When All You Want Is A Little Bit of Home...

I guess I win. I was the first to get sick out of all of us here. I thought that it might happen, but not during our first week. During the middle of the day yesterday, I started feeling a bit nauseous. After seeing a bunch of clients in the community, I thought I had shaken it because I felt much better. But when I got home, my stomach was killing me and I felt nauseous again. I couldn’t bring myself to have dinner and had a piece of bread and a granola bar so that I could at least have somewhat of a full stomach to take my malaria pill. Unfortunately, that didn’t work and instead I, for lack of a better term threw up. When you’re at home, you’re used to running to the bathroom and your mom and dad hearing you and coming to ask you if you were okay. Everyone was great here, but I’m sure you can all agree with me when I say that when you’re sick, there’s no place like home. I felt much better after the first time however, whatever I had wasn’t done with me. I was up all night, getting the chills and fever, wondering if I had typhoid or malaria. I called my parents in the middle of the night just to cry a little more and decided when I woke up that I wasn’t going to placement. I slept all day and as I am writing this, it is evening and I feel much, much, much better. I think that I may have had some sort of heatstroke and my malaria pills have warned that taking these specific ones can make you extremely sensitive to the sun. I’ve learned my lesson and I will be staying out of the sun, wearing a hat and drinking lots and lots of water. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that I’m feeling better because we had a safari booked for this weekend. I’m not sure what I should be most worried about this weekend, getting sick again or getting eaten by a lion ;)

Now that I’ve whined a little bit, let me update you on our awesome placement. Because Monday was an orientation day and I missed today, I’ve had three full days of awesomeness. I can’t really begin to describe what it feels like to be casting a child’s foot while 7 cows look on, or when you have 18 kids from the village all coming to one house to witness an initial assessment. There’s a bit of a difference here when it comes to confidentiality…haha

Here are some of the clients we saw this week

1) A two year old girl who was extremely hypotonic with little to no trunk or head control. The grandmother of the pregnant girl tried to make her abort the child even though she knew she was three months pregnant.

2)      2) A home visit to a girl who had club foot and needed to be casted after surgery. The original plaster that was used to cast her expired in 2006 and therefore needed to be re-casted.

3)      3) An older woman around 80 years old who was a double amputee. We were doing a follow-up visit to teach her how to use her crutches. They harvested tons of peanuts and it is common during home visits that we are provided with some sort of snack by the family. In addition, this family had tons of avocado trees and one of the grandsons climbed the tree to get us 15 avocados!

4)      4) A grandma who lived with her granddaughter since the child’s parents had passed away. The grandmother is suffering from chronic heart failure and requires a great deal of energy just to move. Her granddaughter is severely disabled and lies in her bed all day. The grandmother stated that she was concerned that if something happened to her, her granddaughter would just “rot away” but didn’t want her to be taken away because she would die of loneliness. No other family members were willing to help out by taking the granddaughter in.

5)      5) We went to a school for children with mental illness. These children were so loving and welcoming and many of them loved that we would just sit down and talk to them. One of the saddest cases here was a girl who was approaching the age of 19 but had been locked away in a room by her parents for the first 18 years of her life. She exhibited extremely violent and aggressive behaviours but when we approached her was more than welcoming and even let us take a picture of her. ** On a side note, kids LOVE when we take pictures of them which is great for me because we all know how much I love to (although I think Nikita is becoming more camera-happy than I am). As soon as we take the picture, they want to see it on our camera and then they all get in a circle and giggle. It’s pretty amazing.**

We still get chased on a daily basis by young children shouting “MUZUNGU” at us. I don’t think it will ever get old. It’s going to be weird to come back to Canada and have an actual name.

When we look at client names, it shocked us that the majority of the children had similar last names. We couldn’t figure it out until the physiotherapy students who have been here for a few weeks explained it to us. Get this: Many children are given last names depending on the time of day they were born. So:

	GIRL	BOY
A.M.	Akinyi	Okinyi
MID-DAY	Adhiambo	Odhiambo
NIGHT	Atiano	Otiano

After placement, our evening consists of journaling, reading, eating dinner and then watching “Soy Tu Deuno”, the most ridiculous Spanish-English dubbed soap opera. It’s so bad it’s good.

We’ll be leaving for our safari at 4am Saturday morning so that we get there in time to see a game drive at night. We’ll be camping out instead of staying in a lodge. Wish me luck on the 7 hour car ride it takes to get there!

Take care everyone :)

Love,

Shahla