Banana Planting!

Finally, after almost a month of laboring away on our laptops, entering data and filling in questionnaires and creating way awesome excel spreadsheets that calculate lots of things for us, we got to actually put all our data to work and visit the schools to give them our recommendations. We also got to go to a couple of schools to give Healthy Family eating seminars to the parents of the students in Nursery school.

Giving the feedback to the school was awesome. The staff at Kamuketha were so incredibly attentive and hung on to our every word, not once doubting our expertise despite only being students. It was pretty fun to be able to teach them things that they were excited to try. Simple little changes that will enhance the health of all the students. None of the changes are drastic, but they are realistic and achievable, which is the best part. It's too bad we can't come back next year, because when the new nutrition students who come next year go to visit the schools, they'll be able to see that what we have recommended is being implemented and positively impacting the students.

We went to Ruuju Primary school on Wednesday to give our very first family nutrition seminar to the parents of the nursery school kids. We called the headmaster the day before to see how many parents were expected to show up and he told us around 30. There are about 70 nursery school students so while we weren't thrilled with this number, we felt that it would be a fairly good sized group to speak to and to be able to facilitate a good discussion with. We were a little worried that the 30 expected would not all show, and we would be left with an audience of about 5 people. We weren't really nervous but couldn't help but have some butterflies as we stood infront of a room full of mothers looking at us expectantly. We had a teacher translate for us since we don't speak the language and many of the mothers do not speak strong English. We would say 1 or two short sentences and then allow the teacher to translate. We're not entirely sure what she actually told the women but it took about 5 minutes of Swahili (or Kimaru...not entirely sure)for every 2 sentences of English. We knew going into the presentation that presneting to women in Kenya would be different than presenting in Canada, but I don't think either of us was fully prepared for how extremely different it actually was. Women were trickling in in groups of 4, 2 or 6 throughout the entire presentation, often accompanied by crying children. Since the group of women quickly expanded from about 30 women when we started to well over 100 women by the end of the session, teachers were constantly coming in carrying more and more benches for the parents to sit on, shuffling the already seated women around completely and causing a ruckus as everyone jammed into the little classroom we were lecturing in. It was a little but frustrating to have so many interruptions every few minutes. With new people coming in, the existing audience members being rearranged, children on lunch break playing and screaming outside and children popping their heads through the window trying to get a look at what was going on, it was hard to focus on what we were actually presenting to the women. Luckily, we happen to be in Kenya, and I think Christina and I were the only two that even noticed the distractions. All in all it went really really well! We had the women fill out an evaluation form in three groups to get feedback on how they felt it went and the comments were overwhelmingly awesome. Everyone seemed really happy to have been invited and were excited to try out some of our tips at home. We even got thank you cards given to us with a standing ovation from the women. The card will be hanging on my bulletin board in my room as soon as I get home!

We had another parent session planned for another school the following day and were pretty excited about it since the previous one went so well. When we walked up to Kinyenjere, the school seemed awfully quiet. There are normally kids running around everywhere but there were only a few little kids playing outside. Turns out that there had been a death in the community and the majority of the school, including ALL the parents of nursery school kids, were attending the burial that morning. So we were a little disappointed; not a single parent showed up to our session. We rescheduled with a teacher for the following week and then went into some of the classes and taught the students about the 3 Kenyan food groups instead. Once the kids got bored of the food groups, we taught them all the hokey pokey which they found beyond hilarious. We eventually had a giant school wide circle of hokey pokey-ing going down which I would have loved to get a picture of. I knew that pulling out a camera would mean everyone immediately running towards me to look at the picture I had taken so I didn't even bother trying.

