It has been far too long since you’ve heard from me, so I will hit the high points of the last couple of weeks.
Two weekends ago we visited Kakamega Forest, which was awesome! I learned (and then forgot) a lot about the plant medicine of the forest. I want to compile some sort of “Medicinal Plants of Africa” encyclopedia; details to follow on that project. I think we will hike in the forest again before leaving Kisumu, and I will bring a notebook along to scribble some pearls about the plants and their medicinal properties. We also have a gigantic memory card for the camera now, so we will be better prepared in general.
I really want to talk about last weekend, as I keep thinking about it. We were invited to Masango (may not be the exactly right name, but it is close), and we were to give inspirational speeches to 1800+ HIV+ kids and their parents, teachers, and caregivers. The day started off with us arriving at the town, greeted by a group of ladies who were singing, dancing, and welcoming us to the town. I hate being the center of attention, but “when in Africa,” right? Sooooo, we pranced and sang our way through town with gigantic, shiny leis around our necks.
We were definitely getting the VIP treatment all day. We visited several groups, the first of which was a primary school of mostly AIDS-orphaned children. A group of the kids put on a dancing/singing performance to welcome us, then, after a prayer from the pastor (who, by the way, seemed like a really awesome guy), I gave the first speech. You could hear the crickets chirping. I heard some muttering behind me, and then realized we needed to start over with a translator—the second start was much better! I told the crowd the story of William Kamkwamba, the young man from Malawi who taught himself physics and built a windmill for his village, and encouraged them to take care of themselves with good nutrition and staying on their medicines, and to keep dreaming and to never give up. Well, this was all good, and Casey and I traded off giving this general talk to 4 different groups that day.
As the day was winding down, we came back to the site of speech #1, and some folks were asked to come up and speak to us. One woman, an older mama caring for AIDS orphans, said something that cut right to my heart. She said “I heard you talk about how these kids can live a long, healthy life with HIV if they take their medicine and get appropriate nutrition. Many of these children don’t have enough to eat. Please help us.” Wow. I knew I wasn’t speaking to HIV+ kids in the States, but not having enough to eat is a real serious problem. I told her I would take her words to heart, and now I am formulating some ideas for things I can do for those kids. I am in contact with Jan Scholten, creator of Iquilai (a homeopathic remedy based on a combination of potentised minerals), and am working on a proposal for a trial that would incorporate a sustainable nutrition supplement and Iquilai. After talking for hours in bed last night, Casey, an expert at creating programs in developing countries (so nice to be sleeping with an expert!!), I have some solid ideas of where to start. Here are the basics of what we came up with: 4 arms (Iquilai alone, Iquilai+Plumpynut, Plumpynut alone, and a control group), 60 participants in each, with the interviews, interventions and follow-up carried out by a group of CHWs that I would train. I’m clarifying this vision and working on securing funding that would pay for the trial and, most importantly, funding for the intervention that showed the most improvement in quality of life and CD4 counts.
Whew! Keep those kids in your thoughts/prayers. One other serious need that the nursery school director had was for seeds for their garden. Ever since the sugar cane industry fell on its face, it has been even harder for these people. They live on a flood plain that is dry part of the year and flooded the rest of the time. Rice is grown in paddies nearby, but it’s hard to grow food crops outside of sugar cane for reasons that are beyond my agricultural understanding. Thoughts, anyone? We are definitely putting our thinking caps on!
Let’s see, this week has flown by. Claire and I had a nice visit with our Japanese friends and I think we will be having playdates weekly. A programmer, Kevin, flew in Monday from France to help Casey get his software going, and he is staying in our guest house. We are all getting along very well and enjoying hanging out and eating delicious food.
Yesterday, Claire, Lyn and I visited this organization called “Babies in Crisis,” that we saw while out walking. It is a home for abandoned babies, and as sad as the concept of that is, the work these folks do is truly amazing. The compound is a sprawling facility, kept very clean and orderly, with a very mellow energy all around. We visited during nap time, but saw kids from very tiny babies to developmentally delayed kids up to around age 8. We were told several times that the children were up for adoption, and I’m afraid to bring Casey, as he keeps talking about picking a sister out for Claire! Despite Casey being on the baby train, I think we will go on Saturday morning so we can be around to help with feeding time. There are 5 babies to one caretaker, so the babies have to wait their turn to be fed.
Ok, so the last thing is that we are coming up on a referendum on August 4th. I am not nervous about violence, but I hear mixed predictions. As it is, we are likely to be staying here and have begun stocking up on some essentials in the unlikely event that we have to hole up for a few days. We’re not going all Y2K on it, but it’s not a bad idea to have a back-up plan. It’s hard to believe that our time in Kisumu is coming to an end, Claire is almost 1 years old (!), and we will find out, hopefully today, if we are for sure going to be in Ghana for the next leg of our African adventure. This post was monstrous, so congrats on reading the whole thing! Until next time…
Friday, July 30, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
I became an MP today!
