And So It Goes.

... and so we go. Taking off early tomorrow morning in a bus for the long trek to Nairobi, killing a few hours in the city, and flying out at 11pm. Hopefully reaching home by Thursday if the Icelandic volcano gods allow. The week has been a bittersweet mix of reunions and goodbyes.


We went to visit Baby Gloria at her new home out in Kapenguria. She's putting on weight and chugs a bottle like a champ!


Too cute to pass up. What a face.



Being a poser with Sharon and Metrine at Nema House.


Chilling with the very expectant Mama Virginia and Regan at the Veronica Home.
(Getting there that day involved a 30-minute walk through muddy roads, a 10-minute ride in a 12-passenger van with 27 people in it, and riding on the back of a motorcycle in a downpour for another few miles to the house. All in an afternoon's work..)

Visiting classy and popular places like the New York Hotel.


Enjoying the 5-10 minutes of sunshine each day.. (yes that's a lone bike parked on the road)..


Spending most of the day waiting for the rain to stop..


And in the meantime, picking enormous ticks off the Veronica Home's pregnant (and practically comatose) dog, Tiger.

Oh boy. Leaving is hard. I'd hoped it might be easier the second time around, but no such luck.

See you all on the other side...

Lina.

Just got back from a weekend sleepover at the new Veronica Home. It was a little surreal, as we used to have sleepovers often out at the old children's home 2 years ago, with twice the amount of kids. But the new place felt amazingly homey and welcoming.

The best part, hands down, was getting to hang out with Lina. She was brought to the old children's home near-death last time we were here (old post on her here, back when we thought her name was Linda) and has not only healed completely from malaria, pneumonia, severe dehydration and malnutrition, she is stumping doctors now by testing negative for HIV, when her body was rampant with it just 2 years ago.



I had to take a picture of her leg, which used to have a bacteria-filled hole in it (photo on the older post). She no longer walks with a limp, but remembers her hospital stay very vividly, down to every meal she ate there! She is healthy and happy, and has this wizened old soul feeling about her, maybe because she is only 8 but has been through more than most of us will in our lifetimes.

Let's Go to the Hospital!

African hospitals are the one thing that's quite similar to the way I envisioned it before coming to Africa. Without generalizing too much, they are typically crowded, chaotic, dirty, and fascinating.

Last week Ina and I went to Kitale District hospital, partly to find out what happened to a burn victim we visited 2 years ago, and partly to wander around and meet people. (Forget any HIPAA laws around here!)

When we entered the parking lot, an old woman and her daughter, with presumably her daughter tied to her back, ran up to me. The old woman was wailing and holding her wrist while her daughter waved a fee slip and yelled something frantically in Swahili. After a few questions, I discovered the old woman couldn't be treated until she paid the 30 shilling admittance fee (roughly 40 cents). She unwrapped her arm and showed me her wrist, which flopped awkwardly away from her body, clearly broken. Ina can tell you I'm staunchly anti-handouts, but all I could think of right then was "40 bloody cents, Andrea." I handed her two 20-shilling pieces and she wailed her thanks and ran back to the counter to be admitted.

Ordeal #1 complete. And we hadn't even entered the hospital yet.


To cut a long morning short, we spent some time with the nurses in the burn unit, which was also being used for a bit of everything else. There were kids with chicken pox, a boy with the entire left side of his body swollen to twice the normal size, and woman with a huge bloody gauze strip over her eye. A man in a wheelchair with a covered hand was pushed by, wailing, and leaving a trail of blood spots behind him. We talked with a nurse as she 'disinfected' (she touched so many things with her 'sterile' gloves, I lost count) an older woman's leg amputation wound. The majority of her leg had been removed a few years earlier due to diabetes complications, but became infected recently and was so badly enflamed and reopened, you could see the bone inside.

The best part of the day was walking into the infant ward and finding a little bundle on a bed in the back room.



She was brought to the hospital the day before by an area chief, after being found abandoned outside the local prison. She was clearly premature but in perfect condition apart from bug bites on her left arm. I have never seen such an incredibly small but perfectly formed little body.

We went back to visit the next day, and talked to a nurse about her. The only way she could be discharged was if she weighed more than 3kg, and she currently weighed 1. Ironically, the nurse admitted to us, she was much more likely to gain weight in a baby or foster home than in the dirty hospital, being exposed to God knows how many diseases, and fed and changed whenever the overworked nurses happened to have a minute.

On my way to the hospital the 3rd day, I got a text from my friend Mere, saying the baby had just been taken by their friends Jeff and Carla, who run a large and thriving baby home outside town. They'd stopped by to see her and the nurse had told them just to take her, even though she was technically 2kg underweight. So the informality of it all has its pluses..

We are headed back to the hospital tomorrow to pick up malaria meds for a friend. More on that later.

The Week in Pictures. With a Few Words.

Visiting the twins, Teddline and Lavender, from the children's home we worked with 2 years ago. 14 years old and SO tall!


The roads right after a daily downpour. We enjoy standing at this particular spot watching overly-confident vehicles fishtail all over the place before getting stuck.


Dan and the girls hanging out in the front yard of the new Veronica Home.


Ina and her avo the size of a football. One of the many reasons we love Kenya.