Martin came to pick us up in the afternoon on his way back from Nairobi with 2000 Banana tree seedlings in the truck. We headed to the Muchui Business Center where we were greeted by about 20 women who were waiting for Martin to arrive with the plants. We all crowded into the greenhouse, where polybags full of sterilized soil were all ready and waiting. martin gave us some instructions and we got to planting. it only took about half an hour to get all of the tree seedlings planted but that was more than enough time to get completely covered from head to toe in mud. Somehow Kenyan women manage to stay 100% clean 100% of the time, regardless of whether or not they are farming or having tea with the queen. Us on the other hand, had mud from our toes to our knees, our fingers to out elbows, and even smudges on our faces. The women were a little disgusted with us and ushered us to a water tap to shower off. They weren't quite satisfied with our bathing job though and kept giving us death stares, pointing to our muddy feet and speaking in swahili to one another. Oh well! I loved banana planting. Being able to work with the women in the farm was awesome, and made me feel like I was actually being useful instead of just giving sessions on what they should be eating. They find it so incredible that white people would be willing to help them do manual labour so they were all really grateful despite not even needing to be.

Sunspots and Hook Worms

This is really long as a result of my random ramblings and nothing else to do. I advise you skim it.

There are very few things that motivate you more to slather on copious layers of sunscreen every hour than the realization that you are no longer invincible against sunspots and wrinkles. I like to think that the hours and hours I’ve spent in the sun throughout my lifetime have been not so much out of choice but a necessity as an outdoor summer athlete. I always wear sunscreen at the beginning of the summer when I'm still super white and burn, but once I've established a base tan, I normally forget to put it on everyday, despite being on the water for several hours a day all summer long. In the back of my head I know this was unwise, and when I retired from paddling I told myself I would start taking the time to look after myself properly. I was legitimately making a bigger effort to wear sunscreen everyday and re-apply here but the one day I decided I would lay outside and read I got ridiculously burned. I looked in the mirror a few days later and realized that I actually had the beginnings of wrinkles and several new freckles on my chest and arms. This really really freaked me out. I don't want to be one of those people who you walk by and instantly know they had spent a lot of time in the sun when they were younger. So the past few days I've been putting on about a gallon of sunscreen every hour in a frantic attempt to prevent further damage or reverse any damage I may have already done. I know I'm only 21 but this whole getting old thing happens quicker than I thought!

We provided a school with feedback based on our data analysis today for the first time! It was really exciting to be able to finally to the job we can here to do. We made up a handout for the head teacher of the school with several tips and a brief summary of what we found. We sat down with the head teacher, the gardener, the cook and another teacher who was involved in what was served to students and went through what awesome things they are already doing, and areas in which they could improve. We provided several tips to make these changes possible and then had a lengthy goal setting session with them. We made concrete, realistic goals with dead lines that the school could strive for that would make the recipes they use more nutritionally adequate for all students. I think the staff were very receptive and appreciative and by the end of the session they even seemed pretty excited and determined to achieve the new goals we had set with them.

To get to the school, we called George, our taxi man, for the first time. He was a little bit sketch, but he is the friend of David, who one of Henry's go to guys and since Henry is awesome and so is David, then we figure George must not be as sketch as he seemed. The road to Kamuketha Primary School is treacherous to say the least. Not to mention we didn't know how to get there. We tried calling Martin, the guy who drove us last time, who is a employee of farmers helping farmers, but when we passed the phone to the driver for Martin to tell him where to go, he simply instructed the driver to stop at another school to pick up a student who could show us the way. We got out of the car at the school and as they pulled a a little boy out of a grade 4 class and was forcing him to get in the car with us, Christina and I refused to let them take a student out of school so a few teachers, the principal and 3 students later, the driver finally got an explanation of how to get there. There are no road signs, so the directions consisted of "turn left at the rock that looks like a banana" and take a right at the cactus". We had to stop like 5 times to ask directions from guys herding goats and women carrying hundreds of pounds of water on their backs on the way but we made it eventually. When Martin drove us to the school last week, he drove very slowly and swerved around all the boulders and eased the truck up the mountain. When I say the road is treacherous, I mean that this road looks like a really decent hike up the side of a mountain, not the least like a road that would allow cars to actually pass. George doesn't have a truck. He has a little car. His strategy for getting up the mountain and over the boulders was to go really fast with a running start. It worked after rolling down the maintain backwards only a couple times though!