So, today was an interesting day, and it was the last of the all day trainings which I've been going to and which have been keeping me out for more than 11 hours for the past few days,though today I got back a bit earlier today... So, a few things... One, never try to swap the Lamborghini of cell phones with the Toyota Carolla of cell phones with your CHWs, it doesn't matter if you have good and rational reasons, and it may be better in all practical ways, but yeah, don't try to swap them... I've seen 3 days of revolts... The first day they were yelling at the dude and the next 2 days not one person agreed to swap the phones.
Unfortunately, today i didn't get to make my request when I wanted to and kept being put off by the lady leading the talk and I got to talk to them when they were nice and pissed off... Yay :( Oh well. I also learned that the CHWs have a nickname for me. They call me The M.P., which stands for member of parliament, if you didn't know. I was told that it was because I'm a big guy, and that MPs are usually big guys. So, yep... I'm an MP...
And I found out that I don't get to have the maternal and childhood health booklets that I was going to have the CHWs hand out. Oh well, we'll just have to let them know to just give the women the stickers then, or maybe make cards to have the IDs written on them? I don't know... though I think that the stickers are still the best idea.
Okay, well Lost is on and it's really odd but I guess it's explaining the origins of Jacob and the other dude...
Okay, pics from the training soon and I'll write more later!
Goodnight!
Unfortunately, today i didn't get to make my request when I wanted to and kept being put off by the lady leading the talk and I got to talk to them when they were nice and pissed off... Yay :( Oh well. I also learned that the CHWs have a nickname for me. They call me The M.P., which stands for member of parliament, if you didn't know. I was told that it was because I'm a big guy, and that MPs are usually big guys. So, yep... I'm an MP...
And I found out that I don't get to have the maternal and childhood health booklets that I was going to have the CHWs hand out. Oh well, we'll just have to let them know to just give the women the stickers then, or maybe make cards to have the IDs written on them? I don't know... though I think that the stickers are still the best idea.
Okay, well Lost is on and it's really odd but I guess it's explaining the origins of Jacob and the other dude...
Okay, pics from the training soon and I'll write more later!
Goodnight!
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The Photos, Pt. 1
Taking Claire swimming!
She made some new friends there
Friends!
This one is pretty self explanitory
Just before heading into the forest
Gotta love that new post smell.... mmmmmm....posty
Hello Blog,
well now I’m skipping forward to last weekend, because I’m lagging on this whole blog thing, and I have given up on filing the blanks before that point. So last weekend we were going to head to the Kakamega Forest on Saturday morning, we were to leave at 7am sharp, this was confirmed by Francis. We got up and ready and waited, and waited and waited, the guy was supposed to be washing the car when I called at 7:30, at 8 he still wasn’t around, and so on and so on. At 9:00 I finally called Francis and told him that it was getting too late and that all the animals are hiding by noontime, he and the driver finally made it at around 10:30, apparently the driver have loaned out his car to someone who was supposed to bring it back the night before, but didn’t bring it until the morning. I told him that it was too late, he tried to talk us into going anyway, but I told him he could come back the next morning at 7 if he wanted and we could go then. So he decided he would do that and went on his way.
We decided to take Claire swimming, and to take a Kiboko boat tour. Kiboko is kiSwahili for Hippo. So we went off to Kiboko Bay Resort and took Claire swimming. She loved it and she made some nice new friends. Her new friends had floaties too, so they all floated around together, Claire even shared hers with two other kids when she got out of the pool. We decided not to go on the Kiboko tour as the hippos are best to watch in the morning time, and Katie had slipped and was feeling sore.
So, the next day we indeed headed off to the Kakamega Forest. It was great, we paid a modest entrance fee and found a guide and enlisted him on our 3 hour walk. He turned out to be very knowledgeable and gave us a lot of great info about the medicinal properties of plants, which is exactly what Katie wanted. We recorded quite a few of his talks and will post them soon. I found out though that I have a memory card which is too small, back when I got it, this 2 GB card seemed huge, but on the walk I used it up less than halfway through the trip, which was no good and I even had to delete one of the talks about the medicinal plants. We found a black and white Columbus monkey, I got a great shot of him. So, I will get a bigger one at Nakumatt if the price is reasonable. So on the way back, the guide asked me if I knew anyone who knew how to make a website. And so I offer to make one for them in exchange for some free guided tours of the forest in the future. It seemed like the best deal for all, of course I’m very busy so that’s that hard part, but I told them it would just be a simple simple site.
