Orphanage and Movie Night

Today we went to the orphanage nearby for the first time. It was about a 5 minute walk to get there and it was a shocking 5 minutes. Our compound is in a pretty nice area with other nice, fenced in compounds around it. In just that 5 minute walk, a lot changed. It went from houses with fences to houses made of mud or scrap tin. There was garbage everywhere and kids scrounging through that garbage, looking for anything salvageable. It was so terrible, and the conditions were unimaginable. The Rebby Junior School was sitting right in the midst of this. It is a school for orphans, or children with one parent or 2 parents that can’t support them. The children get educated there for free and spend most of their days there. Some of the kids sleep there, but the kids who can go back to their parents. The school has walls made of mud and sticks. There is no windows and very little air movement within the area, so it was very hot. The kids were so happy though! They were adorable and very happy to see us. We were there for about 3 hours and they did skits and sang songs for us. They also did some group dances with us and we showed them some dances for them to do with us, like the chicken dance, YMCA, hockey pockey and the Macarena. It was a lot of fun. I think their favorite part of the morning was taking pictures though. They love to get their picture taken and then they stole our camera’s and were taking pictures with them.

Joel, the guy from the UK who was here 2 weeks before us, is doing a 6 week program here. After visiting the orphanage the first time, he decided to set up a website asking for donations to help rebuild the orphanage with actual cement walls and floors. It didn’t take him long to raise the money (it only took about $1000) and to purchase supplies. Work will start sometime this week and we will probably all be helping at some point. It is really inspiring that he did all of this mostly by himself and it will make such a difference to these kids.

I haven’t really wrote in here yet how thankful to God I am that I was born in the US, but I think about that every single day, especially today. We are so blessed that we don’t have to live like this, that even our poor live 100 times better than this (I will admit, this is an assumption as I have not really visited many slums in the States). This orphanage was a Christian orphanage too, and just to hear them singing songs of praise to God was really amazing. These kids aren’t angry about what they don’t have, just happy about what they do. It just really puts things in perspective for me. We complain so much about things that just really don’t matter in the scheme of things. We don’t have to worry day by day if we will have enough food or if we will have any sort of roof over our heads or if we will die from some very curable disease because we don’t have enough money to pay for medication. I know that I will still find myself complaining about someone putting pickles on my McDonald’s burger when I get home, but I have a feeling I will be thinking twice before I actually get upset about things not going my way.

One thing that I haven’t mentioned about Kenya is the fact that everyone here loves Obama. Everyone who hears we are from the US says something about Obama and how much they love him and how he is from Kenya. The hospital that we work at, Coast Province General, even claims that they have Obama’s birth certificate. They don’t know enough about our laws to realize that this is a bad thing, not a good thing. They think that all Americans must automatically love Obama too, which is funny to us since that is not the case.

After the morning of dancing and singing, some of the kids walked back with us to the compound for the swimming lessons. I didn’t actually help with these, except for from the sidelines, but it was really funny to watch. Most of them could swim a little, but they had a hard time doing the back floats or other things. They mostly just wanted to swim in the pool with us I think. After this, I went to take a nap because I was exhausted from the heat and dancing of the morning.

I’m getting really excited for the safari this weekend. We will leave early Thursday morning, spend the night in Nairobi, 2 half days and one whole day on the safari, another night in Nairobi and back to the compound by Monday night. Before Mia left, she told us a lot about the safari and it sounds so amazing to see. They saw all of the big 5 except for the Rhinos and they saw lions multiple times. She also saw these animals really close up. I’m excited to bring home pictures of this! Yes, videos too hopefully.

Tonight we went to the movie theater. It was absolutely amazing how different the theater is than the rest of Mombasa. It was easily the nicest and biggest theater I’ve ever been to. We all forgot that we were even in Kenya for those couple hours. We went to see The Dark Night Rises. I had already seen this movie, but it was just as good the second time. The only strange thing about the theater is that before every movie, they ask everyone to stand up as they play the Kenyan national anthem. It seems so random to me! Anyways, all in all it was a good experience and a good break from this life where we are constantly thinking about how different things are here. It was a very American experience with pop and popcorn and a good movie. Well tomorrow, we go back to the hospital. I’m hoping to get to watch some surgeries.

First Procedure!