After a good day at school, we headed to the junction to Irene's salon for manicures and pedicures. I was a little sketched out about the sanitation of the tools she was using, which aren't washed between people and may never have ever been washed so I settled for getting my nails filled and painted. I stopped biting my nails when I got here for safety reasons and so it's the first time I've had nails long enough to paint which was kind of exciting. She also got disgusted with how dirty my feet were and washed them for me. Good thing to because while she was washing them she found a parasite and dug it out of my toe with a needle sterilized with some sort of alcohol (well clear liquid, I assumed it was alcohol). In Kenya it's called a jigga, but I think it might have actually been a Hookworm. Either way I hand sanitized my feet hardcore when I got home and will have to start bathing more often I guess.

When we were all getting our nails done (all six of us), Jennifer's brother's wife came in, who is also Stacey's grandmother. Stacey is this little girl who comes over all the time to colour in my Toy Story and Monsters Inc colouring books with my crayons that I brought. She had her cell phone in one hand, was wearing a very nice business suit and in the other hand had a chicken. A fully alive, fluffy white chicken. It happened to be her dinner for tonight! She told me that next time she buys chicken, she'll call me up and let me help butcher it and de-feather it and cook it up. I'm sure this will maybe make me cry a little - I can't imagine killing a chicken, but I think it's really important to be as involved as possible in the entire process of your food. I want to raise chickens in my backyard one day, so I think it would be good for me to learn now. I don't really think it would be fair of me to eat chicken as often as I do if I wasn't willing to at least witness the entire from field to table process. There are chickens everywhere here. You can't look outside without seeing one running around. I think I may have fallen in love with them. I decided that if I ever get chickens, I will name each one after a meal. For example, one could be Pot Pie, or Stew, or Drumstick, or Dumpling. The possibilities are endless really.

Yesterday, during hte world cup final, there were a serious of bombings in Uganda. The nurses are a little freaked out that the violence may somehow end up in Kenya but I'm not to worried. I'm keeping my eye on the headlines just to stay informed but I'm sure if anything major ever happened that was any threat to us here, Farmers Helping Farmers and the University would be sending us home asap. Last time the school sent nutrition students, they ended up being robbed at knife or gun point and were consequently sent home on the next flight. Henry is magic and would have us in Nairobi and on a plane within hours of anything happening so I figure we couldn't possibly be in any safer hands.

I will try to put some pictures up soon, but the internet is slow and now that my prof isn't here to take 200 pictures a day there aren't nearly as many to put up!

Goats on a Rope and Bubble Wrap

This week seems to have been plagued with all things attached to ropes. Earlier this week, we spent several nights putting soap on a rope for hand washing sessions that the nurses will be conducting at several schools over the next few weeks. The past two days have been filled with sightings of people walking down the streets with their goats on a rope, trotting not so willingly beside them. All of the animals that are grazing, are tied to ropes on the side of the road, and I guess their owners move them every once in a while for new grass. Since very few people own property here, specially closer to the cities, all the animals graze on public land in the ditches along the roads. I can't even tell you how many times we've come dangerously close to driving right into a cow or a donkey. Normally the ropes are about an inch too short for the animals to run onto the road, but sometimes they're about 3 inches too long to prevent them from doing so.

