Clinic and Karibu - Joytown Day 8

Karibu! No not the animal, the Swahili word meaning 'welcome'. Today was significant in that I finally felt welcome as part of the community at joytown and no longer a visitor. I've built relationships with the BethanyKids therapists and am able to recognize/name a large portion of the kids. At the end of the school day around 3:30, we have an ever growing number of kids inching into our work building and crowding around our stations, usually centered around a computer. I guess I never really expected to build friendships with therapists at Joytown, my perception of it was always centered around the research and the children. However, I am so glad for our relationships so far!

Today we continued with data collection but with the interesting component of the mobile clinic visiting day. Surprisingly, besides moving the location of our 10:30 tea and 1:00 lunch, the clinic did not interfere one bit. On the contrary, it provided some awesome opportunity for conversation especially for Connor (a young friend with Spina Bifida who is traveling with us) and his mother.

Tomorrow wraps up the second week of data collection in Kenya. I can't believe it!

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Oh the Americans are here. Make spaghetti.

Tuesday and Wednesday passed quickly and easily as we now all adjusted to Kenya time (Goodbye jet lag!) and were back to our Joytown research routine. We knew what had to get done and the time we had to do it in. SACDEP welcomed us back with a Tuesday meal including "American food" aka spaghetti noodles. Just noodles. Haha Thanks, Kenya. We continued our wheelchair research at Joytown Primary School and got to return to the Secondary School (Kenyan High School equivalent) for a second survey time with the students. I realized through this survey that although we are very different, Kenyans and Americans, much is the same. High school students are high school students. They are teenagers. Some with attitudes, most with dreams, and all of them with lives that are just as real and crazy to understand as my own. *Philosophical vent over* Once our survey work was finished, Danielle decided to jump in and join a group of Secondary girls rehearsing songs for an upcoming talen...

Hello again Kenya

After 24 hours of travel to the other side of the world and two days of research work I've finally gathered enough jet-lagged energy (and strong enough wifi) to write this. On Monday, I escaped the thunderstorms, tornadoes, and flooding of Texas on a trans-atlantic flight to London. The team included Professor Rispin, Prof Sasaki and Danielle. 8 hours later, we arrived with time to crawl through layers of Heathrow security and wander, sleepy eyed through the airport to our next gate. By 11am we were on our final 8 hour flight to Nairobi, Kenya. My plane buddies included a Kenyan track runner who's said he's filled up three passports traveling and racing in countries around in the world (completely paid for by sponsors, by the way). And he hasn't even finished college. Why am I in school again? Kidding... sigh... Med school... My second plane buddy was a newly graduated Kenyan-born pharmacist living in Houston. He reminded me how much doctors are needed, especially in ...

Another One of Those Kenyan Days - Joytown Day 9

Both last night and this morning the four data-collecting students (Matt, Anna, Nicole, and I) had a team pow-wow about our progress and plan for the day, one of the last days of data collection. We arranged all our subjects, times and wheelchairs to be used and sent each other off with a smile. Today went pretty much nothing like our plan. We had forgot about Murphy's strong residence in Africa. ;) After a bizarre chain of our subjects being either sick, gone on school trips, or just plain unable to continue I found myself walking down the road with Ms. Rispin to our Joytown secondary school (high school) neighbors in search of extra people to help fulfill our study. However, regardless of plans, today went amazingly! I really enjoyed spending time with the high school-ers who have some pretty awesome dreams for the future and similar interests. I talked with one pair of girls about music and the different instruments they would like to play if their school had...

Redhead Steps Around the World

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