"No hurry in Africa..."

One of our hosts said that the other day as I was rushing a bit to catch up with her. I had 2 amazing days. Yesterday I spent another day at the clinic Wananchi (Community) Jamii (Family) Clinic. It was so much busier than the other day- I think in part because of the post-election chaos and in part because it was still school holidays then. I was with Rose, a nurse, for the morning. There are no doctors at the clinic- only 5 nurses and a couple of other staff who manage to run the clinic (for very little cost to the patients) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Rose and I saw 20-some patients in the first 3 hours. I say "Rose and I" but Rose really does the work and I assist only. I took notes on the first 18 of the day and then had to stop. Example: 1. A 44 yo male who had come in the night before for stitches in his cheek after being knifed. He was stitched and given a tetanus shot last night. He came back yesterday for antiobiotics, painkiller, and to pay the rest of his bill. 2. Possible bacterial meningitis. A woman who looked to be about 40 (but I don't know), she had come in the day before unable to move her neck and they had given her an antibiotic injection. If it didn't improve by today they would have referred her out to a bigger hospital to run tests. She had some improvement today so they gave her another injection on antibiotics. I asked about this treatment (it seemed slow for treatment of meningitis) and Rose explained that if it were a child he/she would be referred directly b/c the meng. could progress more quickly. 3. was a prenatal visit (2nd child, everything normal) 4. a weight check for an infant and vaccinations (DPT and 1st polio vaccine which is oral). Rose asked me to give the oral vaccine which I did but I declined to give the injection. I wasn't quite ready to cause babies to scream. I discussed vaccinations with the owner of the clinic (Magdalen- also a nurse) and she found it shocking that people in the U.S. sometimes refused vaccinations. During the day we did many more vaccinations, many more prenatal checks, many malaria tests and medications... we also treated burns, UTI's, typhoid etc... I learned so much yesterday I can't begin to record all of it. Everyone is so nice too- and most of the workers I meet (teachers, nurses, social workers) rarely, if ever, get paid. After another amazing dinner I spoke with Mar-i and Peter's (hosts) youngest son John about Kenyan and U.S. politics. Really interesting. From the people I've spoken to it seems that the Kenyan parties don't have much ideology attached to them- that they serve as a platform to advance one's own interests (I'm not really saying here how much that does or doesn't differ from American politics. So people switch parties all the time. Kenya is evidently considering a rule about not allowing members of the opposition to serve in the cabinet of the Pres. w/out permission from the parties. This at first seemed counter-intuitive to me - it seems like a good thing to have the opposition as balance but I guess since there isn't ideology attached to that party/person it happens that the person serving under the pres. just does what the pres. wants. AND since that person has essentially left the opposition party by joining the president's cabinet - the opposition is drained of its leaders and the opposition is weakened. Opposition of what if there is no ideology? Opposition just to be opposition- a balance of sorts to question the current authority. Hmmm... (All of this that I've gleaned is from 2-3 Kenyans only AND for the sake of time, I left out all the tribal implications. I'm currently living in a Kikuyu area- Kibaki is a Kikuyu- so even if they think the election was a sham they're not unhappy to have him as president still) As for U.S. politics, most Kenyans seemed really interested in what being Republican or Democrat means. And most of them are excited about Obama b/c his father was Kenyan.

Today and its excitement will have to wait. Kwaheri (good-bye in Swahili)