Last weekend I got sunburned. Really really sunburned. It turns out that the sun is pretty strong here at the equator...who woulda thought. Anyways, so I got burned, re-applied aloe every 30 minutes for 2 days in an attempt to be able to sit and move without pain (this was an entire body, from neck down burn). I didn't end up peeling very much at all, and now it has all turned into a tan, which was a bonus because I had never seen a burn on the backs of my legs turn so purple before. It was bad. Yesterday morning I got up early to go for a run on the treadmill before heading out into the real world outside our little locked up compound. The room where the exercise equipment in is quite literally as close to a jail cell as you can get. A stationary bike and treadmill fit snugly into the room together. The room can't be any bigger than 6ft by 6ft and one wall isn't actually a wall, its a giant door. Half of this door is metal and the other half is just metal bars. So as I run, my view is either the curtains if they are pulled, or I can see a tree through the bars. It's not exactly the funnest place to exercise but it's better than nothing. This little room gets really hot, even at 7am. As I get off the treadmill drenched in sweat, I realize that I have developed tiny little blisters all over my body, but worst of all in the spots where my burn was the worst but didn't peel. My entire body actually felt like my skin had turned into bubble wrap. I showered and they still remained, and then I eventually figured that my entire body was covered in blisters that were filled with sweat. As they ruptured throughout the day, I could feel the sweat slash liquid gushing out of them. Luckily I woke up this morning bubble wrap free so I'm a happy camper.

We were invited to go to a women's group meeting yesterday. It was an all day affair and the 4 nurses and 2 vet students joined both of us nutrition students. Jennifer, whos house we stayed at the first week, is the leader of the Muchui women's group and also is heavily involved with helping the Ruuju women's group get up and started as they are much newer. The women from these two groups have never met. Their headquarters are about an hour apart, and each member of the groups are paired with someone from the other group as a pen pal slash they talk on their cell phones (which everyone in the entire country has) but have never met eachother. So the Muchui women rented a bus for the day to take all 65 of them to Ruuju for a meet and greet and we tagged along. The morning was fine, we went to various farms seeing all that they had accomplished since the group started. We saw our very first eggplant plant which was for some reason really exciting. The sad part is, Christina and I have been to so many farms in the last 3 weeks with Farmers Helping Farmers and at the schools, that we can recognize all the crops, we know which questions to ask about crop rotations, about harvesting methods and about which plants may be missing from their garden. We're trying to teach people to plant more indigenous greens that are more drought tolerant and resistent to Kenyan climates. Currently, many of the women are planting mass amounts of cash crops instead of plants they can actually eat themselves. They often get an incredibly unfair prize for their maize, making it next to impossible to support themselves and their families. Although the man of the family owns the property, the women do all the work. It is not unusual to see the men laying drunk and passed out on the side of the road or high from chewing miraa or khat. So what we're doing with the women's groups and the school gardens is trying to teach them how to grow a small kitchen garden along with their cash crop shambas (shamba = swahili for farm) where they grow enough vegetables and fruit to feed themselves and their families. Wow I am totaly off on a tangent right now and will have to reread this paragraph to figure out what I'm even talking about. oops.

Ah yes, ok so after walking around the farms, we regrouped in the dining hall of the school they use as a headquarters, had some Kenyan tea and bananas (which by the way, taste almost nothing like the bananas at home) and then the guest speaker starter her inspirational speech for the women. Cramming 150 people into a small stone dining room in the middle of the day makes for a very hot and sticky and sweaty and smelly and uncomfortable afternoon. It didn't help that the speaker spoke Kimaru ( the local dialect) the whole time so we sat in the heat all squished together for over 2 hours listening to a speech in a language none of us spoke. We were all very very grumpy by the end of her speech. The only english words she said the whole 2 hours was "make yourself betta and betta everyday in every way."

All of the women were wearing wigs for the occasion. This was both hilarious and frustrating. We know alot of the women from visiting their farms, they are teachers at the schools we've visited, or just women we've met several times and are now friends with. But since they were all wearing wigs, it was so hard to find the ones we knew because they looked totally different! There is an entire aisle in the Nakumatt devoted to hair pieces, and I think these women must have sold them out before the meet and greet. Even some of the women farmers who we had seen the day we toured farms in Ruuju, who had dying goats and kittens in their yard, and looked as though a breeze would blow them right over were there in fancy wigs. I guess it just goes to show you that since the culture is so dramatically different, what we perceive as a horrible living situation, might not be that bad at all. This women who broke our hearts by giving us eggs two weeks ago, was now dressed in her uniform, happy as could be with all her friends and wearing a giant wig that made her unrecognizable.

