Get me to the church on time...

Before I start discussing my day, I wanted to throw in a bit of evidence that I did do some actual work yesterday. I tracked down a photo taken by one of the other cameras of the planting of the tree. Enjoy ;-) Don’t worry, despite the number of photos of kids I’ll be posting, I’m not going to turn into another Sally Struthers! (Though, then I could say I was on Gilmore Girls and that would be amazing, ::giggle::)

Just like the rest of the Christian world, Sunday is a day of worship in Kenya. I am not overly familiar with any devout Anglicans, so I’m not sure if the level of “Praise the Lord” that I heard today was excessive or typical. But, trust me, I heard it a lot. In English, in Luo translated to English and in Kiswahili (again translated into English). Perhaps in their eagerness to greet “our visitors from the US” they got overly-exuberant, but every speech, formal or informal, was started in this fashion.

We began, as always, by running a bit behind, and for once, I have to admit that I started that train rolling. We had spent the evening talking and laughing at Beldina’s Kisumu home so by the time I was back in the city, all the stores were closed. Imagine my shock (very little) at finding the closest supermarket closed at 8:30 on a Sunday morning. Luckily, there was another about 4 blocks past the guest house in the other direction, and I raced up there and happily found it open. I could not show up in the village again without sweets! Particularly as we were meeting a different group of villagers today than yesterday.

By the time we rounded up our motley crew, we didn’t arrive at the church until 10:15 for the 9 am service. Jim had factored in Kenya time, and we were actually only about 15 minutes late. The church we attended was the Amilo Anglican Church of Kenya, the church of Beldina’s youth. We entered the small building only to see the lay pastors in prayer at the front. They started the service as soon as we entered. And though he was clearly struggling for eloquence in English, the minister delivered his sermon in both Luo and English for our benefit. (His main message is that the bible is the mind of God and is a set of instructions to prepare us for the time we will leave this earth… I was paying attention!) Embarrassed as we were to be late, the rest of the congregation trickled in between 10:30 and 11, just as the services were ending!

From what I can tell of the Kenyan teenagers and adults that I have been around, they like structure and organization and titles, even if it is only superficial and doesn’t really imply any kind of internal order at all. Each of the church officers gave little speeches of thanks for our visit. We were then asked to introduce ourselves to the members of the church, which we did. Beldina, who despite all her efforts to help the village, is constantly being tested to make sure she hasn’t forgotten her roots. She was asked to say the final prayer in Luo, and she joked that they do that to make sure she hasn’t lost her native language. We then processed out of the church, and there was a ritual hand-shaking, much like a receiving line, only you would join the end of the line as you came to it, to ensure that everyone shook hands. (I know I’ve mentioned before how big hand-shaking is around here!) The mothers of the church (the older women) add to the greeting, with a double hug, touching cheeks, before shaking hands.

We were invited to the home of one of the church members for lunch and conversation. It was an interesting afternoon. At first, our host was trying to apologize for the state of his home (which was very nice compared to others in the village) and alternatively trying to find out why we, who live in such comfort, would come all the way to Kenya to spend time in “filthy huts like ours”. That was only the beginning of a unique dialogue that continued through lunch and for the better part of two hours. Topics ranged from personal savings to divorce to racism to Christianity (and the prevalence of hypocrisy, therein) to corruption to the culture of abuse in Kenya. It was all open, honest and good-natured until the subject of spousal abuse came up. Now, I know that it is rampant in the villages of this country, and I know that cultural change is gradual. But this man laughed as he said, “And in your country a man cannot even slap his wife!” I wasn’t the only one who started to get agitated and frustrated. Culture doesn’t condone or excuse violence. Christianity doesn’t condone violence. And these men were professed Christians. Beldina kept us all calm and skillfully led us into a conversation about change, and how the AVFP hopes that by teaching the children of the village to respect the rights of others, it can gradually alter the problem of marital abuse. This man refused to believe us, until one of the young men spoke up and said that he would never hit his wife. It was like a dam burst, and suddenly the man was pledging that from this day forward he would not strike his wife and asking the other men there to do the same. I’m not hopeful that he actually meant it, but only time will tell.

After that somewhat taxing ordeal, we headed to the Masogo sub-district hospital. To instill a spirit of volunteerism in the orphans, they are asked to develop a project to give back to their community. This group chose to come in and clean the hospital. We all lugged our disinfectant and gloves and rain boots to the hospital and went to work. They mop using the same brush brooms that they use to sweep. It seems a taxing process. I was in charge of washing and sterilizing the surgical instruments. No hard labor for me! ;)

Feeling that the young man who desired a career in or around the operating room needed a little motivation to continue to do well in school, I brought him a scrub top as a gift. You would have thought I’d given him the world. He and his friend posed around the hospital as we were cleaning.

There was a little incident while we were at the sub-district hospital. A road crew was nearby, and one of the workers suffered a seizure. The girls were out walking and saw the event and came to get me, as all the road workers did was to drag his convulsing body over to the side of the road. When I got there, the seizure was over, and he had some classic signs of having had a seizure, which I won’t go into detail here. There was no evidence of head trauma, and he was somewhat alert and oriented. He had a nasty deep scrape to his knee, caked in road dirt. He fought with us as I cleaned and bandaged it. So much for my career in rural medicine. I was the crazy white woman who made the guy scream! I was imagining so much worse when they came to get me, telling me there was something going on at the roadside that I needed to see. According to the villagers that were there, this happens to him about once a month, but, of course, he hasn’t gone to the hospital to get checked out.

We ended the day as we did the day before, by relaxing at Beldina’s Kisumu home. Sandwiches are not a staple of the Kenya diet, and so one of the young men put everything on the table in his sandwich: ham, mustard, tomato, cucumber, lettuce, and peanut butter. He, of course, would not admit that it had to have been one of the more horrid tasting sandwiches ever created… Thought I was having some Kenyan wine, but it turns out it’s a Spanish wine imported by a Kenyan company. So that is still on my list of things to do. A friend of Beldina’s is visiting from Canada, and her family lives in the Lake Nakuru region; there are now tentative plans in place for my safari into the national park there.

It’s back to the hospital for me tomorrow, then a farewell dinner for the crew from Pennsylvania.