When I got home I was the recipient of some amazing news! UNAIDS had offered me funding to help start a PMTCT program in Ghana in late September! I did a happy dance of joy and then was a bit overwhelmed by what this all means, so I won’t be coming back to the US after Kenya, I’ll be taking a leave of absence and going straight from Nairobi to Accra and then up to the Barong Afo region, (Which I know I misspelled) to start on the next project! Yay for awesome opportunity, sad that I will be missing my friends and family who were going to visit this fall and I might totally miss my J-termers before I come back to SIPA! So Yay and awesome and such for that, though I think the leave of absence has some consequences for financial aid and for the housing. But we will see. If I can keep my place I will just sublet it out to James who was here in Kisumu but is moving with his family to NYC. My friend Beth will be coming to Ghana to work on a two year contract and she agreed to bring me some stuff from my place that I want here. Okay so it’s the external drive with all my movies, the projector and my xbox, yes, I’m a nerd okay?
On the job side of things, exciting things are happening! We are getting a programmer to help with the programming side of things next Monday, his name is Kevin and he will be a big help. Plus he’s staying at the same guest house as me so I can bug him about the software non-stop! On Monday I had a meeting with Andy Kanter and Ben Nemser who are high up in the childcount/mHealth/eHealth bit of things in New York and we made some significant changes to the system. We eliminated a few forms and steps and came out with a much more streamlined version of things. Now the CHWs will not have any additional forms to carry, and the total number of new forms is down to 3. We are still collecting a lot of good data though. I will be working with the Yala Sub-District Hospital to try and get them to begin inputting CD4 results into the system as well and there is the long shot of getting the folks at the CDC lab that process the DBS tests to do input them as well. The conference call ended at 7pm and even that was only because they were going to lock me inside the building if I didn’t come out right then.
I worked late into the night on Monday to try and get the new forms ready for the meeting with the health facilitators on Tuesday. I knew I would have time at the place itself, but that my only access to a printer would be in the morning before we left for Yala. I got it all done and printed and headed off to the training where I would meet the health facilitators later. So, I arrived and while waiting for the training to be over, I realized what they were training on. They were to go around to all the households in their catchment area and do a household health survey. Somehow I was lucky enough to have the one sample pack of stickers that we were getting as part of my program and took about 10 minutes to ask the CHWs that when they were going around to please record the health IDs of the mother, father and all kids under 5 on stickers complete with the name for identifying, and to stick them to the inside front cover of the maternal health booklet. This was the plan from the start, I’m just happy I was there so we could piggyback on this instead of making them go to all the households a second time. Now we just need the stickers, though Dickson is supposed to be on that one, and to procure some maternal and childhood health booklets in case the woman hasn’t gone to her 1st antenatal visit yet to receive one, which Komolo is on. So, wow, we are moving forward, work has begun! And I spoke to 2 health facilitators yesterday and one today (who are the ones in charge of the CHWs at each health center) and they are totally on board too! So, things are going really well, I did another training today and the last one will be tomorrow. Oh, one funny thing, I didn’t have internet in the field and after busting my ass to get the forms changed, when I got back to the office I had an email with more changes! D’oh! But oh well, I’m going to do those either tonight or tomorrow. So, that’s about it for now.
Oh, next weekend we will be staying out in a village and giving a talk to 1,800 HIV+ kids… that will be interesting! OK, till tomorrow or so!
P.S. if you haven’t already, click follow or I will be forced to keep bugging you (You too Mom!) because we love to have followers!
OK, pics up when I get home because they refuse to upload now...
well now I’m skipping forward to last weekend, because I’m lagging on this whole blog thing, and I have given up on filing the blanks before that point. So last weekend we were going to head to the Kakamega Forest on Saturday morning, we were to leave at 7am sharp, this was confirmed by Francis. We got up and ready and waited, and waited and waited, the guy was supposed to be washing the car when I called at 7:30, at 8 he still wasn’t around, and so on and so on. At 9:00 I finally called Francis and told him that it was getting too late and that all the animals are hiding by noontime, he and the driver finally made it at around 10:30, apparently the driver have loaned out his car to someone who was supposed to bring it back the night before, but didn’t bring it until the morning. I told him that it was too late, he tried to talk us into going anyway, but I told him he could come back the next morning at 7 if he wanted and we could go then. So he decided he would do that and went on his way.
We decided to take Claire swimming, and to take a Kiboko boat tour. Kiboko is kiSwahili for Hippo. So we went off to Kiboko Bay Resort and took Claire swimming. She loved it and she made some nice new friends. Her new friends had floaties too, so they all floated around together, Claire even shared hers with two other kids when she got out of the pool. We decided not to go on the Kiboko tour as the hippos are best to watch in the morning time, and Katie had slipped and was feeling sore.