I ended up going to the hospital this morning and so I’ll go to the orphanage later this week. I was in Minor all morning and I actually got to do a lot of things. Thanks to the wonderful advice from my Dad and Luke, I found a way to wear the sterile latex gloves by wearing my latex-free gloves underneath. It worked like a charm! There were a couple of people in who needed dressing changes and I got to help with that and with changing some catheters. Then, a man came in who was badly beat up from a motorbike accident. There are a lot of motorcycles here and they are even a form of public transportation (you can jump on the back of one and go wherever you need to for only about 80 cents). I have yet to see anyone wearing a helmet on these, which is absolutely stunning considering how people drive here. So, not surprisingly, we get a lot of men who have been in accidents at the hospital. This man needed stitches on the side and top of his head. Angie and I watched the doctor do the first couple on the side of his face then she was able to do the last couple. This was her first time suturing. Then it was my turn to try and do the stitches on top of his head. I got everything ready and started stitching, but the skin on the top of his head was so thick that I couldn’t get the needle to go through and I was hesitant to push any harder than I was for fear that I would hurt him further (even though the area was numbed). So, I tried a couple separate times before the doctor took back over. He said that it was some of the toughest skin he had done and it was a real struggle for even him to do the stitches. It was probably not a good one to start on for my first try, but at least I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to do it next time, or on my own if I really needed to. We then finished cleaning the man up and dressing most of his wounds. At this point, we run out of sterile gauze (which is what we clean and dress everything with) and there didn’t seem to be any in the whole hospital, which was very frustrating. The nurses didn’t really care and even said to Chelsea, “You just need to accept that there is none and stop looking.” They were perfectly fine with sending away patients that needed help getting cleaned up or stitched. They just said that they told the patients to just come back tomorrow. This was frustrating for us to see and so we ended up leaving pretty shortly after.

So, when we got back home, Chelsea, Alexa and I decided to do laundry. This was a Much bigger ordeal than we thought it would be. It takes so long to wash everything by hand! About 3 items in, we started sorting our clothes into things we really needed washed, and things we could live without getting washed. It was still a lot of stuff to wash though. Then, we had to hang everything on the line to dry. I’ve never been more grateful for washing machines and dryers back home! We then relaxed out by the pool for awhile. A lot of us read in our down time, and I’ve already gone through 3 books

The food here is something that I could do without. Every night, its white rice or pasta and some sort of stew with chicken or mystery meat over the top. A lot of time there is potatoes in the stew. I’m very sick of starches. I looked at a break-down of the Kenyan diet in a newspaper here and it said that 77% of their diet is carbohydrates. I can really believe that. The meat is definitely not the farm grown quality that we are used to. It’s all edible, but it’s just a little bland and we are all getting sick of not having much variety.

Tonight we are hanging out at Café Mocha again. It’s definitely one of our favorite places to relax. Quite a few people are going to the hospital tonight, but since it gets overwhelming for the patients when there are so many of us (and because there isn't anything to do when there are a ton of us there), I'm taking my turn and sitting this night out. Tomorrow I'll get to hang out with the kids again! That is definitely my favorite part so far.

Sunday Funday

It was another lazy day today. We spent the first part of the afternoon at the beach. We were much more careful not to get scammed this time. I tried to get some videos of the beach and the guys who were wind-boarding. We can’t do anything here without someone trying to get money out of us. I’ll be so thankful to be back in the States where that doesn’t happen. Today was Mia’s last day, so that was really sad. It made me really homesick to see her packing everything up. I miss everyone back home a lot! I’m also not ashamed to say that I miss the modern conveniences of home. It’ll be nice to be able to take a warm shower again (the choices here are either scalding your skin off or ice cold). I also miss really random things, like Subway and driving and not getting honked or stared at. I’ve adjusted to things here, but that doesn’t mean I have to love the way things are. It also makes me sad to see Mia leave, first of all because we’ll miss her and second of all because that means that we only have two weeks left. It’s crazy how fast the first week has gone! Then we only have 3 days this week and our safari and then it’s the final week. I can’t wrap my mind around that.

Tomorrow we have the choice to go to either the orphanage or the hospital. I’m not sure which I’ll go to, but then the groups will switch for Tuesday.  We’ll also give swimming lessons to some children from the orphanage on Tuesday at the pool here on the compound.

