Can't...think...of...a...witty...title....

I'm sitting in my friend/fellow PCV Marcus' sexy apartment with my feet up on his coffee table, drinking yogurt out of a carton with a straw and...updating my blog. Life is good. So posh corps right now...

I've actually made a list of things to talk about so I won't go blank like I usually do when I sit down to write here. I'm sure this post will be as discombobulated mine always are, but... at least I have a list. My mom would be proud.

I've started jogging (or is it "yogging"? is it a soft J?) a bit in the mornings just for fun. Aside from feeling like I only have one lung and that it's an underdeveloped, asthmatic and TB infected lung (I'm blaming the elevation, not my lack of fitness), it's been really fun, mostly because I laugh at myself the entire time. Because I look like an ass. Not many people (um...no one in my village that I've seen yet) wake up to do more physical work than is required to live here. People in my village are SO strong and hard working. In the shamba most mornings, walking to get water (and then carrying 20 gallon jugs back on their heads), cleaning their land, keeping their animals (and small children), cooking, I could go on. But...running? Just to run? People find it really amusing. Some of my favorite comments so far: "WHAT'S WRONG??", "...where is your bike??", "...what are you doing...?" followed by knee slapping and hysterical laughing, "Ohhhh sorry! Sorry!" like whatever I'm doing looks painful to the point of them feeling bad for me. I naively thought that everyone would be a runner in Kenya. That's completely logical, right? Kenyans run. All of them. But, yeah. No. It's not the case. My village thinks it's hilarious, though. And that's reason enough for me to keep doing it.

I have been keeping myself really busy lately and it feels so good. Among a few other things, I've been meeting with a builder to talk about the quote for the dispensary, I've written a letter to the Rotary Dr. people to try to get a protected well for my family and the surrounding families (other than rain water, our water comes from an open boar hole, fed by a natural spring), I've met with the head master at the local primary school to do a little "assessment"--the better classrooms have no doors, no windows, no floors, the worse classrooms have been deemed a health hazard by the Ministry of Health but are being used nonetheless--so... I've got to come up with a plan to fix that, and I've visited the nearest medical facility in Murumba (about 13km away from my village), just to check it out. Not that I needed more inspiration to get our dispensary built, but... wow. I was not prepared at all for what I saw there. Below is part of what I wrote in my journal that day:

"...Perhaps the first sign that something was amiss was the huge fallen water catchment tank lying useless on the front lawn (their main water source?). Near and around that sat and lay sick people and family and friends and boda-boda(bike taxi) drivers. A bare mattress lay unoccupied on the grass; next to it, a man sitting, resting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. I parked my bike near the other 15 or so in front; just beyond that were lines of people waiting to be seen, some waiting to see others. Mostly women, most carrying babies. The erie quiet was punctuated with bursts of desperate coughing coming from one corner and echoed by someone else accross the open air hallway. There was no "hospital building" (per se)that I saw, just open air walkways connecting rooms of different purposes. The "system" for visiting a patient was...non-existent. Baba and I walked up to a room marked "WOMENS WARD" and when the old mama serving as the only nurse to about 12 occupied beds in the ward emerged and opened the doors, about 20 of the people standing around outside rushed in to hold the hands and stroke the cheeks of their respective loved ones. I stood in the doorway, just...staring. It was the first hospital I'd seen that didn't have shiny white floors, clean white robes, plastic plants, generic wall paintings and calendars, a forced "hush"ness, that awful sterile smell. I missed that sterile smell. I fixated on the IV drips, which were actually just inverted plastic bottles connected to tubes. Some of the bottles were punctured directly with hypodermic needles (maybe these things are standard?); some of the IVs were hanging on the iron window bars because there was nowhere else to hang them. There was no sound of beeping, dripping, breathing. No curtains. No privacy.
And then, everyone in the room gathered around and in between the beds and I watched as they lowered their eyes and then their heads and were led in prayers by someone among us. I focused my eyes on the little baby in the bed closest to the door where I was standing, his chest rising and falling, so labored. I listened, not knowing the words that were being mumbled but somehow understanding them...and I reminded myself that these people were the lucky ones who had mad it there. I still couldn't step all the way in to the room...."

Sorry to be so Debbie Downer... but, shit. I was really affected by it. I know getting a dispensary built wouldn't necessarily change things at that hospital... maybe things don't even need to change. Sometimes I worry that when I think about "helping" I really am just picturing bringing the world I grew up in to the world I'm in now. And that's not necessarily appropriate or necessary. Still, a dispensary in Umer (my village) could maybe help people not need to get to that hospital? I don't know.

Anyway. My eyes are bugging out. I have a lot more to talk about, but I'll have to write another installment this week sometime. I'll keep you all in suspense. Wuahhh hahaha.

Much love,
H