Safi.

I posted pictures, but I'm not sure how the format will work once I press "pubblica post" (the browser is still in Italian...) One is of my banda. It is called "popomingi" which means bat. Ironically, a bat lives in the wall next to my bed and scares the crap out of me when it flaps while I try to sleep. The other picture is the view of Kilimanjaro from our camp. Amazing, right?

This past weekend we did a lot with the community. Saturday we had our first community service event. We went to a traveling clinic of sorts that was set up at a one-classroom school about two hours from KBC. We gave out prescriptions for various problems (mostly antibiotics), gave children vitamin A and de-wormers, distributed mosquito nets, provided measles vaccines, and weighed children under 5 years old to see if they were underweight or not. A lot of people showed up. One of the nurses told me that people had walked many kilometers to get there. There were so many people that, unfortunately, we did not have enough vaccines and netting. It was hard to turn people away, especially with the language barrier because it was hard to explain why they weren’t getting what they traveled so far for. Overall, though, it was a great experience. We played with the kids and tried to have conversations with our minimal Kiswahili. I spent some time in the diagnosis room watching the nurse write down the diagnoses and prescriptions that she was giving people because I couldn’t understand what they were saying. It seemed like about 1/3 of the people had malaria and something else, and almost everyone had some type of parasite or virus.

The next day was another non-program day. In the morning, a lot of the group decided to go to church. Maybe some other time I’ll see what it’s like, but I don’t think I really care to see what church is like here. It’s like wanting to see what the malls are like here. I’m not too interested in seeing Western culture in a traditional setting. Anyway, in the afternoon we went to Oloitokitok to visit the VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing), an HIV/AIDS support and information center. They do free testing, provide people with treatment and information, have a support group, and help the members make crafts to sell to visitors. It is difficult for people here with HIV/AIDS to find work because most work involves manual labor through agriculture and pastoralism, so VCT helps them make some money to pay for the food they need to stay healthy (medicine is provided by the government). Several of the members told us their stories of how they came to find out that they were positive, how it affected their lives, and how they got involved in VCT. It’s really amazing what VCT has done for these people. The support group has helped work to eliminate the stigmas associated with HIV/AIDS here and helped afflicted people learn how to live positively. There are several other VCT centers in the region, but as roads are really bad and most people don’t have cars, several kilometers can prevent people from going to VCT or even hospitals and clinics to get help.

Today I was cook crew, which means I woke up an hour early to make breakfast and cleaned dishes after dinner. Once a week we get to do this. I enjoy cook crew. The cook crews are named after Kenyan tribes. Mine is Luo, the tribe that Obama’s family is from. Thus we refer to ourselves as “Team Obama.” Last week we were cook crew on a morning that we had a field lecture, so breakfast and thus cook crew were both pushed an hour earlier. Cook crew at 5:45 instead of 6:30 is no fun…it’s still dark out so you need to wear your headlamp just to find the chumba. But a few chants of “yes we can!” got us through the morning. Today cook crew was at the normal time, and we were given the option of cooking whatever we wanted for breakfast. I took charge and made cheesy eggs (we almost never have cheese here and we always want it). Delicious!

Since then we have had a lot of class. We do not have a real schedule here, it varies day to day. The past two days we have had three classes each day. The classes typically run from 1.5 to 2 hours. All the classes are in the chumba as well as our meals, so a day full of class gets very boring. It’s kind of like elementary school – we are always in the same room with the same people. Unless you check the schedule beforehand (which I stopped doing after a few days of being here), you don’t know what classes you have until the day of. Keeps us on our feet! Tomorrow we are spending the entire day at Amboseli National Park, which I’m uber excited about because I missed the first trip. So although we put in some long days full of boring class, there are plenty of excursions and variation in the schedule to keep us interested.