Lazy Day

Today was a very relaxing, lazy day. We slept in until about noon since we got in pretty late last night and then we got ready and went to Old Town, a very touristy location with a bunch of little shops with handmade items. I bought some things to bring home, and looked at a whole bunch more. I’ll have to go back at another time to shop some more now that I know what is all there. They work really hard to sell you things, but usually they will bargain with you. It’s a really hard thing to bargain for everything here when no one bargains for anything back home. People here will definitely try and get as much money out of you as possible. A group of us (not my group) actually got scammed while they were there by a guy who told them he was security and was going to take them around to the shops. At the end of walking around, he said that they needed to pay him for taking them on tour of the place. They did, but not nearly what he asked. They weren’t very happy about it. When people like that came up to us, we made it very clear that we would not need a tour guide. Anyways, it was certainly an experience to go shopping here.

We had a barbeque tonight and it was really good to finally have American food (and not have to pay extra for it). Then we all came to Café Mocha to use the free wifi and to get ice cream in celebration of Mia’s last night. We are all super tired, so I don’t think we’ll stay here very late. Its good to be able to relax like this on these days.

I swear that I will get more pictures up soon!

Day with the Kids

I’m sorry that I didn’t get my post from yesterday up until today. I typed it up yesterday but the internet wasn’t working so I couldn’t post it.
This morning we went to a school for needy children (not an orphanage like I thought). It was really terrible conditions still but the children were so dang cute!!It was a lot of fun. We gave out toothbrushes and toothpaste and then showed them how to brush their teeth. Some of the children told us that they did brush their teeth, but the lady in charge told us that they just were trying to brush with sticks. It was so sad to here that, and to see one teething little boy chewing on a rusty nail. We also demonstrated good hand washing and gave them a bunch of little packets of soap. Right away when we got there, all the children sang cute little songs for us. One of them was even in English! Don’t worry, I got a video of that. They latched on to us right away and always wanted to be holding our hands or hanging on us. A couple of the little ones let us hold them and carry them around for awhile. They were just so happy to have someone play with them and they kept smiling at us the whole time. Some of the parents were there too and they were happy to see us. They all wanted us to take pictures with their kids on our cameras. It was funny. During one group picture, a little baby behind me grabbed my hair and pulled and everyone thought that was pretty entertaining. We also gave them all suckers with whistles. They loved those so much. It was mass chaos for awhile with all of them blowing their whistles at once. They were really sad when we had to leave and said bye and waved after us for a long time. I wanted to take so many of them home with me!

Some of the kids at the school that we went to. So adorable!

It was really nice to have a break from the hospital, especially since it was such a fun break and for a good cause. We hung around the compound for the afternoon, and I took a much needed nap. We decided that we are going to go out tonight because its Mia’s last weekend here, which is sad. It’s been really nice to have her here to help us learn the ropes and everything. She’s also really nice and we’ll miss her. Have a good night!