Yes, that's a homemade pizza in Kenya.
Yes, we each ate a whole quarter of it.
And yes, it does indeed have a stuffed crust.


On the way out to Mali Saba on the back of a pick-up.


Todd, Ina, and Dan checking out the brick progress at a project in Soy. Check out that view of the valley.


Mama Dreadlocks with baby.


Getting a new hairstyle from Regan, as the rains roll in.


A full week back in Kitale Town.
Highlights:

Eating real pizza. It'd been a while.

A story floating around town about 3 pregnant ladies walking to the hospital. One stops to rest on a log and a cobra comes up and wraps itself around her. A man backs his truck near it, covering it with exhaust fumes, and the cobra flees the scene. Mum and baby both die. Snake is spotted the next day at a farm, eating a cow, before retreating to the forest. Police have been searching for it all week, but assume that after eating an entire cow, it may be digesting for a while. (This is one of those classic Kenyan stories that is tragic if true, but is so bizarre it's hard to believe. We have our doubts, but numerous Kenyan friends swear it happened.)

Driving out to a rural project in the Land Cruiser. Ina and I are in the back seat, Dan is in the front on the phone, and Todd is driving. All of a sudden Todd yells, "Wait, what side of the road am I supposed to be on???!"

Walking down to the Shimo slums nearby and passing a young boy who I vaguely recognized. I asked if his name was Camou, and indeed it was. He was one of the youngest kids at the street kids' school 2 years ago, and I used to buy him cream for the ringworm on his face, as his father is dead and his Mum was a well-known alcoholic in town. He is now a healthy, growing 6-year old going to a local primary school and living with family members nearby. When it feels like so many things here have changed for the worst, stories like that make coming back so sweet.

Everything Changes.

It's funny how in the western world, you can assume there will be a lot of change in a place over 2 years, but I naively assumed because of the slow pace of African life, things would stay generally the same here. Not so, as we've discovered in only a few days back in Kitale. It feels like every project we worked in or alongside has now relocated, gotten new leadership, re-structured itself, or ended altogether.

The biggest change has taken place in my favourite project -- a large, rural home with 2 outstanding house parents and around 30 kids, whom we spent every Saturday and many overnights with in 2008. TI began working with the home the year before, shortly after it started up. Money was invested in animals, a well, farming, and construction. Amazing relationships were established. Over the last year, we'd been hearing about a lot of corruption in some of the home's outside leadership. Food was being taken, a cow was stolen, the well was dry, the kids weren't getting the care they needed, and all the wrong people were being blamed. Most bizarrely, it was discovered that nearly half of the kids in the home actually have well-off family members in the area who were willing to care for them! After much discussion and prayer, TI decided to cut ties with the corrupt people involved, return the kids with families to their homes (while continuing their school sponsorhips and monthly visits), and start a smaller home nearby for the remaining children.

This home is called the Veronica House, after a young girl from the original home who died of AIDS last year. 3 of the remaining kids are HIV+, so there will be a special focus on getting them the right nutrition, medication, and routine to thrive. Ina and I went to the home on Saturday when the house parents and kids moved in. It was both joyful to watch them explore their new bedrooms and backyard, and sad, feeling the enormous absence of so many kids we'd gotten so attached to, particularly the beautiful and quiet Veronica. The house Mum was thrilled to see us again but emotionally spent from so many goodbyes and the past year of accusations, mixed messages, lies, sickness, death, and who knows what else.

And so it goes in Africa. New beginnings are awesome, but mourning the loss of things lost is never easy.

On a lighter note, we also visited the Nema House for ex-street girls last week. 3 of the original 6 girls are still there (a reasonably good percentage, all things considered), and the 3 newer additions seem to be doing really well. Below are the lovely Lillian and Sharon. I took the picture mainly because Sharon is wearing a scrubs top that says "Animal Emergency Clinic, Tacoma, WA."

Yes, We Have No Bananas.

Actual dialogue with a waiter today at a cafe in town:

Me (looking over the large menu): Could I get a mango shake?
Waiter: Sorry, we don't have.
Me: Oh, okay. Umm, a mango juice?
Waiter: Sorry, we don't have.
Me: What about a strawberry milkshake?
Waiter: Don't have.
Me: Okay, umm...
Waiter: From the drinks, we only have passion [fruit] juice.
Me: OH. Okay. That's fine, I won't have anything.
Waiter: No, you must have something! Maybe something small to eat?
Me: No it's okay. Don't worry about it.
Waiter: No, have some food!
Me: Alright, fine. Do you have the spring rolls?
Waiter: Oh no, we don't have.
Me: What about samosas?
Waiter: YES! Samosas we have!
Me: Okay but do you have veg samosas? No meat?
Waiter: YES, we have veg samosas. I'll bring one.

[Waiter returns with samosa and leaves. I take a bite and my mouth is filled with hamburger. He returns.]

Me: I thought you said you have veg samosa? This is meat.
Waiter: No, we only have meat.
Me: OH. I SEE. Well, could you take this one back? I don't eat meat.
(winning line of the day in 3... 2... 1.... )
Waiter: Well, why don't you change your diet?
Me: (thinking: Why don't you go get fired?) No, that's okay. I won't have anything. Thanks.

I swear it was never this difficult living here 2 years ago.