Skip to main content

Time to say goodbye - Joytown (Final)Day 14

Headed to Joytown like normal (for the last time) to be part of devos. Fridays have become my favorite devo day because its praise day! We stood in a group singing hymns, worship songs, and African chorus. After devos, we passed out daily inspiration desk-top calendars to all the therapists as a thank you and encouragement. The booklets worked out perfectly as they turned into sort of yearbooks with everybody walking around shaking hands and getting the team's email and facebook info.
 
The rest of the morning we continued working on data spreadsheets in our "chapel" work area with a few extra curious faces peering into windows and coming to visit us at our computers.

Favorite high-lights of the day:
  • Continuing to hone my wheelie skills
  • Watching a news camera crew and their filming of the dance group performing a song and dance in costume
  • Wonderful time at lunch laughing and spending time with people
  • Teaching Elizabeth, woman who's been cooking lunch for us, how to make no-bake cookies. They were a hit all around, especially according to John who ate 7 of them…
  • Impromptu "Can you do this" yoga session with some of the therapists
  • Racing and having wheelie battles with some of the kids (racing backwards in a wheelchair is really hard!)
  • Sitting side by side in wheelchairs and talking with 8-year-old Ezra. I listened intently as he described "his best dinosaur" and explained the entire plot of "Ghost Rider" and the "Avatar" cartoons. By the end of the conversation I was surrounded by 4 other little kids, one of which kept gently tugging at my ponytail then running off to grab a friend encouraging him in a spurt of wonder-filled Swahili to do the same.
  • Being part of the mass wheelchair migration up the slope of Joytown to the dining hall. The entire school is built on a kind of hill-slope, perfect set-up for a school with over 100 wheelchair users, no?
  • Hugs and gift exchanges and goodbyes to Joytown though they were crazy bittersweet. I never imagined making such strong connections to people here, as strange as that sounds. My mind was in such a research-only mode in preparing for this trip, I was caught off guard by the number of people that kept telling us "We will miss you guys greatly!" .

We emailed in our final spreadsheets tonight. It's such a crazy feeling looking at the tabs and tabs and tabs of information and knowing that you helped collect it all. The extra cool part is the memories that are attached to nearly every piece of data. I remember looking at data sheets from previous Wheel team's Joytown Kenya runs and seeing nothing but a mound of data and African-looking names. Looking at our data sheets from this year, every name has a face and a smile and a laugh attached to it. This research is something I helped create. It could be the start of major change in Kenya and in the world of wheelchair provision. Or our time here in Kenya could be the start of the change of just one kid's life. And that would be enough. I know its changed me.
Ezra & friends

Silliness on the way to dinner

Dance team preps for the TV crew

Comments

  1. UnknownJune 15, 2013 at 8:27 PM

    wow, Emily, I've just looked through like all your posts from the very beginning, lol...I wish I'd been reading this in Kenya, but it's a beautiful recap on the trip! You're a good writer! I like how you have links throughout your posts to other things.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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 ...
4 comments
Read more

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