Bootcamp and District Hospitals

Well, it's the end of my third week of real teaching, and I think things are going relatively well. My kids seem to like me well enough, but that might just be because I'm actually a little bit crazy. Boarding school here is somewhat reminiscent of boot camp (so says my father) so they are constantly exhausted and barely have any time to just be kids.

They get up at 4:30 so they have enough time to get their things ready and down their porridge in time to be at school by 6:15. Except for tea break and lunch time, they sit in the same classroom all day long and watch the teachers come and go. Teachers spend their time writing notes from the book on the board, and the students copy, even if they have no idea what they are writing. Most signs in my vocabulary have one or two English words that help me make the connection from one language to the other. But their only fluent language is sign, so these words on the board they don't know look to them like Chinese looks to me; it's just a bunch of symbols. But they know I want to help them, so they consistently bring me lists of English words they don't know, and ask me for their meaning. And since I don't know a sign for most of them, I do a lot of acting things out. It's like a constant game of charades and can get pretty funny sometimes. Last night I did "seemingly," "alienate," "isolation," "flatter," "wandering," "devoted," "coaxed," and "arousing" to name a few. When school gets out at 5:00 they have just enough time to play a little soccer before their ugali and cabbage is ready, after which they spend the rest of the evening in "Preps" where they sit and recopy the notes they never understood in the first place. Bedtime at 9:30 just to get up and do it all over again the next day. Ugh. No wonder they fall asleep in class all the time! They are such good kids and like I said, they have no time to just be kids. For this reason I try my best to keep class as exciting and engaging as possible. I think me bouncing off the walls is a common occurrence. Whatever it takes though. They're curious, they're really smart when the use their heads, they're patient and polite and they totally deserve the best.

Thursday afternoon one of my kids fell through a small wooden bridge we have on the walk up to school. He messed up his knee really bad and I didn't see it until Friday morning, but as soon as I did I knew I couldn't just leave it. It was swollen beyond belief, if he wasn't black it would have been extremely red, and he was in a lot of pain. The other teachers seemed to not really care, which actually didn't surprise me, so I gave my classes some work to do, put him in a tuk tuk, and took him to the hospital. Kilifi District Hospital is certainly not like the hospital in Mombasa or Nairobi, I'm sure, but it wasn't a total disaster, I guess. We waited for a bit to go into the "Plaster Room," where a man squeezed and poked and prodded poor David's knee until he was trembling with pain. Apparently it was "necessary" to see if anything was broken. Right. He said we needed an x-ray, so we moved to another waiting area, where I learned I had to go to another building to pay for the x-ray. Two more lines and 360 shillings later (about $4.50), I was back and waiting again. We finally got into the x-ray room, which I was super surprised they even have. The man who takes the x-rays poked and squeezed all over again, and while I was cringing watching David in agony, the guy starts telling me about how men don't feel pain, how they are stronger than that, and how I would not make a good doctor. I've never wanted to go to med school, but if I ever did, it would be to prove this guy wrong. He was telling me I was in more pain than my kid, who of course was trembling from the pain he actually was feeling. We waited a bit longer for the pictures to be done, which afterwards we had to take back to the horrible man in the Plaster Room. He told me the bone was not broken, and I believed him cuz the x-ray looked ok, and that he needed to plaster the knee anyways. For 3 weeks. This seemed a little extreme for an unbroken knee, so while I was in town running around trying to find pain meds for David, I called mama yangu katika Amerika (Momma at home in the States). Though it was the middle of the night she happily advised me that the plaster thing was a bad idea, which I had an inkling of in the first place. Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation, and some ibuprofen. So I bought him the meds, a couple bananas since we missed tea break, and stuck him another tuk tuk back to school. I wrapped the knee in an ace bandage, told him to stop walking to and from school, and gave him a bag of cold water from my fridge; ice doesn't really exist here. I think throughout this whole process what surprised me the most was not the lack of decent medical care but the fact that everyone was so astounded when they realized he was deaf and we could still communicate. It blows people's minds that you can talk without talking. "You mean, you know his language?!" Yes, I do. Or least I'm working on it.

Anywho, something tells me that won't be my last adventure to the Kilifi District Hospital in the next two years. Otherwise, things here are good. I teach Life Skills in a couple hours which I think the kids usually enjoy. Last week we ended up talking about abortion and vasectomies. If I can't teach them anything else in the next two years I want them to at least learn to use condoms, and not sleep around, and how bad HIV actually is. If I can keep any of these kids from dying young, I will have done my job.

I hear the snow storms at home on the east coast are making life difficult, but just know how jealous I am. My kids love hearing that snow actually exists, and I really wish I could be there to help shovel your driveways :) Hope you all are doing well and remember, if you're ever in Kenya, you should stop by Kilifi and visit. Ha!

Okie doke, miss you miss you miss you.

Love always,

~ Shub :)