Sunday and Monday

I realized last night as I was in bed that I didn't write an entry. Oops.

Not much exciting happened on Sunday. I woke up, went running at the gym (where it was already hot and humid despite showing up when the gym opened at 7), and then lounged around the hotel until it was time to do some souvenir shopping. I went to the tourist market (yes, it's called the tourist market), and had the 'help' of a local, which mostly meant he shooed me past shops until we got to ones that belonged to his friends who would offer me 'good prices'. Whatever. All the shops had pretty much the same stuff, so I wasn't missing anything.

Random shot of children near the tourist market:

Yesterday the Casualty department (like an emergency department) opened for business. Well, it opened; I don't know if they got any business yesterday. When I was there in the morning, the nurses were doing inventory and making sure all the keys to all the rooms worked (they didn't). Here's what the resuscitation room looks like:

Not a bad facility, all things considered. They have one portable x-ray, a portable ultrasound, monitors for vital signs, and a defibrillator (which nobody knows how to use). It's too bad I'll be leaving in a few days; it would be interesting to see how works with patients.

That's me and Katana, the public health officer. Yes, it's centered funny because I'm not very good at using the timer on my camera.

After opening the Casualty department and doing the walk-through, I was surprised by the next assignment: to teach a group of secondary school students the basics of HIV/AIDS. I was told that this is what we were going to be doing about five minutes before we headed over there to do it. I'm not sure exactly what the students are being trained for, but it's a week-long course over HIV/AIDS, either to be peer educators at their schools or to do VCT (voluntary counseling and testing).

So we went over there, and after the standard couple of hours of introductions, ice breakers, and the students going over their expectations of the course (all of which was in English, out of consideration for me... makes me feel a bit ignorant, that these kids know at least three languages fluently, and I only know one), it was my turn. Since they're going to have a lot of sessions about some of the nitty-gritty details, I just wanted to go over the basics, so I started asking what they knew about HIV/AIDS. Some of them had a fairly broad base of knowledge, others not so much. Here was the list they came up with:

-HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus
-There is no cure for HIV
-HIV causes AIDS
-HIV can be prevented
-You can't tell if someone has HIV just by looking at them

We then went through how HIV is transmitted, which turned into a session about facts and myths of HIV transmission. Some myths I had to dispel include that you can get HIV through a person's sweat or sharing a toothbrush. They also had questions about a few things I didn't know about, such as whether HIV can be transmitted by traditional circumcisions or wife inheritance, so they had to explain those to me. In traditional circumcision, you'd have a group of boys or girls (yes, there are places in Kenya where they do female circumcision) and they'd all get circumcised at the same time, one after the other, with the same tools. I said that that would be possible to transmit HIV in that case, but apparently the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation beat me to that: they've done quite a lot of teaching to the villages on this, and now most will sterilize the instruments in the fire between 'patients' or use new ones with each circumcision. Good to know.

Wife inheritance is that when a husband dies, the brother inherits the wife to take care of, and often that inheritance includes expectations that she would perform all wifely duties. Obviously, if the husband had died of AIDS, that's not going to be a good thing. So I said yes, HIV can be transmitted that way, which is why it's important to educate people that you should always know a person's HIV status before having sex with them, even if it is a new spouse. Obviously, empowerment of the women to be able to say no to having a new husband would be the ideal situation, but baby steps.

In all, despite the zero prep time, it went pretty well. The students seemed to follow what I was saying and had good questions, so I'm sure the rest of their week will go well. I just don't know what role I have in the rest of that week.