just a thought.

A lot of people have told me that by being here, I’m going to change so many lives. After spending some time here, I don’t think that’s the point at all. If anything, my life is going to be the one that changes dramatically. People here are resourceful in ways that I never imagined, and I have so much that I can learn from them. I’m a college student, I have very little of value to teach someone else. Also, I think that’s the problem with Western development. We come to the developing world with grandiose notions of exactly what this place or that place needs, without ever consulting the people that live there, or understanding what it is exactly that they feel they need.

Here’s an example, one that I learned yesterday. The clinic that I work at receives medicine and medical supplies from various organizations. However, the foot the bill for most of the everyday medicine that they use. Save the Children wanted to donate medicine, and Ray of Hope was pleased, however, when the medicine actually came they found out that most of it is bizarre medicine that is rarely used. While Save the Children did a good thing, Ray of Hope still has to pay for almost everything that it uses on a daily basis.

Then there’s the American equipment that’s brought over by American donors, that sits unused because they can’t find the right power converter, or because part of it breaks and they can’t find an equivalent replacement part in Kenya.

There are so many examples that I’ve seen first hand of good intention gone awry, it really makes me think about my own desire to do development work. I’m not exactly sure that that’s what I want anymore, but the question now is, what do I want?

I’m not saying that all foreign aid should stop. It’s just that “development” work has acted as a crutch for so long that in some ways it’s inhibited the people who receive it. It’s still needed to a large extent, but it would be so much better for countries receiving it to be part of how it is used. And it’s sad to see Americans and others from the Global North take jobs away from Kenyans while working in the development field.

As much as this semester leaves me with more questions than answers, maybe it’s good that I still have three semesters left. I should look in to becoming an anthro major. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel then like I had to doubt the benefit of everything that I do in the rest of my life. And I wouldn’t necessarily be taking jobs away from Kenyans either.

One month anniversary!

Last night we celebrated our one month anniversary in Nairobi.
It's hard to believe that it's been a whole month, it's gone by so quickly. so much has happened.
my friends like to call it baptism by fire, and it's so true. the people at work speak to me in as much swahili as possible, which is hard sometimes, cause i still understand so little. Also at work, i've become known as the "midwife" because they found out how much i want to be a midwife. i've assisted in the stages leading up to labor, including learning how to tell how dilated a woman is (you can probably imagine what this entails)

On Friday we went to the Giraffe center, where you can pet giraffes, feed them, and give them kisses. check out flickr for photos!
on saturday we found an amazing second hand market, and i got some awesome shirts.
on sunday i met a traditional midwife in Kawangware (the slum i work in). she told me that one day i could come an help her out with her procedures. i never would have guessed that i would be able to experience this much midwifery. never in my wildest dreams!

anyway, just a short post to tell you that i'm alive. also check flickr, i updated!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/miriamewood/

if you want email updates email me at mir (dot) wood (at) gmail (dot) com
love to you all!!!
miriam

'Never say Bread, say SupaLoaf'

So my internship and classes have started, and so far they’ve both been very interesting in different ways.Classes present a new challenge because of the scarcity of internet around here (and the cost/viruses that abound), so that makes it hard to do assignments online. Also, I’ve had classes for a week, and so far only one professor has come (but he only came for one class), and I don’t have a single syllabus yet.

Here’s a little glimpse of the start of one of my days.

Wednesday was fun. I have to take a matatu ride to work, and that morning I got on one matatu that was going out of town, but wasn’t actually going to where I thought it was going. I was the last person on the matatu, and the tout (the one that takes the money and tells the driver where to stop) looked at me and shrugged. I asked him if it was going to Kawangware (pronounced Cow-an-GWAR-e), and he told me that it wasn’t, and he was nice enough to tell me which matatu to take to get there. The second matatu that I got on decided that they didn’t feel like 1) waiting in traffic, and 2) going all the way to Kawangware. We weaved a lot in between the two lanes of traffic, and a few people were angry at our matatu and would point their car right in front of ours so we had to get back in to traffic. That was pretty fun. Most of the way to Kawangware there were two of left on the matatu, so the driver just decided to give us back our money and turn around. Thankfully a nice woman helped me find my way on to another matatu that finally made it to Kawangware.

Thankfully, I’ve been lost so many times now that I pretty much know my way around. Hopefully I won’t get lost anymore!! The more I walk around Kawangware the more I know my way around.

