A preview of things to come

Today at school, we had our last formal International Development class, wrapping up Professor Jama’s material in the academic portion of the MSID program. The rest of the school day was dedicated to briefing us on our last week in Nairobi and what to expect at our internships. Basically, next week we will have one more guest lecture on ethno-musicology, regular class on Monday, Tuesday no school because it’s a public holiday (there are a LOT of those here), Wednesday we have our Kiswahili final exam, then Thursday and Friday we have off to pack for our internships and work on our term papers for our other classes. I have a lot of work to do there, but we won’t talk about that for now….
For our internships, we are basically clustered in four different parts of Kenya. There will be a group in or near Mombasa on the coast, a group around Mt. Kenya in the cities of Meru or Embu, a few who will remain in Nairobi, and a group of us that will be in or near Kisumu in western Kenya. We are grouped this way primarily because it is logistically practical to have all of us in a few central areas, and also so that in the case of a national security issue, we are all either near international airports or could be removed from the country by crossing the border (ie into Tanzania or Uganda). But that is the sort of discussion that makes people very nervous, and the program has only had to evacuate students once in the past, following the 2007 presidential election. We were told that we have no reason to be worried about evacuation, but that Jama is a warden of the US Embassy here in Nairobi, so we will be among the first to know if any concerns should arise.
My internship will be in Ukwala, which I am told is a very, very small town in a very, very rural part of Kenya’s Nyanza Province, near Lake Victoria and the Ugandan border. Ukwala is about three or four hours from Kisumu, so my placement is actually about as remote as possible. Though I am considered part of the Kisumu group, I will be largely on my own. This is something that is both incredibly exciting for me but also makes me a little anxious. We will be at our internships for six weeks, and we’ll live with another host family for that period of time. I can’t think of another time in my life when I have been completely isolated from people I know for six weeks. However, my advisor Jane told me that my host family is wonderful and I’ll have a lot of opportunities to get really involved with my internship.
I will be working for the Matibabu Foundation providing health serviced to the rural poor in that area. I am lucky in that they are really letting me take charge of what I do for my time there. The organization focuses on women and children’s health, so I’ll likely work primarily in a maternal- child health initiative, a pediatric de- worming project, and HIV/ AIDS nutritional support and outreach. More details to follow once I actually start!!