Life Lately

My favorite days at Matibabu are Wednesdays. This is because every Wednesday I join one of the other nurses in going to Nzoia, the other Matibabu clinic about twenty minutes away from Ukwala. I think I’ve mentioned these trips in an earlier post, but I wanted to give some more details about what I do at Nzoia. Also, the example of the Nzoia clinic is a very useful one for me to illustrate the differences between what a student volunteer is able to do at a clinic in the US as compared to rural Kenya.
The Matibabu clinic at Nzoia is much smaller than the Ukwala clinic and seems to have two full- time staff members: a pharmacist and a clinical practitioner. Similarly, the town of Nzoia is very small and has no electric power whatsoever, which means no refrigeration. So, you can’t keep things like food or sodas, or vaccines for that matter. Thus, or objective every Wednesday is to provide early childhood vaccinations to the kids of the Nzoia area as well as doing antenatal checkups on pregnant women.
I’ve never tried, but I’m pretty sure in the US I couldn’t just walk up to a pharmacy with an empty cooler and say “Today, I think I’ll take eight doses of tetanus toxoid vaccines, a dozen measles, and hey, throw in twenty pentavalent while you’re at it”. As it turns out, that’s exactly what I do here in Kenya. It’s difficult to know how much of each vaccine we offer to take to Nzoia each week because the patient flow is unpredictable. My first week here, we saw two babies and one expectant mother. Today we had well over a dozen babies and several antenatal visits. One thing that struck me as really funny was that I (or anybody really) can walk right up to the refrigerator that’s shared between Matibabu and the government health center in Ukwala and grab whatever vaccines I need. On the other hand, we were about an hour late arriving to Nzoia last week because we needed to bring some extra child health cards, which were locked up in a cabinet that nobody could find a key to. The cards apparently required better security than the drugs.
At Nzoia, I do my best to make myself useful, but the language barrier issue comes into play once in a while. When I’m supposed to be weighing babies to make sure their growth is on track for their age and catch malnutrition early, I mostly have to point at the scale and say “hapa”, which means “here”. Not very eloquent. I was just starting to think all the Swahili I learned in Nairobi was useless in a practical setting. Most people don’t have daily conversations about things like “How old are you now? Where do you stay? What time would you like to go to the market? That price is far to high for those bananas.” However, this is exactly the vocabulary I need for the infant health visits- we need to record their age in months, their village or sub- district of residence, their birthday, all the sorts of things I am capable of asking. It’s almost insane how accomplished I feel having a successful conversation in Swahili!
I’ve found that I’m able to take on a number of clinical tasks that an undergraduate student probably wouldn’t be allowed to do back at home. I give injections, draw blood, help give stitches, just to name a few. At first this was really overwhelming and I was terrified of making a mistake, but I’ve become surprisingly confident in myself.



Other updates on life:

Lucy was near tears the other night. She thinks I have hookworm because “your appetite seems fine but you just aren’t adding enough weight”. I think that when I’m not around she secretly schemes to sneak extra calories in anywhere she can.

One of the lab technicians, Albert, is very good at his job. He can “find a vein” better than any phlebotomist I’ve ever seen, even on babies and elderly people. He’s extremely kind and compassionate with his patients. One elderly lady that’s a regular patient wanted to give Albert a token of gratitude for his contributions to her health. In the US this might be a short thank you note or a small donation to the healthcare center. In Kenya, you give a chicken. I was minding my own business taking midmorning tea in the “break room” of the lab when I heard a strangely familiar soft clucking coming from the corner. I pushed aside a box to see what the noise was, and a chicken flew out into my face. The best part of the story is that at the end of the day, Albert needed to find a way to get his new pet home. He decided the best course of action would be to transport her in a box. Unfortunately, there were no spare chicken- sized boxes at the clinic, so Albert had to cram her into one that was a bit too small. He then walked down the driveway of the clinic and toward his house, the box tucked under his arm shaking and squawking all the way.

The other day I proudly took the DVD of my rafting trip into the lab so all my colleagues could see just how brave and adventurous I am. It seems I got a DVD that didn’t copy right or something, because all of the narration sounds like it was done by the munchkins and it looks like we’re all wearing lime green and turquoise clothing and floating along in fuchsia rafts. Somehow, that really doesn’t detract from the main point of the video though.

There are no cockroaches at my house in Ukwala because our cat eats all of them. The cat is called Paka the Cat, Paka being the Swahili word for cat. There are these yellowish geckos that crawl all over the walls, which the cat also likes to chase. Recently, Lucy informed me that the cat is pregnant, and if I’m really, really lucky, she’ll come give birth in my room. She also told me that as soon as the cat realizes that I’m her friend, she’ll invite herself into my room all the time. I wasn’t too worried about ever seeing the cat in my room, as I am not exactly a cat person (anybody who knows me can verify this) so I didn’t think Paka would pick up too many friendship signals from me. Then the other night, I awoke to a scratching sound at my window. I was terrified since Lucy and I were talking about all the cattle- stealing bandits that have been on the loose around Ukwala lately. I quietly slunk out of bed, tip toed to the window, pulled back the curtain to find… Paka the Cat stuck in the window, half in my room and half out. I preferred the out option, so I did my best to gently guide her back outside. Paka was having none of that, and latched onto my skin with her claws. Every night since then I have had a loud, meowing roommate.