So, the next day we indeed headed off to the Kakamega Forest. It was great, we paid a modest entrance fee and found a guide and enlisted him on our 3 hour walk. He turned out to be very knowledgeable and gave us a lot of great info about the medicinal properties of plants, which is exactly what Katie wanted. We recorded quite a few of his talks and will post them soon. I found out though that I have a memory card which is too small, back when I got it, this 2 GB card seemed huge, but on the walk I used it up less than halfway through the trip, which was no good and I even had to delete one of the talks about the medicinal plants. We found a black and white Columbus monkey, I got a great shot of him. So, I will get a bigger one at Nakumatt if the price is reasonable. So on the way back, the guide asked me if I knew anyone who knew how to make a website. And so I offer to make one for them in exchange for some free guided tours of the forest in the future. It seemed like the best deal for all, of course I’m very busy so that’s that hard part, but I told them it would just be a simple simple site.
When I got home I was the recipient of some amazing news! UNAIDS had offered me funding to help start a PMTCT program in Ghana in late September! I did a happy dance of joy and then was a bit overwhelmed by what this all means, so I won’t be coming back to the US after Kenya, I’ll be taking a leave of absence and going straight from Nairobi to Accra and then up to the Barong Afo region, (Which I know I misspelled) to start on the next project! Yay for awesome opportunity, sad that I will be missing my friends and family who were going to visit this fall and I might totally miss my J-termers before I come back to SIPA! So Yay and awesome and such for that, though I think the leave of absence has some consequences for financial aid and for the housing. But we will see. If I can keep my place I will just sublet it out to James who was here in Kisumu but is moving with his family to NYC. My friend Beth will be coming to Ghana to work on a two year contract and she agreed to bring me some stuff from my place that I want here. Okay so it’s the external drive with all my movies, the projector and my xbox, yes, I’m a nerd okay?
On the job side of things, exciting things are happening! We are getting a programmer to help with the programming side of things next Monday, his name is Kevin and he will be a big help. Plus he’s staying at the same guest house as me so I can bug him about the software non-stop! On Monday I had a meeting with Andy Kanter and Ben Nemser who are high up in the childcount/mHealth/eHealth bit of things in New York and we made some significant changes to the system. We eliminated a few forms and steps and came out with a much more streamlined version of things. Now the CHWs will not have any additional forms to carry, and the total number of new forms is down to 3. We are still collecting a lot of good data though. I will be working with the Yala Sub-District Hospital to try and get them to begin inputting CD4 results into the system as well and there is the long shot of getting the folks at the CDC lab that process the DBS tests to do input them as well. The conference call ended at 7pm and even that was only because they were going to lock me inside the building if I didn’t come out right then.
I worked late into the night on Monday to try and get the new forms ready for the meeting with the health facilitators on Tuesday. I knew I would have time at the place itself, but that my only access to a printer would be in the morning before we left for Yala. I got it all done and printed and headed off to the training where I would meet the health facilitators later. So, I arrived and while waiting for the training to be over, I realized what they were training on. They were to go around to all the households in their catchment area and do a household health survey. Somehow I was lucky enough to have the one sample pack of stickers that we were getting as part of my program and took about 10 minutes to ask the CHWs that when they were going around to please record the health IDs of the mother, father and all kids under 5 on stickers complete with the name for identifying, and to stick them to the inside front cover of the maternal health booklet. This was the plan from the start, I’m just happy I was there so we could piggyback on this instead of making them go to all the households a second time. Now we just need the stickers, though Dickson is supposed to be on that one, and to procure some maternal and childhood health booklets in case the woman hasn’t gone to her 1st antenatal visit yet to receive one, which Komolo is on. So, wow, we are moving forward, work has begun! And I spoke to 2 health facilitators yesterday and one today (who are the ones in charge of the CHWs at each health center) and they are totally on board too! So, things are going really well, I did another training today and the last one will be tomorrow. Oh, one funny thing, I didn’t have internet in the field and after busting my ass to get the forms changed, when I got back to the office I had an email with more changes! D’oh! But oh well, I’m going to do those either tonight or tomorrow. So, that’s about it for now.
Oh, next weekend we will be staying out in a village and giving a talk to 1,800 HIV+ kids… that will be interesting! OK, till tomorrow or so!
P.S. if you haven’t already, click follow or I will be forced to keep bugging you (You too Mom!) because we love to have followers!
OK, pics up when I get home because they refuse to upload now...
Saturday, July 17, 2010
A boardroom, a bong, and a bathroom with a view
Owino's political message--YES on the new constitution.
Casey and Claire at work. He has the whole boardroom to himself!
Traditional Luo water pipe as seen at the Kisumu Museum.
First wife, bitches, uhh! (uh, maybe not?)
A potty with a view onto our private patio.
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