On the way back the matatu was so beat up that there were rusted patches on the bottom of it, and the door didn’t shut all the way. This is a pretty common experience, but it still amuses me every time, and reminds me of good old Shadowfax… man I miss that car.

My internship is going well so far (granted I’ve only been there two days). I’m not sure how much I’ve already described about Ray of Hope, so here’s a longer explanation. Ray of Hope is a clinic and community center. The clinic does everything: from fixing small wounds and helping HIV/AIDS patients to delivering roughly 60 babies a month and holding free vaccination sessions for infants every Friday. The community center has two parts, the first is a learning center that works with children orphaned by HIV/AIDS, or street children, etc, the second gives food, medicine and support to the community members through community meetings and individual counseling through home visits. A woman named Hendrica, runs the home visits, and community center, and she is my idol. She is a combined social worker, birth attendant, and counselor. She visits homes, gives of her own money, takes people to the hospital, sees death pretty frequently, and is generally a saint. She’s the one that wanted to start the learning center, because she saw so many orphaned children whose parents couldn’t afford the school fees anymore that she wanted to do something so that these kids could get some education and have some fighting chance.

The people at the clinic found out that I want to be a midwife, so now they’ve been planning how to get me to see as many births as I can, including taking me to a nearby women’s hospital that has a very busy labor ward.

It’s been so much fun to get to know everyone at the clinic and school. They are all so nice, and are extremely sweet and caring. The first day I was there I saw a pelvic exam of a woman who was having labor pains, and heard the baby’s heart beat. Most of the time in the clinic I sit and try to understand what everyone is saying in Kiswahili. Occasionally they realize that I’m sitting there and decide to catch me up on the last 20 minutes or so. One day we had a lunch of beans, potato and corn, and they told me that when you eat a lot of beans you fart a lot. I then taught them the American rhyme “beans beans the magical fruit…” which they loved, and made me repeat to everyone else around me.

Hendrica also took me with her as she visited some of her clients, which was so interesting to see what life is really like in Kawangware. I’ve kind of become Hendrica’s assistant, which is cool, because it’s interesting to see how she works, and what life is like for her.

Kawangware is crazy. All of Hendrica’s clients live in corrugated tin shacks that are 10 feet by 10 feet, and the rent is 2,000 Ksh a month (about $30, which may not seem like much to you, but to the average Kenyan living in the slums that’s a HUGE amount). There are generally more than 6 people that live in these houses, and on the day that it rains the roads are made up entirely of mud (and it’s been raining for the past week, thank G-d for those rain boots I got!!), so the houses become muddy also. Everything is cooked over charcoal, which creates a lot of smoke. Trash is also burned everywhere you go, which creates a very distinct odor, and adds to the pollution here (hence the black boogers).

I’ve also sat in on the nursery classes at Ray of Hope (which are children age 3 to kindergarten although there are a few older kids), which was fun. The children mostly stare at me and laugh, which is adorable, although somewhat frustrating. The first day I had to draw pictures, while they guessed what it was, and every time there was one that looked somewhat like what it was supposed to be they would sing a congratulation cheer. It seemed almost like they were mocking me, but it was hilarious.

So that’s pretty much what’s been happening so far! Once I spend more time at USIU I’ll fill you in on everything that’s been happening, and whenever something interesting happens at Ray of Hope I’ll be sure to let you know! (especially when I get to see my first birth!)

Miss you all!!!!

miriam

Black Boogers and Wimpy’s Burgers

*I’m sorry if none of this makes sense, it’s so hard to put down everything that’s happened into writing. Also, I realize it’s ridiculously long, but there’s so much to say... *

So it’s been a week an a half since we arrived in Nairobi, and I’m amazed at how much we’ve done, and how much Nairobi is beginning to feel like home. Orientation week has gone by so quickly, and it’s been non stop since we got here. It’s been a week of firsts: first ride in a matatu, first ride alone in a matatu (very very different), first time hearing reggae versions of Celine Dion, Usher, Cher, Bryan McKnight, the Titanic theme song, first time eating Ugali (which is corn meal porridge, like thick grits) and sukomo wiki (boiled kale), first time on a six hour bus ride on a super bumpy road, first sub-saharan squatty potty, first time on a safari seeing live animals.

