Valentine's Day and Internally Displaced Persons Camp

Note: Pictures finally added . . . thanks for your patience!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Hello and happy Valentine’s Day! I hope that you all had a wonderful day with loved ones today and if you didn’t, I was thinking of you all from Kenya! Kenyans celebrate Valentine’s Day, but it is not as prevalent as it is in the US. I celebrated Valentine’s Day today by going out to breakfast with my friends. I ate a waffle with strawberries and whipped cream! It was nice to celebrate.

Valentine’s related (kind of) trade issues . . .

My mom (birth) asked me if there was chocolate in Kenya and there definitely is! The chocolate here is mostly Cadbury, Kenya’s former colonial power. Similar to many African nations, developed nations manufacture many goods sold to people in the developing nation because developing nations don’t often have the infrastructure to manufacture goods, even though most of the raw materials that developed countries use to manufacture actually come from developing countries. Many political scientists have theorized that this type of trade – trade in which raw materials from developing nations are sold cheaply to developed nations and who then manufacture the products and sell these products back to developing countries at high prices - is one of the reasons why developing nations like Kenya have problems developing at all. With this cycle, developing nations are paid little for their raw materials, but then are forced to buy manufactured goods from developed nations because they themselves don’t manufacture. If developed countries were to manufacture, their imported goods could not compete in price with domestically manufactured goods in developed countries because of the high tariffs placed on these goods, so no one would buy them.

Internally displaced persons camp

A close second being the strawberry waffle with whipped cream that I ate this morning (KIDDING, this is totally better), the most noteworthy event in my week was visiting an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp yesterday (Saturday). Internally displaced people are refugees who are displaced within their own country; IDPs don’t travel across international borders to seek asylum, but rather, they are part of a massive group of people who have had to leave their homes for some reason. The IDP camp I went to is right outside of Nivasha, Kenya, and people in the camp are displaced as a result of the 2007/2008 post-election violence when riots ensued after alleged election fraud by President Kibaki (this election forced the current coalition government that I have described in previous blogs). The houses of these particular people were burned and so the government placed them into this camp with promises of finding them a place to live. The government has taken no action to find them land other than the camp since 2008.

I went to the camp with one of my friends here who started a non-profit organization to bring food and medicine to people in three of the camps near Nivasha. We went together along with about 15 other volunteers from various countries (England, Canada, US, Denmark) in a van that one of my friends owned. On the way there and the way back, we swerved through Kenya’s roads like a race car, as is pretty normal for drivers in Kenya!

Once we got to the camp, our task was to set up a clinic for the day for the IDPs including a pharmacy, HIV testing center, family planning clinic and injection room. We used and newly built school (pictured below), which was basically aluminum siding with dirt floors. We had a few benches and chairs, but otherwise no furniture with which to set up the clinic. We ended up taking a bunch of seats out of the van to serve as seating inside our injection and HIV rooms.

Pic: This was the school where we set up the clinic. This is only one of the rooms; there are a few more that aren't pictured here. This is basically to give an idea of what the school was like.

Pic: The pharmacy . . . I'll never forget the name of Paracetamol- I counted out MANY of these pills!

I was in the family planning clinic for the first part of the day. This doubled as the injection room, so I worked with the nurse for a while as she tried to figure out which medicines were what and read the doctor’s handwriting on the prescriptions he made. I guess reading doctors’ handwriting is a universal challenge? Anyway, after injecting a few people, the nurse had to teach someone (with no medical training) how to take blood pressue as we began to take the temperature and blood pressure of every patient who came into the clinic. I was the test dummy for this and it was rather hard for the student to learn at first . . . if you ever want your arm to fall asleep, try taking your blood pressure multiple times on the same arm! After a while, she learned and began taking blood pressures for everyone as the two nurses were busy doing injections.

Here is a brief summary of what the process was for clinic patients. Patients would stand in line to receive a card with their name, age and gender, which volunteers would write for them on large notecards. Then, they would get in line to have their temperature and blood pressure taken. Because there was only one person doing blood pressure, this line was as long as 50 people sometimes. After their blood pressure and temperature was taken, they would wait for the doctor. The doctor would write out the prescription on the notecard and then the patient would go to the pharmacy to get their medication. If the patient needed an injected medication (we gave penicillin this way), they would go to the injection room and receive an injection from a nurse. Because of confidentiality issues for people getting tested for HIV and some women receiving birth control, we had to block windows in the school by stacking wooden blocks in the window. This wasn’t a sustainable solution, so we had to resort to using people’s clothing as a curtain.

The second half of the day, I was in the pharmacy. I mainly counted out pills for people and labeled their pill packets. The people up front would then give the patients their prescriptions and tell them how to take the pills.

Pic: Between the injection room and pharmacy, I also played with some kids for a little while. This is me trying to teach everyone to play crocidile morade (sp?), a game where you clap hands and try not to get hit on the last word of the song. It didn't work very well, but it was fun for a while!

For the day at the camp, we saw over 125 patients. After the clinic, we played with the kids a little bit (some of them liked to use my camera to take pictures). We then drove back to Nairobi having felt like we had really done something worthwhile! While there is always more that volunteers and developed countries can do for people, I talked to one woman for a while who said that she felt like she could hope again when we came. She meant my friend’s group, of course, since that was my first time going, but it was still good to talk to someone there to understand the importance of working in the camps. Most of the time, my friend’s group does food outreach instead of medical, so I will report back if I go again to give food.

Pic: These are the tents at the camp that most people live in.

Pic: Even though the UN left a long time ago, there are still some UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) tents in the camp.

Pic: These are some of the boys who were playing with my camera. The van is the one we took to the camp from Nairobi.

Pic: This picture is me, a few of the boys at the camp, and my friend Kiersten whose NGO we went with to the camp.

Another notable non-profit

Speaking of non-profit organizations, I met another young person this weekend who also started his own non-profit organization. His organization is called Eating Stones and it is named after children in the slums who eat rocks and stones to get the calcium and other mineral deposits within the rocks. I don’t really have any words to follow this up; it is just one story of how people cope in desperate situations I guess (eating stones).
I am headed to Uganda today to go whitewater rafting . . . on the Nile. I am so lucky to be able to do some of these things and excited to see the Nile and Uganda! I’ll report back on this as well hopefully sometime next week. Have a great week!