internet access again

So no updates since the Thursday breakfast blog until now as our internet service was unavailable for a little more than a day…

• Wednesday afternoon (Mar 4), Allison, Bethany, and I walked into downtown Eldoret. We stopped in Nakumat (the closest thing to a Wal Mart around here) and a stop by the Barclays bank ATM.
  
  The town was hopping for sure… lots of people out and about, and we left just before the full end of day rush of people to buses. Its kind of a mad mix of people and vehicles milling about. The many butcher shops with the sides of beef on display in the front window (sometimes covered with flies) certainly made an impression… mental note: make sure I only eat well done meat here! But what stuck with me most was the street children. It sounds like many (most?) of them are orphans, and they were just hanging out, being walked over/around by people. And apparently substance abuse (sniffing glue) is a huge problem among them. Some were quite aggressive in begging from the obvious foreigners.
  
  The ones we saw seemed SO young (though pediatricians Allison and Bethany said they could be older than they look due to poor nutrition)… Dr. Mamlin said 15 years ago the city’s street children were almost all taken care of by a shelter, and the hospital chipped in with health care. But the city shut down the shelter to provide those services itself, and at this point there are no services for the street kids.
  
  We heeded the advice to keep walking past them so as not to be overwhelmed, but it was really, really tough to do so. I’m still processing it all… It was slightly comforting that Bethany mentioned on Thursday afternoon that she got stuck journaling as she was struggling with writing about the street kids.

• On Thursday afternoon (Mar 5), I joined Allison, Bethany, and the this week’s other new arrivals for a tour of the Moi University Teaching and Referral Hospital. While Allison and Bethany had worked in the Pediatric ward for two mornings prior to the tour, they hadn’t seen the whole hospital complex. And I hadn’t even been there yet! I’d almost call it a small campus as the various buildings are spread out a bit, connected by metal roofed open air walkways. Some items that stuck out to me were:
  
  This hospital is associated with one of two medical schools in Kenya (the other is in the capitol city, Nairobi). Moi is the referral hospital for all of western Kenya… what put things in perspective for a medical layman like me was that the hospital’s five ICU beds are the *only* ICU beds in western Kenya. The IU connection is very apparent throughout the campus facility wise, most so in the large 4 story AMPATH building that houses four HIV/AIDS clinics and serves as the hub for the 20 or so rural clinics in the region that focus on testing/treatment/prevention of HIV/AIDS, and sound like are expanding to provide more primary care services.
  
  The IU-Kenya program works with patients who come to the public side of the hospital, and would be people with no insurance and limited means (sustenance faming and maybe earning a little more than $1 US a day when day labor type jobs are available). Guards/security are posted around the site that aren’t there to prevent folks from coming in—they prevent patients from leaving without paying!
  
  After the tour, Bethany, Allison, and I spent a little while in the Sally Test Center in the hospital, which cares for several orphaned and abandoned children. I’m sure I’ll be spending more time there, and will write about it more later.