On the way home, we had to drive through downtown Meru. The president was in Meru yesterday for a rally about the referendum. It was actually madness! There were a million people everywhere. Half of them were wearing bright green shirts that had YES written on it in giant white letters, the other half were carrying around rifles and GIANT guns of all types casually as if it were no big deal. And then there were the multiple truck loads of army clad men with even bigger guns then the pedestrians. I was very happy we were only driving through and not actully stopping in town for anything. We haven't heard of any violence occuring yesterday yet so that's always a good sign. We were told not to leave the compound on August 4th when the population is voting. We were also told not even to unlock to doors to the compound that day as it's not safe for us to be anywhere. They are expecting quite a bit of violence that day I think and just want to err on the side of caution with us.

Last night, we had some drinks and played scrabble. There isn't much else to do within the compound when we're not writing reports, analyzing data and preparing presentations so we either read or play scrabble. I love scrabble. I'm thinking if the nutrition thing doesn't work out for me I might just travel the world finding scrabble gurus to teach me their ways and ultimately become the scrabble champ of the world. I won't lie...I am way way far from getting to that point. My skills still consist of words that only Dr Suess could be proud of, but I'm learning! I played the word Toxin the other day on a triple word score. It was probably the highlight of my scrabble career even though it wasn't even very many points. The nurses always joke that nurses don't drink a lot, just enough to forget the day. Wine and scrabble was actually the perfect way to ungrumpify after an unpleasant afternoon.

Three Cheers for Soap on a Rope

What came first? Bees with colour vision or flowers in colour? I’m reading a Honey Bee Biology and Beekeeping text book and in it they as this question. Apparently the school of thought has traditionally been that coloured flowers came first, but new research suggests otherwise. How the heck can you possibly research anything that would give you that answer? It boggled my mind a little bit.

We went back to Muchaka, the children’s orphanage today. Unlike last time, when the whole purpose of our visit was to simply feed babies and play with children, we actually had to collect data today. This turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated because they don’t actually measure anything. It’s extremely hard to quantify ‘4 handfuls of sukuma wiki’ to input into a nutrient database, or to figure out how much milk they add to uji when the amount they add is based on ‘ just knowing’ how much they need. So of course we hop out of our van, clipboards in one hand, measuring tape and scale in the other, looking for exact measurements of everything but sometimes it’s just not possible. We have the densities in g/mL of about a million vegetables because often they add 1 ‘bucket’ of tomatoes or 3 ‘jugs’ of onions. We’ve been able to calculate the volume of the containers used to measure and then convert the volume into a weight of veg but it all seems a little sketch at times. We’re doing the best we can but I can’t help but wonder how accurate all this actually is, and if it even matters. Without even putting the recipes into our World Food database, we already know what we will eventually recommend. Stop polishing the maize, add more vegetables, soak the beans and maize overnight, add milk to the uji, add more types of cereals to the uji flour etc. Hopefully our data is going to be used for some greater good other than these recommendations. Yes the recommendations are important; we’ve seen in some schools that by simply adding some sukuma wiki (kale), which they already grow in their gardens, the nutrient content of the foods served sky rockets, potentially preventing deficiency diseases from occurring and curing those that already are.

Since collecting data took less time than anticipated, we actually did manage to find some time play with and feed the babies. I wasn’t exactly bouncing off the walls in excitement to feed them again after getting fired last time but I wasn’t dreading it either. (Honestly, I was more excited to play with the preschoolers on one of those play-ground features that is circular and spins really really, really fast and may or may not be called a merry-go-round (minus the horses though, and you can spin it as fast as you want). It’s essentially a giant Lazy Susan for kids to play on). Although I didn’t get fired from feeding the babies today, I did learn a valuable lesson. I am apparently lacking any maternal instincts whatsoever. I cannot feed a child if my life depended on it. We both end up covered in goop, which quite frankly grosses me out a bit. I like kids, and I like babies, but I should not be allowed near anything under the age of 2.

