Kiddos

I spent the weekend at the Rift Valley Children’s Village, an orphanage 45 minutes East of Karatu. FAME sends a delegation of doctors and nurses every other week to care for their 70+ children as well as members of the surrounding communities.

I met the Rift Valley volunteer coordinator last week, and she invited me to stay the night and get to know their organization. They have a lovely campus, adjacent to a government school and sandwiched between coffee plantations. I got the full tour. The dormitories are extremely nice, and the children seem very well cared for. The kids all wanted to play with you and hug you and feel you and talk to you at the same time. I made the mistake of spinning one of them around in the air, which meant I had to do the same for everyone. I took a disk, which held some novelty value, but the kids immediately lost interest when the soccer ball came out.

Here's a picture one of the kids took of me and a friend. (She took a lot of pictures with my camera, but this is the only one where she managed to get our faces in the shot.)

Rift Valley also hosts a group of American volunteers, mostly in their twenties, who come to help take care of the children, teach English and help out around the facility. It was a little jarring to be dropped back into a group of normal Americans of my own age. We sat on the porch to watch the sunset after while the children were put to bed (promptly at 7:00pm), and then watched a Hollywood movie. In the morning, I hung out with the kitchen staff, learning more Swahili and teaching them how to make taco salad for lunch.

I’ll put up a few pictures of the trip, but I need to economize on Internet data because I’ve already blown through a month’s worth in the past week.

Here is one of the friendly RVCV dogs.

BONUS FRUIT BAT FACT: fruit bats sound exactly like cell phones beeping. When you are sitting around outside at night you occasionally have to wonder, "who is playing with a cell phone up in that tree?"

UPDATE: Problem #1

The EKG machine is finally fixed! After a very late night at in the clinic (the only way to exchange email in a timely fashion with the US is to stay up until it’s morning there), I was able to follow the instructions of someone who actually knew what she was doing. I followed her instructions very carefully, and everything looked good until I tried to plug in the electrodes and test the system. The old error had disappeared, but now the machine would not recognize that the electrodes were connected. This development, you can imagine, was very disappointing. However, when I mentioned the setback to Dr Frank, he said that the connection problem was a known quantity. All you have to do is kick the convertor box in a certain way, and eventually it will recognize the connection.

I still wasn’t’ sure if that was a satisfactory fix. Then, yesterday, Siana, the head nurse, came striding up to me with an expression that made me think, “Oh God, what have I done now?” Siana is only five feet tall, but she can project intimidation anyway. She walked right up, turned to Dr. Frank and said “Dr. Frankie, lift me up so I can kiss him.” Apparently she had just done a 12 lead on a heart patient, and it worked just fine for the first time in months. So I’m chalking this one up as a win.

Many thanks to Uncle David for putting me in touch with Carl Herde and Tom McGee at Baptist Hospital East. Thanks to Tom for putting me in touch with Clint Kaho also at BHE. Thanks to Clint for putting me in touch with Carl Meade and Shari Price at BHE. Thanks to Carl for putting me in touch with Robin LongenBach at GE Healthcare. Thanks to Robin for putting me in touch with Kim Moore at GE Healthcare. Finally thanks to Kim for patiently sifting through my troubleshooting report and showing me how to fix the problem.

UPDATE: Problem #2

Thanks to Tom Vernon for the suggestion of finding a local family to move in with. It’s going to be hard to leave the lovely house provided for me at FAME, as well as Eva, the cleaning lady who even washes my running shoes when I don’t hide them well enough. But I think it’s the right thing to do until I can get a better handle on the language. I’ve started the process of searching for a new place, somewhere close enough that I can ride the FAME bus that brings staff from town at shift changes and more importantly, somewhere that nobody speaks English.

Bonus bonus teaser: As I was writing this, we had a helicopter come in with two patients. More to follow: