It is hard to believe that it is Friday already. Today we drove to a small community church located next door to a school. Once we saw the school, we knew we would be doing another deworming program. If we didn’t, they would all attend our clinic and the numbers would be even higher. The first thing we did is to visit the school, Vihalo Primary. There are 39 students in the school and 14 teachers. After meeting the head master, Erika presented her gift of soccer balls to the older students in the care of one of the teachers. You should have seen him beam. We then went to a grade one class and gave them the finger puppets made by Joan, my curling friend. We have photos but not on my camera and everyone has gone to bed. I will be publishing them later. We then went to the grade 2 class and gave them the toothbrushes given by Dr Kotecha and the toothpaste which had been given to Silvia. The children were all smiles. The classroom has a dirt floor with a chalkboard and desks, three children to a desk. They spoke in unison at the head teacher’s prompting and they were so excited. We had planned on doing one school this year as a pilot project and the latest one made 4!
We treated 982 people today and ran out of medications. Including the children at the school and the teachers who were also treated, our patient number was 1386. Even we can hardly believe the numbers. Of course, some were turned away and turmoil existed as closing time grew nearer and people became more desperate to be treated. We always give out the location of the next day’s clinic for those who can get there. We took 4 persons to hospital today, including an end stage Aids patient and a child that Gail carried to the van in her arms.
We received updates on our other hospital patients: the burned baby is still surviving but it doesn’t look hopeful; the lady who miscarried is now home but weak due to the amount of blood she lost; and we found out that another baby, who had been admitted, is doing well, but her mother was admitted at the same time. She was very weak and she hadn’t eaten in 2 days. The baby was getting no nourishment. The doctor at the hospital told her to eat porridge including millet in her diet. Our Kenyan friend, Johnston, who takes these patients to the hospital for us said that millet was very expensive right now (don’t we feed our birds millet?)
There are gas shortages right now and it is about $1.70 a litre. We are often turned away from a station as they have run out. I hope to tell you about the political situation here in the future. I believe Kenya has a stronger and fairer government that its neighbours and the unrest shouldn’t happen here.
Everyone is very very tired tonight. With 2 more clinics to go, we may have to dig a little deeper than usual for the energy. 7:00 am departure comes early. Talk to you soon.
PS. I will attempt more photos but the cyber café takes a long, long time to load the blog software. Be patient, I am doing my best.