One thing I think is incredibly underrated is soap on a rope. The nurses are going around to a bunch of schools to give hand-washing clinics to the students. They are bringing with them boxes of soap for the schools. Each school is getting 20 kg of soap and there are 5 different schools. These boxes contain 20 1kg bars of soap that are really long, so all the bars had to be cut into normal soap bar sized portions, had to have holes drilled into them and had to have string tied around them. We now have 100kg of soap on a rope ready for the clinics. I’m sure there was a much better way to spend our last weeks worth of evenings, but it had to get done eventually. It actually made me kind of want some for my shower at home. It wouldn’t get all slimy where it sits in the dish and if it slipped out of your hand, instead of flying across the bathroom, it would stay firmly attached it it’s rope and where ever that rope was hung.

Exciting happening of today number a million was an e-mail from the UPEI swim team coach about next year’s team. Last year the schedule was pretty slack. Very few practices were mandatory, and those rules were never even reinforced. This was convenient for me since I was just kind of swimming for kicks and not competing because of my ticker but it did nothing for team spirit. This coming year is going to be way more intense. First of all, they are only taking 12 varsity swimmers on the travel team this year, and there are even tryouts! Eek! I’m a little scared I won’t lie. I’m not exactly in the best shape of my life and I won’t even be able to step foot into a pool before September 12^th when I get home. Tryouts are September 7^th-19^th so essentially my tryout will also be my first swim since April. I e-mailed the coach and he seems to be ok with that and I think will hopefully take into consideration that I’ve been in Kenya for the 3 months leading up to tryouts but it’s still not a very comforting feeling. Needless to say I need to hardcore google body weight exercises that are good for swimming and somehow come up with a fitness regime while I’m here so that I don’t embarrass myself too badly in September. I’m really, really super excited to swim though! Even if I don’t make the varsity team, I’d still swim everyday with the club team because I love swimming. I didn’t train hardcore last year, I just kind of chilled in the slow lane working on technique and pacing at about a ‘brisk walk’, but this year I’m actually going to train hard and try to get faster than the 10 year olds that swim with the Charlottetown Bluephins. It’s a pretty lofty goal, I know, but I can dream right?

Since it’s not entirely safe to wander around Kenya on your own, and we don’t exactly have many friends here yet, the past few days have been slightly boring. We spend the mornings getting work done – analyzing data, preparing information sessions for the parents and students, the afternoons at the schools collecting data and then by 3 o’clock we are home at the hospital. By the time we get home in the afternoon, we are sluggish and tired have very little motivation to do anything. Then by the time we’ve eaten and cleaned up from supper and are motivated to do fun things, it’s after dark and we aren’t allowed out of the compound. Last night, after finishing my fourth book in 2 and a half weeks, Christina and I decided that we had had just about enough of being bored. Who goes to Kenya to be bored? Like really. So this morning we went for a walk and then after going to the school we went to the Kiirua junction to visit Irene. Irene has a little shop at the junction where she gives manicures and pedicures for 100 Kenyan shillings. This is about 1.50 Canadian. We made appointments with Irene for Friday after we get back from the orphanage and she told us she’d take us to the market soon. She also directed us to the best Mandazi spot in town, which is a little hotel across the street from the hospital. Mandazis are pretty much just fried dough so it’s very very yummy.

Silas, our personal chef, made us a delicious Kenyan meal tonight of chapattis, sukuma wiki (kale) and baked beans. I can’t complain about the living arrangements. We have a women named Gladys who has our laundry clean and folded on our beds for us every afternoon when we get home from the schools, and a chef who has dinner on the table for us every night at 6pm and even does all the dishes he used for cooking. It’s going to be hard to get used to doing my own laundry and cooking again once I get home! I do sometimes miss cooking for myself, but not enough to fire the chef. We even have enough left overs from every dinner that we have lunch for the next day too. The problem is, the chef told us today that his goal is to send us home bigger than when we came with all of his food. This goal, combined with the fact that there are no mirrors bigger than a foot square, no scales and the only clothes I bought are stretchy might be a recipe for disaster. But for now I’m just going to love life and enjoy Kenyan food.