Thursday at the Hospital

We ended up just taking the night off last night and hanging out around the compound. I went out and bought a new camera so that I can start making up for the pictures that I lost. It was really nice to take a break from everything and just chill. It helps so much to be able to talk to everyone else about the hospital. Everyone here shares the same frustrations with the Kenyan medical system and how reluctant everyone seems to be to help the patients or to help us help the patients. I know that it is hard for people who aren’t here to be able to understand how awful this situation is, so it helps to be able to talk things through with people who are experiencing this too. I will say it is crazy how used to this very different place I am already. I’m still affected by all the bad things that go on, but I could see myself being here long term. There is just so much need that we can partially help eliminate. We all can already tell that it is going to be really hard to come back home and to see how much excess we have while people here literally have nothing. The people who are below the “poverty” line have no idea how good they have it to still be able to have running water, shoes, and food for their family.
Today at the hospital I got to be in Minor for the whole morning. It was really interesting and cool because I got to do a lot of the hands on stuff. I put my first catheter in today! Okay, so technically I wasn’t successful, but that’s only because the patient had blockage and so would need surgery to put one in. I think it still counts. I also cleaned and dressed several really gruesome looking wounds. I took pictures for those who want to see, but I don’t think I’ll put them on here because they really do look disturbing. One lady who came in had injured her arm and leg in a bus accident about 3 weeks about. Literally, her arm wound was about an inch deep and the whole top of her arm was gone. She doesn’t remember exactly what happened in the accident, which is probably a blessing. Anyways, she has been coming every day or every other day to the hospital to get it cleaned and dressed and so Joel and Mia are very attached to her. I can see why, as I already really like her after just one day. She was so happy and spoke very good English. She’s also a little bit of a drama queen, which is really funny. The first thing she said to us was her name and “I’m warning you, I’m a screamer.” She was very impressed with herself because she didn’t end up screaming as we cleaned it (which is very painful because we have to make sure it’s bleeding a little again). She also showed us how the women here wrap themselves in their sarongs.  It was very cool to be able to hang out with her a little bit. It’s very cool when we get patients like her who only want us students to work on her. She and other people specifically ask when we will be there and work their schedules around so that they can make it to the hospital at those times. It makes us feel very good about what we are doing. Also, we cleaned up a little seven year old boy who was very brave. We went out and bought candy so that we could make the kids a little less scared of being there, so he got a sucker before and after getting re-bandaged. I also spent a little time again in Casualty, but not very much because I’m still frustrated by that part of the hospital.
I took a nap this afternoon and just hung out until we decided to go back to the hospital at 9. We stayed until about 1. Things were actually pretty calm in Casualty so we could actually help handle things and learn how to do certain things. I got a couple of people IV fluids and took vital signs. I also mainly made sure the doctor who was there went over and actually examined the patients there, many of which had been waiting for hours and hours. One elderly gentleman had been unresponsive for 3 days when they finally brought him in. 3 days without being able to eat or drink. We immediately started him on fluids. He was just getting over both malaria and typhoid. The doctor ordered ultrasounds and decided that the patient most likely had liver cancer, as well as possible TB. It’s really scary how many diseases we are exposed to here that we would never be in the US. There is no infection control to speak of, and very little sterile procedure. They often just let things stay bloody or leave blood on the floor for hours before someone cleans it up (and I’m not sure if they even use a good disinfectant). We also had a hemophiliac patient who was bleeding from a mouth wound. The doctor was actually pretty good tonight and was very eager to teach us things. At one point, he handed Angie and I x-rays of a man’s head that had been in an accident and told us to go interpret him and let him know what we saw. That would have been cool to do, if either of us had ever had any sort of training or experience with that sort of thing, but we didn’t. We actually guessed right with fluid around the brain.
That was mostly it for tonight. Tomorrow, I’m going with to an orphanage here to hand out supplies for the orphans like toothbrushes and toothpaste. One student here has an organization (IamAid.org) that actually raises money and brings medical supplies over here and he is running this too. It’s very cool. It should be a fun and hopefully easy-going day.

Wednesday Afternoon Update

I would first like to apologize to anyone who was worried last night after my post. I was exhausted and emotionally drained and wasn’t thinking clearly about how others might interpret my last statements.

I’ll start at about 8:30 pm when we got back to the hospital. At night, the only parts of the hospital that are open to new patients are Minor Theater and Casualty. We started off in Minor. A young boy of about 12 came in with a bad cut on his foot. I actually got to clean and dress the wound. It was a little gruesome looking, but it didn’t actually bother me to do this. Before the boy came in, the group of us had been hanging out in the staff area and I set my camera down on the table in there. While we were busy cleaning up this boy, some people who were there with him walked through that room and I’m assuming that is where my camera disappeared to. This was really upsetting at the time, because I really hated losing my pictures and it just seemed like another thing that has gone wrong here for me. It just seems like it’s one thing after another. Also, I was very disappointed to learn at this point that I won’t actually be able to give people stitches or to help with surgeries like some people have because the sterile surgical gloves that they have for this are latex and there are no latex-free ones. For those of you who don’t know, I have a latex allergy which I don’t really notice in the US because most things are latex-free. Here, however, it seems to be a much bigger deal, unfortunately. So I was already slightly depressed at this point in the night and the night had really just started.

Just a warning, this next part is quite depressing and you may want to skip over this part.

