Work

The general idea in volunteering for EAC, aside from getting the chance to live in Kenya among goats and palm trees, is to perform some sort of work related to health. When I first talked to Suzanne, the executive director, about this, she was excited at the prospect. The EAC began (and still is) a community empowerment organization. They have a primary school for young children, after school tutoring for older kids, a sewing class and cooperative, adult education classes and other various programs. BUT, they were also about to open a health clinic and Suzanne was very interested in having volunteers with health backgrounds.
Health is a big concern here. Last week a baby died after falling in a bucket of water. On our first night here, another small child was covered somehow in boiling water. There's an awful story about a Takaungu woman went into labor, began having difficulties, and wound up bleeding to death while trying to ride a bicycle 4 km to the road in order to catch a mutatu to take her to the hospital. Malaria is almost universal here and people experience recurrences frequently (once you're infected you're never free of the sickness, even with treatment). And 7% of the population has HIV. The nearest hospital is a boda boda and mutatu ride away and even if people can afford to get there, they're not likely to be able to afford the cost of being evaluated and treated.
Last Tuesday Megan and I sat in on the weekly meeting regarding the new Community Health Worker (CHW) Program. The EAC has hired 10 community members to be trained in first aid, nutrition, sanitation, common illnesses, disease prevention, HIV and sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy and more so that they can visit people in their towns, provide help and monitoring and refer them to the EAC clinic if treatment is necessary. There are a number of CHW models, but all focus on a particular disease or problem, such as HIV. I'm not aware of a program that is attempting to be quite so comprehensive as this one. Which brings us to the problem. At the meeting it quickly became apparent that the team (Suzanne, Tricia, the nurse (Sarah), trainer, and EAC coordinator) had been working very hard and for a long time to pull together all of the pieces of the program. There were medication kits to discuss, the hiring of the CHWs, training schedule and logistics and uniforms. The curriculum for this month long, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week training does not exist yet. And the training begins around the 1st of September. Megan and I volunteered to take the maybe 50 different information sources available to us - books, presentations, pamphlets, and a few lesson plans - and synthesize it into a uniform and comprehensive training curriculum.
Our second project is to help with the completion of the community health survey. The EAC created a survey with over 250 questions to measure the health of the community. Some of the question are about education and income (does your house have electricity? How many goats does your family have?),others are about food (how often does your family drink milk? eat meat?), and most are about health (how many children are in your family? when is the last time someone had malaria?). So far they've managed to complete around 40 surveys, but there are 60 more to do so I'm looking forward to tromping out to huts and sitting with the locals to ask for this information.
A third project is to come up with the tracking sheets for the community health workers - what information should they record when they visit a family? This will help with sharing health information as well as for measuring the success and identifying gaps in the program. Likewise, the medical clinic, once opened, will need to have patient charts and records for the same reasons.
Meanwhile, we sit in the office to do our work and marvel at the pictures in our reference book (is that a pig biting a man? Why is there a piglet in the picture? Oh my god,look at this picture of a guy catheterizing himself!). We critique the posters that another volunteer is drawing to use as lesson illustrations (jeez, the penis is getting larger in each frame) and chat about what we're doing here, next weekend, at home, in school, and so on.
The beautiful thing about all of these projects is that I couldn't have picked work that was more suited to my interests and experience. I was a little afraid I would wind up digging latrines or teaching school classes which are things that would contribute to the community but are not things for which I have any skill at all. I'm excited that I can really dig into these health projects and complete something meaningful in my short time here.