Happy New Year! While most of my days the past few weeks have been spent doing my normal work at the clinic, the holidays definitely added some out-of-the-ordinary excitement.
In the week leading up to Christmas, I truly had no idea how the day would be spent. I knew the clinic would closed and I would join my fellow volunteers at another project site but I knew no other details aside from that. What began as a day full of unknowns ended up being one of the most memorable days I’ve had here. We started the day going to a community center for teenage girls, a project that I have visited many times and have become very familiar with over the months. In short, the center serves as a meeting place for girls, a place they can hang out together when they are not in school and receive counseling or motivational “life-coaching” sessions. I always enjoy and appreciate the time I get to spend with these girls but getting to celebrate such a momentous holiday with them was particularly special. We spent the morning cooking and shared a meal together in the afternoon. It was a truly joyous way to spend Christmas.
In an unexpected turn of events, the rest of my Christmas was spent enjoying dinner with a local friend of one of the other volunteers and their family. Our hosts were so kind to take us in and allow us to join in their family Christmas dinner. The meal consisted of a goat – and entire goat – and traditional Kenyan side dishes of ugali, stew, chapati, and tomato salad. This is a typical celebratory meal here and, often, families, such as the one we were with, will travel out of the city to purchase a live goat and slaughter and process it in their own home. The meat, and all the food, was delicious and the company we shared was equally beautiful. As there were nearly 10 different nationalities represented at the dinner table, conversation flowed easily as we shared and compared stories of our unique cultural identities. My whole Christmas day was an amalgamation of all the best things I could have hoped for while celebrating the holidays here, from spending a perfect morning with the girls in Kibera to sharing a homecooked meal with perfect strangers turned friends in the evening.
As for updates from my days in the clinic, we have continued to see our normal share of infections, diabetes, heart disease, and everything in between. We have had quite a few patients recently present to us seriously ill with respiratory infections and, as I have stated previously, the normal course of treatment for such infection here is for the patient to come into clinic everyday for a week or so to receive IV antibiotics. With this not being a regular practice in the U.S. (for a patient to receive IV medication in an outpatient clinical setting), I have realized that it allows for the unique opportunity to see the day-by-day progression for the patient’s improvement outside of an inpatient hospitalization. It is an amazing thing to witness the tangible impact of your treatment plan as a patient goes from not being able to walk unsupported on day 1 to being only slightly out of breath on day 2 to being almost fully recovered on day 3. I recognize that witnessing this progression is the norm in hospital medicine and acknowledge that it is rare in the outpatient setting and a beautiful artifact of the way infections are treated here.
All in all, I am continuing to love my time here and have much to look forward to as I turn the corner on my last month in Nairobi. The time has flown by and for now, I am focused on savoring every moment.
Christmas lunch at Dreams of Hope community center
Christmas dinner!
Fish tacos and a green juice at a new (to me) cafe