Skip to main content

We Got Skills - Joytown Day 11

Today I woke up with the Rocky theme song stuck in my head. Well not exactly, but that was the general feeling among the team as we went over our plans for the day of mass data collection. We each had our subjects divided up onto lists and were partnered up with a "people-fetcher" whose job it would be to bring kids from their classes to the research area. All of the kids who were subjects for the original wheelchair skills testing would be called back to test the standard "China chair" on rough ground only, a 6-minute rolling test.

After devos, the first subjects arrived and off we went into a morning of perpetual circles around the school dirt road. 10 names stared at me from my list in the morning and by tea time only 5 remained. After lunch I finished off the last 2 subjects and loaded the last of my heart-rate data. I looked up from the computer to realize we had done it! And with relative peace and ease! A day that I expected to be totally frantic and crazy turned out to be a smoothly flowing collection of data and reunion with each of my subjects. It was really fun to reconnect with some of my first couple subjects, kids I had worked with during my third or so day in Kenya.

The rest of the day was devoted to entering data into spreadsheets and hanging out with the kids once they got out of class. There also was a little matter of mischief centering around the birthday celebration of one of the volunteers, John, who has been helping with our research. John, who doesn't know how to swim, was taken for a surprise dip by Matt. Lured over to the pool by the false information that Matt needed to finish one last subject for the day, John was suddenly bear hugged by Matt and pulled into the water, but not before squirming and frantically demanding to save his shoes from a soggy fate. The comical struggle and splash caused an huge eruption of giggling from the audience of children, therapists, and Wheels members.

In other news, I still feel slightly sickly via my nose and throat but definitely on the mend!

Wheelie skillz

Comments

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

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

This is Africa

I'M IN AFRICA! Now I've had limited sleep in the past 48 hours (I wont mention an exact number for my mother's sake...) and am pretty dead tired so I really will keep this post short. Highlights from the first two days in Africa: Sleeping for 4 solid hours on our 8 hour flight from London to Nairobi and waking up to a hot tray of four-cheese tortellini airline pasta. Arriving in Kenya and getting my first travel visa! (A.k.a. a nice sticker in my passport) Meeting our drivers Joseph and Peter at the airport and figting the urge to respond to everything in Spanish... my brain was still stuck in the last time I was in a foreign country (Mexico). Getting a flat tire on the way from the airport to our "home base" in Thika and learning the true meaning of the phrase "T.I.A." or "This is Africa". Spending 4 hours in church (In two different services and one Sunday school class). Eating Ethiopian food for the first time. The moment I reali...
Post a Comment
Read more