Bittersweet Goodbyes

Sorry for the overdue entry! It’s been a pretty busy last couple of weeks trying to figure out what our next steps were! I am writing from our rooftop balcony on the island of Shela in Lamu. It doesn’t get any better than writing while looking at white sand beaches and beautiful blue water. Lamu will be a blog entry in and of itself so I’ll save the details until later.

Last I wrote, we had just come back from our second safari in Nakuru. We knew that our time was coming to an end, and when you don’t want things to end, they go by even quicker. During our last couple of weeks, we had an outreach which was as usual, quite eye-opening. We had split into pairs and Nikita and I went to do a home visit. When we arrived, we met a young woman, about 20 years old who had epilepsy. When she was 10 years old, she had a seizure which caused her to fall into a fire. Because of that, her legs were completely impaired (causing her to walk on the lateral side of her feet). She also had cognitive impairments and was not able to do much because of her condition. As we were assessing her, we noticed a little girl, about 3 years old. We thought this was her little sister, but the head of the village told us that a few years ago, she was raped in her sleep and as a result had a child. We asked him who he thought did this to her and he said it could be any of the men in the village because they know she has a disability and would not be able to fight back. Unbelievable and so sad. After this, we went to another house to visit a lady who had a severe disability because of polio. She sat so cross-legged that Nikita and I thought she was an amputee. This lady must have been about 45 years old, and in the room was her husband who looked to be close to 80. He sat in the room the entire time but did not say a word and ate his ugali and fish while we carried out the assessment. At one point he fell asleep while he was eating, and Nik and I couldn’t help but giggle. This lady was so positive and great, but due to her severe arm and leg contractures, is unable to move around and earn a living. She has four children, two of them who are still quite young. She asked us if we could purchase a wheelchair for her so that she would be able to get around easier. We told her that we would do our best, and once again, you can see where your donations have come!

Our last weekend was great and relaxing. We told Perez that we would cook the two meals on the weekend so she could taste “Canadian” food. We made spaghetti and homemade sauce one day, and spicy thai vegetable curry the next day. We really loaded up on the hot sauce, but no one seemed to mind and enjoyed their food thoroughly. Our weekend was lovely and all of us were enjoying it until Christine burst into our room at 11pm Sunday night and told us that Erica had to go to the hospital. Erica hadn’t been feeling well for the last few days, and we thought she had malaria but that the medications she received from the doctor were controlling it. However, on Sunday night, her fever shot up and she couldn’t keep anything down. They rushed her to the hospital at night and the result was that she had some sort of infection and had to go to the Aga Khan Hospital which was 4 hours away in Kisumu! We weren’t prepared to say bye to Christine & Erica because our plan was for us to go to Lamu with them. The rest of the week flew by. We did more community visits and said goodbye to all our favourite clients which was tough because we knew we would probably never see them ever again or for a very long time. Mr. Okidi decided that on Thursday, we would drive to Kisumu to check on Erica (who was still in the hospital and not doing very much better) and then from Kisumu, Nik, Mary & I would head to Mombasa and the Lamu. Although Perez & Mr. Okidi were coming with us, we sat down before we left and spoke about the last 6 weeks. It was so difficult to talk about all the unique and wonderful times we had over the last weeks without getting emotional. They had become our family and Perez was the best second mom anyone could ask for! After all our hallmark moments, we joined hands and Perez said a prayer for us to have a safe journey for the rest of the coming weeks. We all held it in until the prayer circle, and then Nik and I just burst out into tears (did you expect anything less?). And no, Mary didn’t cry -- apparently she has a heart of stone?

It was great to see Christine & Erica again and Erica was much better by the time we arrived that the doctors said she would be discharged by the next day. This was great news for her since she planned to still climb Mt. Kili on Tuesday! We of COURSE had dinner at our favourite Indian restaurant. We also found $1 nailpolish at the Nakumatt and went crazy buying them, and then realized that we literally have no room for anything. As it stands now, each of our backpacks weighs about the same as a baby elephant (Did I mention that packing our backpacks was BRUTAL?). None of us have any idea why our things weigh so much (considering we gave away half of our clothes), but I blame it on all the souvenirs I bought myself (I mean, all of you) from Nakuru. What a fail! Now we are looking into ways to either ship a box home or leave stuff with relatives in London so we don’t have to carry it around the Europe portion of our trip. Hopefully someone comes through, we’ll reward them with a lot of nailpolish!

Anyways, the chef is making dinner especially for us and serving it to us on our rooftop balcony, so I should probably be going. Ahh…to live the hard life ;) We’re doing a huge outreach on Thursday all by ourselves with no translators, cut us some slack!

Love & Ocean Breeze,

Shahla