Adventures in Kenya: Palliative Care and Window Panes

My travel adventure for the week consisted of a trip to El Doret, a city 3 hours from here. My friend Adam has been working there for the month, and I went to see what another hospital with an international influence is like. My day started as the sun was coming up and I hopped a matatu to Luanda to catch a bus. I had to find the bus that was going to Nairobi, but was going the Kapsabet route, and not the Nakuru route. Needless to say, with the language barrier and the inconsistency of Kenya, I was only about 75% sure that I boarded the right bus. But what is an adventure without a little anxiety, right? Thankfully it was the right bus, and to add to my delight, they played Gangsters Paradise and Mariah Carey, You'll Always Be My Baby on a loop, so I was never without nostalgic entertainment.

(Me and Adam doing a little exploring in Kisumu)

Adam is working at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital this month, which is a huge, public hospital, and I got to go on rounds with him while I was there. It was more common than not to see 2 patients to a single bed........pretty much ever infectious disease doctor's worst nightmare. He was working as part of their palliative care team, which is bigger and better supported than the palliative care team at Duke. I'm not sure if that means Moi is just that good, or Duke is just that bad.......anyway, never have I seen such a place that warrants a good palliative care team. There is some pretty intense suffering in this world, and no matter how long you do this it is never easy to see. I have never been so thankful for a team of people devoted to easing the suffering of others.
On a happier note, I am delighted with the newest member to our small but scrappy team of Too Little Children staff. Her name is Anne, and she will be joining Jacky as a house mom. She will be spending the days with the kids while Jacky is working at the Rotary House. Jacky will still be with the kids at night, but her work load was getting to be too much with working at both houses. Ann is a great addition to our team, and we now have staff that speaks both Luo and Luhya-the two tribal languages surrounding us. Her daughter, Precious-and she is quite literally-comes with her as well, and has become besties with Zedekia. Adorable. They like to hold hands ;) I have made it my mission to catch it on camera, but so far they have outsmarted me.
My summer and fall intern, Virginia, who is a Duke undergrad student, is also here now, and has jumped right into orphanage work and the pad project. Per the usual, I have a lot of maintenance/upkeep chores to do on the two houses, which has kept me pretty busy. And per the usual, I was quoted mzungu price for a lot of the repairs. I bargained most of them down, but there are some things I refuse to pay more for-strictly on principle.......so Virginia and I ended up fixing the 3 broken window panes at the kid's house. We are becoming quite the handy women ;)