In other good news, turns out you can get Tusker in Canada? My brother told me it was on sale because of the world cup so I'm super pumped to track it down once I get back home. I doubt that I will find it in PEI but hopefully it'll turn up in Ontario somewhere.

After two weeks of running around like a crazy person from school to school and farm to farm and meeting to meeting, we finally have a day off. My professor and the Farmers Helping Farmers liaison both flew home Friday, and the nursing students all went to Sweetwaters to go on safari for the weekend so it’s really really quiet here. We went from living with 10 people for a week down to just the two of us. We wasted the entire day Friday doing nothing but getting extremely incredibly sunburned and reading. I’ve gone through 3 books already since I’ve been here which is awesome because during the school year I never get anytime to read at all. The bad news is that I have finished all the books I brought here to read, but luckily the nursing students each brought like 12 books so we have an entire bookshelf full of random things to read. So I am about to start book number 4, and will probably have it finished pretty soon.

This morning, to break up the monotony of the weekend, Christina and I went to church with Jennifer’s brother Sammy. The key to Kenya is to embrace the awkwardness of doing random things with random people you don’t actually know. It turns out that Sammy is pretty cool and very easy to get a long with. When it came time for the service, Sammy ushered us into the building and sat us down on the bench beside him. A few minutes later, once the rest of the congregation had wandered in, we look around and can’t help but notice that there are no women on our side of the church and no men on the other side of the church. It turns out that the church actually divides itself for service, with women on one side and men on the other, and we happened to be sitting on the wrong side. Sammy assured us it was fine because we were guests but I can’t even count the number of weird stares we got. It may have been that they were staring because we were also the only white people there but who really knows. Half way through the congregation, we hear the minister slash priest slash reverend (what ever he was) say the words ‘visitor’ and ‘say a few words’. Since he had a severe Swahili accent, those were basically the only words that we could make out. Next thing we know, he’s looking in our direction holding a microphone out. We kind of looked at each other and then to Sammy to figure out what was actually happening. We were ushered onto the stage with no idea what the heck we were supposed to be saying. This was especially awkward because I didn’t actually understand more then 10 words the preacher dude said the whole service and the entire congregation was starring at us expectantly. Finally we introduced ourselves, explained what we were doing in Kenya and then thanked them for inviting us. I thought we were done, and so I handed the microphone back to the preacher man but he was still looking expectantly as if we were supposed to continue with a something religion related. We kind of handed back the microphone and slinked back into our bench on the men’s side of the church thoroughly embarrassed and still not entirely sure what was going on.

Today I organized my entire timetable for classes next year and am all ready and am pumped to register next week. It will be potentially my last time picking courses ever which is both terrifying and super exciting at the same time. I have some room for electives this year and I have picked some really awesome ones that are pretty much completely random but hopefully easy and interesting.

Canada Day and Barefoot Running FAIL

Happy Canada Day! It’s my first Canada Day in a country other than Canada and it’s a little bit strange not to be racing today. We brought enough decorations to deck out the apartment in streamers and balloons and paper flags and to cover ourselves in Canada tattoos. My professor is currently cooking up a storm for our party tonight in which we are inviting the sisters from the hospital where we are staying. In an attempt to be Canadian, we are cooking potato wedges, Sheppard’s pie, chocolate chip cookies, mango salsa and some Kenyan sukuma wiki (fried kale). The hospital where we are living is a very religious place built and funded by Italians so all the nurses are nuns. Apparently they are awesome though so we should be able to continue with the red and white theme with several glasses of red and white wine.

