Salgaa

James made me a cup of Kenyan tea before work, which is by far the best tea I’ve ever had in my life. I am not sure how they make it, but I’ll learn eventually. We walked to work, which takes about 45min but is a pleasant walk. However, during the post election violence (PEV) James said it was awful and 30,000 people were sleeping on the street, making the whole place smell of feces and what not. I can’t believe he stayed through it, but that’s just how committed he is to helping the people around Nakuru. What happened was the elected president is a kikuyu and the luas were accusing him of stealing votes. The kikuyus and luas started fighting, and what people were doing was pulling down someone’s pants, and slicing their penises with glass if they weren’t circumcised. Women were raped infront of their whole families, men beaten in front of their children. People’s homes were burned down, and they ran and hid in the trees or stayed in IDP camps with tents from rotaries around the world. Eyepoke had over 1000 patients but then lost like 400 of them to the PEV, Children were killed or orphaned.
Needless to say, Kenya is NOT the safest country in the world, and James was going back to Ireland for a bit and wouldn’t be home, and I was going out to field sites with volunteers, so Eyepoke wanted me to get a cell phone (“simu” in Kiswahili) so they could reach me and update me or I could call them for help. Peter, a Kenyan preacher, is one of the volunteers and met me at the office to take me to one of the rural sites called Salgaa. I bid farewell to everyone in the office, and got in a matatu with Peter. Most people know and respect Peter, so once again I was saved from hassling with the drivers. Peter doesn’t speak English very well, but thinks he does, and he’s too sweet for me to say anything, so the whole matatu drive he was talking and I just nodded my head because I really had no idea what he was saying. He also overuses the word “exactly”, but actually a lot of Kenyans do that… he just does it a lot. By the end of the terribly bumpy ride to Salgaa, I was saying “Exactly” instead of “yes” or “that’s right”.
Salgaa is a village off of the road to Uganda, so many truck drivers stop through. It has a reputation for commercial sex workers, so I thought it was going to be a rough crowd. Instead, the women were incredibly warm and uplifting. Masa, one of the TOTs was making beaded bracelets which the women in the support group sell for a living instead of begging or doing illegal things. She let me bead a few rows, but its meticulous work and there were so many new people coming into the room that I had to stop and greet them all. Caroline, one of the patients, came in and is a firecracker, and asked me in Kiswahili what I had brought her for Christmas. I had a moment of panic like “Shit, was I supposed to bring something?” and off the top of my head I told her “My friendship”. That seemed to win her over and I breathed a sigh of relief, glad that I hadn’t offended the women by not bringing something. Although the meeting was supposed to start at 10:30, we waited until 11:30 for people from far away homes to get there.
Once everyone got there, we walked over to the church, which is just a wooden hut. Peter and Henry, an incredibly cheery patient, showed me the garden that the support group built so they could grow their own skumaweekee. Then the meeting started, opening with prayer and song. People here think that if you’re not Muslim, then you’re a Christian, which I am not and in fact despise religion. I appreciate what it can do for people, but I do not like its brainwashing quality. James said never to tell people I was an atheist – he said keeps his mouth shut when it comes to religion. People here call themselves hardcore Christians, but they lie and steal and kill (look at the PEV!). So I ask, how is that Christian?
The group didn’t mind me sitting in on the meeting, and I tried to pay close attention and learn some Kiswahili. However, there was a moment where I had the overwhelming need to vomit. I don’t know what happened, I got really faint and my insides ached and I was shaking and sweating. But I didn’t want to disturb the group so I sat there, chugging down water, and trying my best not to focus on how I was feeling. Instead, I took notes on what the women were talking about. There were many positives and negatives that I observed during the meeting. Although the entire thing was in Kiswahili, one patient translated for me. The women went around and talked about what they have taken out of the meetings, such as:
- how to make their own income through the skills they’ve learned in the group like making soap, yogurt, jam, and jewelry
- making friends who are going through the same struggle with AIDS/HIV
- gives them strength to get up every day and care for their children
- learn how to show love and compassion to others
- what a balanced diet consists of, and what HIV/AIDs patients should eat
- education on the disease and how to prevent the spread of it (for ex. A mother with HIV/AIDs won’t spread it to her child during breast feeding if she ONLY breastfeeds and once she gives the child some other kind of food she must stop breast feeding all together)
- how not to depend on Eyepoke for everything and be self sufficient
But the group had some shortcomings that I would like to see fixed. There aren’t a lot of men, and the ones that do come don’t take it seriously. Also, people who are trying to work can’t always make the meetings because they are at an odd time in the day. And also there is a lot of repetitiveness from meeting to meeting, and there in a burnout rate because of that. Eyepoke also does not allocate funds properly, because what Peter and other field volunteers need is a car or motorbike to get to some of the homes for home visits, because it takes soo long to walk to all of the homes. Peter and I only made it to four before we had to head back to Nakuru. These aren’t paved roads, and the homes aren’t sturdy buildings. They’re mud huts.
We visited some of the solar disinfection families, and they showed me their children’s charts and their record of diarrhea for that month. A lot of the children who were drinking the water were actually doing better and were having less bloody stools. Oh yea, okay the sodis project is where people collect water from the river, put it in these clear plastic bottles, and let them sit in the sun for 6 hours. It just paralyzes them long enough for people to drink it. We also went to Caroline’s where I learned how to cut skumaweekee. They hold it in their hands in a fist and take a huge blade and chop the stems sticking out of the fist. It’s very hard and I don’t know how they don’t cut themselves, because I was petrified that I would (I didn’t, don’t worry). Her family wanted me to stay over and spend Christmas with them, but I couldn’t because I had more homes to visit.
The village kids were coming up to me and tugging my hair. Peter said it was because most women in Kenya with long hair really have extensions, so the kids were running up to me to see if my hair would fall out. Obviously, it didn’t and instead my head kept jerking back. I was relieved to get back to the meeting building because my head was starting to ache, and then some of the TOTs started asking me about Obama and America. They even nicknamed me Obama and thought I was going to chill with him when I got back to the states. They all thought that now that Obama was elected, he will change things in Kenya. One of the women thought that Americans are going to want to come to Kenya and bring Kenyans all kinds of gifts. They are in for a rude awakening, because Americans aren’t known for visiting Africa like the Brits are. When they don’t see any results from Obama, I fear they will turn on him and Americans. But it’s not his responsibility to take care of Kenyans. He’s an American and must worry about issues within America.
Overall, though, I really enjoyed my visit in Salgaa and would like to go back, although I will have to come better equipped with perhaps some string to show them how to make the bracelets my swim kids showed me, and also a mouth mask to filter out all the dust from the matatu ride. I swear, it was so dusty that we had about a foot of visibility in front of us - we couldn’t even see if there was a car heading toward us!! Rather unsafe, but I made it home without James this time in one piece, in time to watch ghetto TV and an ad w/ this mosquito shouting “Let’s go spread malaria!!”. It was so cheesy and I couldn’t stop laughing. I guess you have to be there to appreciate the tackiness of it.