A lot of our time was spent going around different parts of Nairobi and visiting the internships that we will be divided among. We take matatus as we travel between the internships, and they’re always fun. Mataus (along with the less exciting City Hoppas) are Nairobi’s public transportation. They’re kind of like VW vans that have 5 rows of seats that hold between 14 and 25 people (depending on which type of van). From Westlands, where we live, to the city center it costs 20 shillings (which is about 40 cents). Traffic is crazy in Nairobi. Lanes are largely ignored, as are traffic laws. I’ve been in two or three fender-benders so far, but everyone’s cars are so banged up that it doesn’t really matter. The first time we went on a matatu there was a screen that showed American hip-hop videos. Most of them play crazy music, usually American hip-hop. I’ve never listened to so much hip-hop. And all of the mataus are decorated, usually with American slogans and logos, such as Check Mate, Philadelphia Eagles (yay philly pride!!!), pictures of Alyiah, 50 Cent, Alicia Keys, 80’s themed, etc. My favorite so far has been one that said “Head Butt” on the back, with a picture of Zidane head-butting the Italian guy from the last World Cup. The inside was decorated with other pictures of soccer players.

In Kawangware, a near by slum, we visited Ray of Hope, a clinic that specialize in HIV/AIDS patients that live in the slum and has a new maternity ward. In addition, there’s a school for 50 children infected with HIV. Walking through that slum was such an interesting experience, we felt like such parade. All of the children would point at us and yell “MUNZUNGU!!” (which means traveler, but it’s used to describe any white people). Then they would ask us “Hello, how are you?” which is the only English that they know. It was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. Ray of hope is actually where I will be interning, working both with the school and in the clinic. As much as I want to be a midwife I’m not sure how I’ll react to seeing an actual birth. It should be an adventure!!

We also went to Eastleigh, which is largely comprised of Somali and Ethiopian refugees that have lived here for a few generations, but are still not accepted by the Kenyan population. There we visited Mama Fatuma’s, an orphanage with mainly Muslim children. You could tell just from spending time there that those children were loved beyond belief. It is held in stark contrast in our minds to Mama Ngina’s, an orphanage in South C that we visited the next day. The children were severely neglected, and they had such poor social skills, particularly the infants. It was so hard to be in there with children sleeping in their own spit-up, with full diapers and under-developed bones and muscles. Even those that couldn’t interact with us when we were holding them knew enough to cry as soon as we put them down. When we left it was as if someone has ripped my heart out, by far the saddest part of our trip.

This weekend we went to Voi, which is a village that KJ our program director worked in. It was two-thirds of the way to Mombasa along Mombasa road, about a 6 hour ride. And when I say road I mean more pot holes than actual road. There would be long stretches where they were working on fixing the roads so instead we would have to use the “deviation” which was bump after bump after bump. It was insane. The bus (matatu) that we were in felt like a tin can on wheels, and after each bump we were sure that something was going fall off and we were going to be stranded like all of the other broken down matatus that we saw along the road. It felt almost like a roller coaster, especially when the bumps were so big that we were launched off our seats (with seatbelts that don’t really hold you in it’s hard to stay seated). The sights were magnificent though. Everything was dusty and dirty (we were covered in a layer of filth by the end), but there were so many interesting things to see. One of my favorite things was just to look at the landscape. It’s largely dry and dusty with a few trees. At one point I saw a large tree that provided some of the only shade in the surrounding area, and underneath it there was a bench with five young girls sitting in height order chatting the day away.

We passed many small towns along the way, that reminded me of old time-y towns that you see in Westerns. One room buildings and stores, people selling things along the side of the road.

There were also so many people walking from town to town along the side of the road. It made an extremely picturesque setting, young children walking with their school bags towards boarding school, young boys herding their family goats, cows and sheep, men and women enduring the heat to get home..

We visited an area near Voi called Taita where we visited the Cave of Skulls. In the crevice of a rock, near a tree that only grows around water are the skulls of the ancestors of the town. People would go to this area to seek advice or to gain understanding. It was also up in the mountains, so it was extremely lush and tropical.

There’s so much to say and not nearly enough time to tell you all everything that has happened. If there are any things that you want to know if particular just e-mail me and I’ll try to fill you in! Also, just let me know what’s been happening in your life!!! I can’t wait to hear from you!

Also, in case anyone wants to know, my address here is

Miriam Wood

Njema Court

Apt R4

Box 66251

Nairobi Kenya 00800

Or something like that. With all of that info I’m sure I’ll get to me somehow.

Love to you all!

Miriam