Sunday, March 29, 2009

IU House

We had a low key weekend staying in Eldoret which was highlighted by exploring town and doing a bit of shopping and a hiking adventure to Umbrella Falls which was about 30 minutes outside of town.
So here’s the long overdue blog entry about where we’re staying. The IU house is actually a small compound of 8 two story buildings. It is about a 15 minute walk from the hospital. There are common areas on lower floors and 4 apartments each of the upper floors. It is gated and guarded, and the neighborhood is also gated and guarded. This does tend to insulate us from Kenyan culture, but not worrying about security seems to be a justified priority for the medical exchange program. There are also 4 ‘guard dogs’ who actually mostly lay around.
Our room is the Blue Swallow room in building 1, which also houses a library and 1 of the two washing machines on the compound. Our room is like a good sized college dorm room – it’s best feature is the windows that allow breezes to blow through. Our bathroom is outside our room, but we haven’t had to share it with anyone. The bathroom is luxurious by Kenyan standards with toilet paper, toilet seat, toilet that flushes, and hot water for the shower (it has a sink too). We’ve been doing a couple of loads of laundry per week and it gets dried on a clothesline in the hot Kenya sun. Other staff are around for housekeeping, administrative, and other maintance type duties.
Meals are provided Sunday dinner through Friday lunch and the kitchen/pantry are available during the rest of the time. There are full-time cooks who also live in the compound. A typical meal is white rice, baked chicken, curried mung beans and fruit salad. There are other vegetables sometimes, and there is also cake sometimes (delicious), but rice is a constant. The food is good, though after a month, somewhat monotonous. However, our western-geared meals have more variety than the local fare. The Kenyan culinary tradition is based on ugali (cornmeal dish), sukuma wiki (stewed kale), and some type of meat. Chipati is also commonly found – it is like a wheat tortilla. We miss Dr. Pepper, ice cubes, and cold milk but it will be an adjustment to have to cook for ourselves again when we go home.
The IU house functions as a hotel of sorts, not just IU associated people are housed here. If you’re a westerner who is associated with health care in the Eldoret area, there is a good chance you’ll spend time at the IU House. There has been somewhat of a revolving door of other guests. Some people are staying here for months longer than us, while others stay days to weeks. Other medical schools, most notably Brown, also have a partnership with Moi University in a similar type of exchange as IU. Purdue sends pharmacy students here regularly too. It seems that any western person who has heard of AMPATH, is associated with MTRH, or is just involved in healthcare seems to be able to arrange for housing at the IU house. Meal time has allowed us to meet new faces and find out their roles.

1 comment:

  1. Has it been a month ALREADY? Wow.

    I hear ya about the cold milk, man. ;-)

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