An Amazing Morning

               So I’ll have to go into my awesome weekend - where I met a lot of people from the town and am now very excited for my birthday tonight - for another post since I had such an amazing morning this morning. Well first I guess I have to talk about yesterday where I finally got a lengthy plan of what I will be doing from now until the end of April. It was a nice little vaca while it lasted, but apparently I have to do real work while I’m here as well. Yesterday, Jessica and I, along with Violet (our preceptor), drove down to Kisumu – about a two hour drive – to meet with the person whose dissertation we are becoming research assistants for. She is currently in Kisumu because she is teaching a class for the GW kids who are spending the semester there (you can do that in your first year of Global Health for GW). So there was myself, Jessica, Lauren (another GW fellow who will be doing the same work as Jessica and I), Violet and Tova – the person who is head of it all. We went over a very lengthy plan which resulted in Jessica and I having to move down to Kisumu for 6 weeks then back to Eldoret for the remaining 2 months. Looking on the positive side it will be cool to live in two places in Kenya, but what kinda sucks is that we just met so many awesome people over the weekend that we won’t be able to really hang out with for awhile now. Oh well.

                For all of you who care what the actual project is continue to read, if not skip to the next paragraph J. We will be using a tool developed by the WHO called the Service Availability and Readiness Assessment (SARA) tool. It was created in order to map clinics in rural areas to mark down the resources and services used there (there are more complex things to it as well, but that’s the short of it). We now need to modify this tool so it can be used in the urban areas of Eldoret and Kisumu in order to map these clinics as well. It is apparently a very exciting project that if successful could be used nationwide and inevitably in many other African countries. This seems pretty crazy to me that we will be working on molding a tool that could be used in so many different areas.

So that brings me to this morning. Back in Eldoret, we are visiting two slums this week and going to as many clinics as we can to initially take down what resources and services that are offered there. This is just to create an initial rapport with the site workers and introduce ourselves to the area so when they see us again with the SARA tool they aren’t surprised by it. The overall visiting of the clinics was very interesting (minus the one asshole doctor from Slovakia that decided to make fun of me, but we don’t have to go into that). It is always enlightening to see what clinics from other countries have to provide and the way they go about giving care to their patients. They had many of the same facilities we do, only in a smaller scale. There were TB clinics, HIV testing, antenatal clinics and so on. As you can see this could all make for a pretty interesting morning, but it is not what made it so exciting for me. Jessica and I met with a community health worker (CHW) from AMPATH in the morning who brought us around to these clinics. It is obviously easier to introduce yourself into an unknown environment if someone from the area is with you – and can speak the language. The person who accompanied us was named Walter and he was awesome. I probably could have talked with him for the rest of the day, but we only had the morning to work with, and you are probably thinking I can talk to pretty much anyone for an entire day, but Walter was seriously exceptional.

Walter became a community health worker in AMPATH (after you read this please google AMPATH, it’s an amazing organization that saves many lives every day from HIV/AIDS) after he was diagnosed with HIV himself, five years ago. He has taken the time to empower and educate himself of the disease and has grown into an amazing person because of it. Throughout talking to him it seems as if HIV has turned into a positive reality in his life instead of a devastating life sentence. We talked about the education he brings to the slum areas and how he is trying to empower others like himself. He understands that it is education that will help more people get tested and return for treatment. He is also very interested in the stigma that surrounds HIV/AIDS and the second he said that I was hooked. If you don’t know already my main focus for public health is not only HIV/AIDS in Africa, but the stigma that surrounds the disease and prevents so many people from getting tested and receiving the proper treatment. Walter just solidified everything I thought I knew about stigma. He described how many people will go into the hospital to get tested instead of AMPATH because they do not want other people to see them go into this building, since it is so well-known for treating HIV. He talked about how the men in the area are sooo uneducated about the disease and will not get tested because they do not believe they need to. There are so many cases where the women will get tested, but cannot tell their husbands due to the fact that these men will blame the women for getting infected and bringing it into the family, which could result in the man leaving her. What is known too is that the majority of the time the man brings it into the family, not the woman. I could probably go on forever discussing these issues, but in the end Walter was an amazing person to travel around Langus with. He is the prime example of a person who has seen the bottom, but was somehow able to climb back up and find the positive in it and reach out to his own community.

The most telling part of the morning was when we were sitting on a bench waiting for the taxi to pick us up to bring Jessica and I back to the IU house. He started talking about when he first found out that he was HIV positive. He said that he had decided to commit suicide because he was ashamed and did not want to bring it into his family. He said that he was at the edge of a building and all he wanted to do was jump off. Somehow he was able to step back and realize that he did not want to do that to his wife and children. From that day on, he sought counseling and group therapy. To know that there are groups in this area where people living with HIV can go to discuss the disease seems like an amazing feat for the town. He was able to relate to others like himself who are also living with this disease, and in turn help educate and bring hope to more people that were just like him. It was truly an inspiring story, which he told with such fervor I was speechless. I hope to stay in contact with him throughout the time I am here and afterwards. These are the stories that make public health kids like me want to continue to come back to these areas and promote better lives for the people living here.

These are the times that make me want to be in Africa.