Mzungu, how are you?

Life’s been pretty great here in Ukwala. Volunteering at Matibabu is going even better than I had expected- the staff is wonderful and so fun to work with. Here are a few updates for you, both on my life and Kenya in general:

• I thought my mom in Nairobi was determined to make me gain weight, but Lucy has taken the challenge to a whole new level . She made me weigh myself at the clinic so she can track her progress week by week. She also has a gradual scale for me to catch up to the amount of food she wants me to be eating daily. The first week I was here, she let me drink just one cup of tea, three times a day. We’re up to a cup and a half per teatime now, and I think next week she plans to go all out and get me up to six cups a day. That’s’ a lot of chai!!
• I washed my laundry the Kenyan way for the first time on Sunday. This involves filling several tubs with water (rain water collected throughout the week, no wasting the running water) and heading out to the back yard. A few tubs get powdered detergent added to the water, but some stay clean for rinsing. Then you bend over and scrub the clothes by hand. According to Lucy, this is “very easy” but my back was sore for hours. Lucy also decided that“ the problem with you people is you’re afraid to bend over” since we don’t have to do so to do our laundry, and they also use brooms and mops that are about a foot tall, so you have to do some bending to clean the house, too. O, there’s not a whole lot of skin left on my fingers, it got scrubbed off along with all the dirt from my clothes. I did laundry for about an hour and washed a pair of pants, two skirts, a few shirts, socks, sheets, and towels. Lucy did laundry for six hours and washed all of her family’s clothing, sheets, towels, and the upholstery covers from the six gazillion couches in the living room. She told me I did a good job for an American and that I’d be allowed to stay in Kenya, but I felt pretty pathetic comparing my efforts to hers.
• Also on the topic of Lucy (sorry but she’s the greatest and most interesting lady ever), she got the one thing she wanted more than anything else in the entire world the other day: a refrigerator. She sat me down and explained to me that now she can store leftover food for even a few days. I told her I was in fact familiar with the concept of refrigeration, but I think I wasn’t awestruck enough for her taste at the luxury of a new refrigerator. Unfortunately, the fridge is bad news for me because usually she makes a really amazing fruit salad for dessert (picture the sweetest pineapple, mangoes, avocadoes, bananas, and oranges coming together in your mouth. It‘s heaven), and since there’s no way to preserve the extras, I have to eat about six servings- no complaints. Now that we have a way to store things I may have to cut back a little bit
• There’s a shocking amount of malaria here. In the lab we often run a few dozen rapid tests per day, mostly for children under five years, and the vast majority of them are positive. People here are so accustomed to it though. I asked Lucy if she’d ever had malaria, and she laughed and thought for a while, and said “maybe twenty times or so” in all seriousness. The Matibabu staff will even drop by for a complementary test if they’re feeling a little under the weather. Oh, and it turns out in addition to resistance to the malaria drugs, a lot of mosquitoes are becoming resistant to the insecticide used to treat the bed nets (which very few Kenyans sleep under anyway), so a number of public officials are calling to reintroduce DDT to manage the issue. I really, really hope there’s another option.
• Today, I went to the other Matibabu clinic in Nzoia, about a twenty minute drive from Ukwala, to help with the immunizations for little kids there- somebody comes from the Ukwala clinic every Wednesday. The Nzoia clinic is a lot smaller, has only a few staff members, and isn’t as well stocked, so Martha (one of the nurses )and I weighed and measured and vaccinated babies under one year old all day today. A LOT of mothers brought their babies in- for 20 shillings (about a quarter), they got a dose of oral polio vaccine, vitamin A supplements, and any other vaccinations they were due for. The really difficult thing was that a lot of mothers had a hard time scraping even the Ksh 20 together, and a lot of the babies got a tick mark next to the “malnourished” line on their infant health cards. On the brighter side, a lot of the moms and kids were also really happy to be getting the care that they were, and I played my small part in lifting a few spirits today. After kids got injections and were crying in pain, the nurse or their mom would just point to me and say “Look, a mzungu” and the kid always promptly stopped crying in shock.
• Kenya is very, very mad at the Obama administration for suspending the US visa of a top Kenyan government official. I don’t know if that made news in the US at all, but it’s a huge deal here.
• Lucy and her friend Scholastica (great name, I know) have been trying to teach me some Luo language. They say it’s to help me communicate better with the locals, which is certainly true to some extent, but lately I’ve gotten the feeling that they just like to laugh at my terrible pronunciation. Like I said, I really brighten everybody’s day around here
  Every night at 8:00 Lucy and I watch Tormenta en el Paraiso, which is obviously one of the telenovelas that I mentioned in an earlier post. It’s got to be in the top five most unnecessarily dramatic shows ever, but Lucy loves it and I love her. Also, it’s great to watch her bicker with John about the show. He thinks it’s a waste of her time to watch, never mind that it’s the one hour of the entire day where she gets to just relax, and he says it makes her a bad wife because we don’t eat until nine because she’s watching her show. Again, disregarding the fact that John doesn’t join us at the dinner table, he eats about a half hour later in front of the TV
• There was a really bad nation-wide power outage last Sunday night. We had to eat by candlelight at my house, but on the news the next day there was a story about how hospitals across the country were suddenly stuck performing emergency surgeries and caring for premature babies by the light of a few cell phones. Yikes!

So, I'm just living the life here. Everything's wonderful and the time is flying by.