My barefoot running project was temporarily a major fail. After two 6-8 km walks in flip flops and a treadmill run barefoot in the same 2 days, I am now nursing golf ball sized blisters on the bottom of my feet. So I grumpily put my sneakers back on today to be able to walk around the Meru hospital without walking funny. The blisters are much less fluidy today than they were last night so the golf ball sized lump of pus-y blister is now only about the size of a marble. We have the next 3 days off so I can recover and start running again by Saturday. I think it was the flip flop walks that that gave me the blisters and not the barefoot treadmill run because the roads are not really roads, they’re like walking through ankle deep super fine sand. I probably would have been better off walking barefoot!

This morning we headed to the Meru District Hospital to meet with the Nutritionist there. Unfortunately she had double booked because she got called into a last minute meeting with the district someone or other. We met with the district medical officer instead and then a dietetic intern took us into the children’s ward to see the cases of severe malnutrition that were currently being treated in the hospital. The medical officer asked us not to take pictures, which was totally fine by us. Apparently a group of Scottish people had come previously, taken lots of pictures and then published them and made the hospital look horrible. He emphasized that Kenya is a poor country and that although the hospital isn’t exactly state of the art but they were doing the best they cook with the resources they have.

The children’s ward was absolutely heart breaking. It smelt horribly like urine despite the scrubbing that the nurses were doing of the hallways and tables. Half the room was filled with mothers and their babies slash small children, and the other half was filled with orphaned babies. I felt like a monster standing there, listening to the doctor and the dietetic intern explain how they treat the different deficiency diseases, while the mothers starred at us wondering why we were there. Although apparently the mothers had been warned that we were coming as nutritionists to learn, I couldn’t help but feel like these mothers were sitting there feeling as though we were judging them. Our professor then asked us to pull out our notebooks to take notes, which made me actually want to cry. The thought of standing in front of these people writing notes about their malnourished children was mortifying and felt incredibly inappropriate. I realize that there are students all over the world in hospitals taking notes and learning from other peoples diseases and illnesses but I couldn’t help but feel like we were being insensitive and should not have even been in the ward at all. The orphaned side of the room was even worse in terms of the severity of the malnourished children. There was a baby who was so severely energy malnourished that he was literally skin and bones. Other babies were so protein deficient that they had edema so bad they looked about 20 pounds over weight. It’s hard to be in the hospital seeing these kids and not actually working within the hospital to help any of them.

After the depressing hospital trip, we went into Meru on the hunt for a reliable taxi man. Jennifer, who is the head of the Muchui Women’s Group (who we are working with quite closely on crop diversification and giving family nutrition and infant nutrition seminars to) had a lead on someone she felt was trust worthy but he was asking way to much. Our current driver Steve also had a lead on someone else who we eventually convinced to drive us around to all the different schools and women’s groups at a reasonable price. His name is George and he will be our taxi driver for the rest of the trip. Everytime we met a new potential taxi driver, our professor talked to him, Steve talked to him in Swahili and Jennifer talked to him to make sure they would take good care of us and to negotiate a price. Meanwhile, Christina and I were being introduced to them and it felt as though we were basically being put on display and being sold to the lowest bidder. In the end though we now how a reliable taxu driver who will be safe to travel with and who can take us to all of our presentations and meeting and to the grocery store. It will be nice to have some freedom and be able to leave the hospital compound whenever we want.

I’ve been keeping up with everyone’s blogs in an attempt to keep up with what’s going on in the world back in Canada but I’m doing a horrible job keeping in touch with everyone and replying to emails and such. So I apologize in advance. I’m blaming the sketch internet connection.

This week sometime we are going to talk to Henry the planner extraordinaire to plan a trip to either Samburu Hills or Lake Nakuru for another safari and to arrange our climb of Mt Kenya during our last week here in September. The professors leave tomorrow so we will be able to settle into a real routine starting next week which will be awesome. It helps that Prof Jen will no longer be cooking 5 course meals for us every night so I can eat normally and exercise regularly too! I have to start training for climbing Mt Kenya!

(A Few Hours Later...)
I am currently sitting with a bunch of nuns drinking wine and twirling the ends of kikoy into fabulous spirals by rolling them along our legs. I never thought I would spend Canada Day in Kenya drinking with a bunch of nuns. Good Times.