Friday opened up
like any normal morning here. The bird. Breakfast & tea. Walking the road
to Joytown school (aka: the Road of a Thousand Eternal Staring Eyes). Sometimes
I think just maybe we'll have walked that road enough where people will get used
to us "white folks" and stop staring at us. This dream has yet to be
fulfilled… I won't hold my breath...
The day at Joytown
opened, as usual, with singing and prayer and greetings (yay handshaking) with
all the Bethany'sKids therapy staff. Everyone split up to their respective
tasks and we were busy setting up the day's research when Karen skipped into
our work-space hall with a smile and a surprise. 25 wheelchairs (in boxes) had
just arrived by truck to Joytown school and we were just the people to assemble
them. The exciting thing about these chairs is that they came as direct of last
year's Wheels research report that the Free Wheelchair Mission (FWM)
wheelchairs, used by many of the kids at Joytown schools, had fallen apart.
Rather than send new parts, FWM sent entirely new wheelchairs. For free. These
everything-in-the-box, Ikea-style wheelchairs were pretty easy to learn to
assemble and by the end of the day we had 15 chairs ready to go. I had to choke
down my frustration several times throughout the assembly as we opened tattered
wheelchair shipping boxes to find entire (crucial) parts missing or broken. So fun. The basic idea of FWM is to be
"affordable" and easy to repair with local parts, which
results in chairs that look like this…
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It's so redneck I'm gonna die!
But aesthetically pleasing or not, this works better than the ground. |
As you can imagine, not the best from a
clinical or long-lasting perspective. But, kudos for FWM
manufactures for listening and sending replacement chairs. Well… sending MOST
of a replacement chair. That’s at least some step in the right direction.
The rest of the
day's highlights include:
- Spending time
laughing and playing with some of the out-of-class Joytown primary students
(pretty much my favorite)
- Collecting survey
data over at Joytown high school (which is my other favorite). High school
students here are serious. Here in Kenya, you take a big test to get in and pay
mega school fees so there's not much room for messing around. Still, the
"secondary" students are really relate-able and intelligent and like to
joke around with us.
- To-go Kenyan
dinners of fried chicken and potatoes (Danielle's favorite)
- Driving through the
"is-this-road-two-lanes-or-three" or "woah-that-was-close"
Kenyan traffic
- Shopping at
"Tusky's" aka the Kenyan WalMart (and accidentally walking through the Men's security line because I'm an oblivious American)
- Waking up to the
familiar head-scrambling bumpy road into Kijabe town. Looking out the front
window of the van, you see a cottage-cheese-like patchwork of concrete. And
this is THE ONLY road ambulances and any sick/injured person must come down to
get to the hospital. Huh. #KenyansAreProbablyTougherThanYou
- Arriving at the
home of Dr. Letchford, a Kijabe doctor who is letting us stay at his house
while he and his family are away in the states. Home is complete with working
dog! Her name is Emma. :)
- Falling asleep to
absolute silence (as we are miles away from any busy road or the SACDEP frogs)
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| Let the construction begin. |
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| The chairs we actually assembled (FWM gen 2) |
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| Danielle and the Joytown pri life |
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| Well hello there |
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| Kenya traffic and people - Notice the use of the sidewalk/road (they're interchangeable here) |
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