn’t on yet. I tried again around 5 and got her, already AT the gym waiting for them to unlock the doors and let her in. So we chatted about it and “how did you hear” and bla bla, and it was just really nice to share a momentous American moment with another American. I listened to the same interviews and the same stuff over and over for almost 2 hours on that radio, trying to get every bit of information I could, because each tidbit I learned made me feel closer to home and more like I was getting to be a part of what was going on at home.

Back to the regularly scheduled programming.
Saturday was awesome. It was a series of mini-adventures that added up to a pretty exciting day. I started out at the clinic, but was soon informed that Pastor Simon and 2 of the orphans were going into Limuru to the market to get food and he wanted me to come. I’m always up for going to markets, for some reason I just LOVE them, and I also love the idea of doing something besides “work on Saturday. :-P So 1.5 hours after I was informed “we’re going now”, we left. :-P
We went into Limuru and after stopping to greet every 3^rd person we saw on the street, made it to the market. We wandered around for a little, I got a pair of sandals that would have cost about $15 in the US for $5, and we stopped at one fruit stand to get enough food for about 16 people for a week and a half. You can imagine the large amount of food that was. All the fruits and vegetables (the starches I guess they already had) weighed probably about 40lbs, and cost about Ksh1000 = $12.50. Can you imaine paying $12.50 for avocados, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, carrots, lettuce, cilantro, bananas, watermelon, peppers, and on and on for 16 people for over a week? Yeah, no.
Then we went back home and I spent the afternoon taking a nap on the exam table in the clinic, since we didn’t have any patients in the 2 hours from when we got back until 4, when we closed. When I got back to the house, they asked if I wanted to go with the kids to “prepare maize at pastor’s house”. I ahd no idea what that might entail, but I said sure! When I got there, there was a huge tarp on the ground, about 20x30ft, covered in dried maize-on-the-cob, already husked. Our job was to sit and pick the kernels off the maize. I LOVE peeling, picking, and all things mindless and systematic, so it was great fun for me until I got blisters deep under my skin. :-P When it started getting shady as the sun went behind the house, we packed all the still-kerneled maize back into a bunch of giant tarp bags (why it was all out in the first place is unknown to me) and went inside, where a few of us continued de-kerneling maize while watching a random soccer game on TV. After a while it was “time to go” so we went. When we got back to the house, we basically just left again- me and 3 of the girls. They wanted to get baking powder to make a cake for one of their birthdays/the high school kids are all leaving today or tomorrow. Unfortunately, the baking shop was closed, so we tried 8-ish different general shops in the local downtown (we’re on the outskirts of Limuru, about 10 minutes drive from that downtown) but none of them had it. The whole time we were walking the kids were doing the usual point-and-yell thing, only here they are all Kikuyu, so they yell “mothongo” instead of “mzungu”. One time we came around a corner and these two 8-or-9 yr old kids stopped DEAD in their tracks when they saw me.
When we got home I checked my email and when I came out of my room, the same guy who told me Obama/Osama was dead this morning said he was going to milk a cow. I asked if I could come watch, so I got the job of flashlight-holder. Turns out he’d already milked the cows except this one, who was getting over an infection in 2 of her teats. So he washed and massaged the udder with hot water, then milked her a little…the 2 infected ones produced green pus, basically, but the other 2 made perfectly nice-looking milk. I was told the pus was because of the antibiotic injections she’d gotten the past couple days, but I don’t understand how antibiotics make pus. We’ll chalk it up to a communication issue rather than bad science. :-P
That evening we sat and watched as MamaAlice helped Tracy (I finally figured out her name) put chemical relaxer in her hair while Isaac, the Maasai guard, tried to get me to agree with him that it was wrong for women to want straight hair because God gave them curly hair and it was a waste of time and money. I refused to agree with him and told him it was her time and her money, I didn’t see anything wrong with her wanting straight hair and I thought she could do that if she wanted, she isn’t putting chemicals in your hair so don’t worry about it. :-P

Sunday was church, where I was paraded around the kids’ Sunday school like a freak show freak…I guess it’s a cultural thing where they are honoring you by introducing you to everyone and wanting you to speak and publicly introduce yourself everywhere, but I can’t help feeling like a big part of it is just “look, we have a new toy, come see it!” Sooo I introduced myself in front of the church- in Swahili- which shocked everyone, haha. Pastor asked someone to come translate and I said no, I’ll do it in Swahili- the first sentence out of my mouth the congregation cheered. Everyone here tells me that I have to learn Swahili, and they’re always shocked when I actually do know it.
After church was a baptism service, but apparently the nearest body of water was a 20-minute drive away, so they rented some matatus and I drove with Pastor…I was one of 5 people in the backseat, 2 of which were very large grandmas, one of them was the grandson, but he didn’t even get a seat. It was quite the uncomfortable ride. We got to this lake, and 2 of the pastors put on rubber boots and climbed in. They got a big stick for the people being baptized to use to help themselves down into the water, some women started banging the goatskin drums and singing, and they got started. About halfway through, it started raining, and then it started raining hard. Most of the women covered their heads with lesos but a few pulled out plastic bags and put them on their heads. So I took pictures. :-P
It stopped raining about the time the baptisms finished and then we went to a “hotel” owned by 2 sisters from the church (hotel = very TINY restaurant that serves usually chai and a few different foods) for chai. We were 10 people and filled the place to maximum capacity. So we had tea and buttered bread, hung out for a little, then went home.

When I got back a few more of the girls had returned from holiday, so I spent some time chatting with them in their room. We were all given a cob of boiled and salted maize on the cob- yum, and then a small miracle happened. 5-yr old Austin, who refused to say a word to me for the first 5½ days I was here, just sat down on the bed across from me and started talking to me while eating his maize. I don’t know WHAT happened with him, but all of a sudden now we’re friends. He calls me “mzungu” and doesn’t run away from me anymore, and this morning while I was eating breakfast he showed me this 2-inch long rhinoceros beetle he somehow managed to trap in the empty battery compartment of a toy car. I win.