Then Joel, who had been in casualty, came into Minor and told us that they needed help in Casualty badly and so we all rushed over there. Casualty is supposed to be an emergency room. However, it was absolutely stunning and terribly frustrating because we soon learned that the doctors and nurses working there had no sense of urgency at all for these people. People were literally bleeding out, and those who could help were just sitting down, hanging out, or strolling from patient to patient. A little boy just died on a table all alone, without a doctor even going over to see what was wrong. A tiny baby, maybe 1 month old, was just lying on a table, struggling to breathe, with no one even sparing her a glance. So, naturally, we burst in there and started running around trying to help these people by getting them oxygen or IV fluids or anything at all to help. The nurses and doctors wouldn’t even help us unless we literally dragged them over to a patient. We got oxygen set up for the little baby girl, trying to help her breathe and put an O₂ stat on her to monitor the level of oxygen in her blood (it should be 100% for healthy people). I held the baby to give her a nebulizer treatment and as I was holding her, her oxygen levels just started dropping. At first, we just watched, hoping the neb would start working and helping her breathe easier. However, as they kept dropping, we became more and more frantic, trying to get someone over to us to help. This whole time, I’m holding this tiny baby, and she’s staring into my eyes until she starts closing her eyelids slowly and I can just tell that she’s going to die. I tried my hardest to get her to keep her eyes open and awake, as her oxygen dropped into the single digits. Finally, we give up on the neb and put oxygen back on her, but the oxygen levels continued to stay very low. The baby had closed her eyes. Luckily, we finally were frantic enough that we finally pulled someone over to the baby. I had to leave at this point, because I thought for sure they would just take off her oxygen and declare her dead. But when I laid her back down on the table, she miraculously started to breathe a little better and her oxygen got up to acceptable levels. This should be a happy ending, but most likely that baby never got any more help and eventually let go of life in that terrible room. At this point, the doctors told us we had to leave because we were “upsetting the patients.” It’s so terribly frustrating that these doctors don’t value any of these people’s lives enough to exert an effort at all to save them. I can understand and accept death, when everything possible has been done to help. But I can’t understand neglecting to help these people at all. I don’t know how many people die in there everyday from simple neglect, but it’s too many. Two more babies died just this morning, which was again probably preventable. It’s so sad, I can’t handle it. I was very shaken up over this last night and just couldn’t pull it completely together after holding that baby and knowing she almost died, and maybe still did, just because no one felt like helping her.

Today was better and I guess I’ve accepted that I can’t change everyone’s attitudes in this place, but I still can’t accept senseless deaths. I don’t know if I will be able to handle going back into Casualty for the remainder of this trip, but I guess we’ll just have to see. I spent this morning in the Family Care Clinic, which mostly focuses on giving treatment and monitoring children with HIV. I was with a very good doctor here and she was very informative. She told me a lot about the disease, and maternal transmission of it. She said that about 60% of babies will get it from their mom’s if the mom is HIV positive and doesn’t take the proper preventative medication while she is pregnant. Also, if the baby doesn’t get HIV from the mom during pregnancy or childbirth, the baby can also get it from breastfeeding from the mom. However, most babies born without HIV don’t get it from breastfeeding and breastfeeding is often the only option that mother’s have for feeding the baby because formula is so expensive. Formula costs about $500 for 6 months and most people’s income is only about $350 a year. The baby of an HIV positive mother gets tested for HIV at 6 weeks, 9 months, and 18 months. If the baby is negative at 18 months, they have officially not gotten it through maternal transmission. Most of the children who came in were just getting their blood drawn for a CD4 counts. They get this done every 1 to 3 months, depending on how good or bad their counts are. The higher the CD4, the better. It was a very interesting and informative subject for me, since I am doing my Independent study project at SDSU on HIV in Africa. I’m hoping to spend some more time with this doctor before my time in Africa is done. The good thing about this hospital is that all of their HIV testing and counseling and medication is free to everyone. It’s a wonderful thing that I’m sure has saved many people’s lives or has given them a chance at normal life. The doctor told me that the biggest thing that needs to happen to reduce maternal transmission is education and empowerment of the women in Africa. She said many family’s don’t want a pregnant women to go to the doctor for any prenatal care. They have a large distrust of doctors, which I kind of understand after seeing the emergency room. Many women won’t go against the family’s wishes and go get the proper testing and medication. There is also a large stigma yet in the country against those who are diagnosed with HIV, so many women just don’t want to know whether or not they have it. The doctors at this clinic do not tell the children that they have HIV until the children are at least teenagers and able to handle this news. It seems shocking to me, but that is how they have found things work better here. After the HIV clinic, I went to Minor where I helped clean and dress some more wounds. One guy who was about 25 threw the biggest fit I have ever seen over getting his wound cleaned. We numbed it and everything and he was still freaking out. I finally let him hold my hands and I swear that he squeezed them so hard that it hurt me more than cleaning the wound hurt him. After that we called it a day at the hospital.

We went out for lunch again because there really isn’t anything to eat at the compound for lunch. The lunch meats and bread that they have for sandwiches is much different than what we have at home and not in the good way, so most of us don’t want to eat it. However, it is getting expensive to eat out like this, even if things are cheaper than in America. We are just hanging out now in the afternoon and are still deciding whether or not we want to go back to the hospital for an evening shift tonight.