Well its Wednesday - Joytown Day 7

It was a rather calm/sleepy day of data collection at Joytown. There was a mellow cloud that seemed to hang around the team. But the day must have taken a toll on us because by the end of it, four of us were jumping into the school swimming pool to cool off.

Devotionals this morning with the BK staff were really cool this morning as it was lead by two of our very own team members! We sang hymns (in both English and Swahili) and then heard from Anna and Matt as they read from 1 Corinthians 12:4-26 and shared about the struggle with jealousy and pride in relating to others. They emphasized the point that each person has been picked by God as a specific part of the greater functioning body of Christ. We should each stop worrying about comparing our actions to others or trying to do everything on our own. Rather, we should instead focus on doing what we CAN do, and make sure to do it well. This was a cool point for me because I often get caught up in the futility that can be found in humanitarian medical work as far as "fixing" a problem. No matter how hard I work, there will always be someone hurting or sick or dying in the world. Even though it may feel like I am only removing tiny drops from a huge ocean, they are still drops that are being removed.

We have a visitor on the team from the Motivation division in Africa (this is the company that produces one of the chairs we are currently studying). She plans to hand out with the team at Joytown tomorrow and watch how we do what we do. Hopefully she easily understands our methods and can get something beneficial from our preliminary data as well as give us any hits or comments about how we could improve our study.

Tomorrow will also be an interesting day because it is mobile clinic day at Joytown. This means that a clinic of doctors will be setting up camp on campus and people from the community will come receive consults and free medical care. We are praying that this won't interfere with our data collection or with the availability of subjects/space.

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Oh the Americans are here. Make spaghetti.

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Hello again Kenya

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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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