Skip to main content

Snakes and Stuff - Joytown Day 3

As a third day of data collection came to a close, I was all over the place with heart rate data on watches and spreadsheets and papers. My head was about ready to explode when I though I'd lost a whole afternoon's worth of data. But my brain survives to think another day thanks to my cheerful team, calming prof, and the super tech-savy David (A part-time student member of our team who happened to be in Africa this summer with his son and came to visit us at Joytown).

Today we worked with students from the secondary school (high school) next door in our studies and it was a total blessing! I was weary at first about how the wheelchair runs would go with them because of my experience with U.S. high school students/youth who generally tend to put up the attitude of "I'm just too cool for this". But I found a group of bright, engaging people who were reletively interested and excited about participating in our studies. I was surprised when asking someone's birth date to realize they were near my age within a year or even older than me. My head has been so geared toward working with kids, its awesome to get to talk to subjects who are going through a similar stage of life (although in drastically different settings). I met one girl, Charity, who shares in my dream of being a doctor. Maybe one day I'll wander back to Kenya and we'll start a clinic together or something. :)

High-lights from the day include:

  • 10:30 tea (chai) time with the Joytown therapists and high school students. We definitely need to start having this in the states...
  • The slithery visitor outside our work space that just happened to be poisonous but was quickly killed by a rock as a crowd of children gathered and giggled and screeched in delighted disgust. 
  • Getting an entire piece of chapati at lunchtime. Before I had only seen pizza-shaped triangles, this baby was a full face-sized circle of goodness!
  • Finding some max-strength anti-itch cream for the constellation of unidentified bug bites around my ankles/foot. Note to self: bring socks longer than ankle-length to Kenya and forget the Off bug spray, it seems to be nothing but icing on the cake for the dang creatures...
  • Mercy, once again saving my brain and continuing to teach me Swahili words
  • The smiles and small conversations with various kids around Joytown. Especially when Charity's quaint voice asked me for a "pitchure?"


Oh, another futbol game is playing tonight and our buddies over the fence are having a repeat party. Let's hope there's no overtime on this one...

Comments

  1. LauraMay 15, 2013 at 4:17 PM

    Emily,

    Thanks so much for the daily updates. It is great to hear how your research is going and your impressions of Kenya. I'm glad you have been able to make friends there while you work.
    I can't wait to hear more.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And Now Presenting… - Joytown Day 13

Our whirlwind day of presentation (no wheelchair pun intended) began with a formal presentation to the Joytown secondary school (high school) and ended with a true Kenyan-style impromptu pres to the primary students and teachers. We carefully planned a presentation to the high school students, even creating a powerpoint to share with them containing graphs of the finalized data and pictures from the study. We miraculously packed 20+ people and wheelchairs into a computer room of the school library that was really only designed for 10 or so comfortably. We shared our data results and the Tinsley family shared some really encouraging words to the teens/young adults, urging them to realize that they are fearfully and wonderfully made by God for great purposes in this world. After exchanging contact information with one of the head-teachers who organized the high school participation in our study, (once she had told us about three different ways about the high school exchange progra...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more