Thankfully our schedule has gotten much busier over the last week and we have been doing a lot of work in the community. Since my last blog about the giraffes and elephants, we spent a day in an orphanage doing medical examinations on the children and providing medications there and also just playing with the beautiful children. We also spent a day in Kibera, which is the largest slum in all of Africa and sits in the middle of Nairobi. We worked with a ministry there and made house visits to HIV positive Kenyans. We prayed over them and just spent time with them and it was amazing the stories we heard, we definately got a taste of real poverty which is quite disturbing and frustrating. Many of those with HIV are also widowed or their husbands have ran away. they live in very small shacks, often without electricity and have a very strong social stigma which makes it hard to have strong relationships which is very emotionally hurtful since by nature they are extremely relational people.


We spent 2 days in Kijabe a smaller town with a missionary hospital where I was blessed to shadow a plastic surgeon as he repaired a man's completely fractured mandible and in the afternoon i volunteered in the women's ward taking vitals. The hospital was very beautiful (although defnately not on the same level as the U.S.) and was not at all what I was expecting to see after my last trip. The next day in Kijabe we spent at an orphange called "Naomi's Village". I would definately encourage you to look this up online as it just brought me to tears to see. A couple from Dallas TX started this orphanage this year and in it they show tremendous grace to orphans, bringing them out of slums and out of terrible situations and putting them in a stunning home with real wooden floors, an actual roof over their head (not tin sheets with holes in them), HOT showers (almost unheard of here in daily living) and flush toilets...and most importantly THREE meals a day and access to education. I was almost in tears during the tour, i think this will change lives here and the hope is that by showing them such grace, that they will grow up with self confidnce and know that they want more for their kids and for their friends and so will be active members of community.

We are now in Litein which is near the Uganda border. We will be here all week and our working in a local hospital each day. Please pray that we will learn a lot and be of use to the people we are trying to serve and develop meaningful relationships. Until next time!!

Giraffe kisses, baby elephants and new team members!

Besides waking up tired, we all are getting over our jet lag and were excited to make our way into the city today.  We were blessed to be gently introduced into Africa with some fun activities in the morning and a training session in the afternoon with a leader at an outreach we will be working with next week.

The morning started with a close encounter with some giraffes! A driver from the mission organization graciously drove us to Giraffe Park.. a place where you pay the equivalent of about $3 US ... get a handful of feeding pellets and make your way up a platform where giraffes freely make their way up to you and lick them right out of your hand...and mouth! ... we took a ton of pictures of course and some of us decided to be brave so we stuck a longer pellet between our lips and got a big fat kiss from the giraffe as it got the pellet out!...a little gross with the slobber but its just one of those life experiences where its like...when else are you ever gonna be able to do that?  One of the national workers also gave us a short talk on the giraffes, and we were informed that their saliva actually contains antiseptic as their favorite food is a type of cacti which often produces sores in their mouth, making the antiseptic very advantageous...and making their kisses very safe for us :) 

Our next stop was an elephant orphanage a couple of kilometers away. Unbelievably, the elephant orphanage was only about $7 US and we arrived just in time to get a good standing posistion for their feeding time.  A thin rope attached to flimsy poles was all that seperated us from 6 young elephants that immediately came running up towards us and headed straight for the 6 workers standing with bottles of formula 2 feet in front of us. The elephants were incredibly eager for their feeding (although they get fed every 3 hours, they still have a hearty appetite!) After they consumed their milk, they started to play with the twigs on the ground, wrapping them up in their long noses; they got drinks from the buckets of water and squirted them at each other. It was obvious that the elephants were very social and had a tight bond with the human workers.  The smallest elephant there, only a couple of months old, stayed by his human worker the entire time after feeding, wrapping its nose around his arm and following just behind him wherever he walked. We were told that all of the 11 elephants who stayed at this orphanage were rescued after their mothers' had been poached for their ivory in the south of Kenya or had died of natural causes such as starvation. When they reached 2 years old they would be transferred to another orphanage sight in a protected area in southern Kenya where they would slowly be reintroduced back into the wild. It really seems like a great program and it was a joy to touch their prickly skin and see their playful spirits. Our God is SO creative! We rode back in the van and thought about what joy animals can bring!

We made it back to Mayfield Inn in time for a duumpling and mashed potato lunch after which we were met by a lady we will be working with next week. She works in a ministry called "Changing Times" in the middle of Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya...and in fact the biggest slum in all of Africa. They provide health care, education and spiritual support for the very poor population in the slums...many of whose inhabitants live on less than a dollar a day. We learned a lot about the economic and social conditions of Nairobi as a whole but especially relating to the Kibera slum. We will go in next week in small groups accompanied by nationals and ministry workers where we will assist in doing physicals and giving medications and will do our best to love on the kids we find there!

Other news, the last 2 memebers of our team arrived today, they are a married couple in their 20s from Melbourne, Australia. They both work as nurses in Australia and will be with us for the next 4 weeks before they will go back to their jobs at home. Like most of us on the trip, they are thinking about a future in medical missions and hope that this trip will give them some insight on whether or not it is for them!

Lightning storms, language lessons and jet lag

I'm now writing from the comfort of the Mayfield Inn, a missionary housing establishment for the country of Kenya. There are probably 20 other missionaries besides us staying here currently, from all over the world. We are staying in bunk beds, in what I can most compare to a dorm environment, we are comfortable.

We arrived at the Nairobi airport late last night (11pm) local time. I feel like I entirely lost Thursday as we left NYC Wednesday evening and after 2 long flights and a time change crawled into our beds almost immediately when we got here. Our first flight was from NYC to London which was around 7 1/2 hours. 3 of us from the Mediquest team sat together and the flight went fairly quickly. The next leg from London straight to Nairobi was an 8 hour flight and I ended up sitting next to one of the other girls and also a native Kenyan man named Steven. Steven grew up in Kenya but traveled to the United States where he attended undergrad and grad school at Boston College, he graduated with degree in computer science and came back to Kenya to live and work, he told us his family owns a coffee farm just outside the city!  One of the perks of sitting next to Steven was that he was very excited to tell us about Kenya, he was sure we would aboslutely love it here, and after hearing from him, I am too! He looked over our itinerary and commented on each clinic we will go to, and says we MUST do a safari, although I'm not sure we will have the time in our schedule or enough personal finances. Steven also gave us a Swahili lesson. We learned several words:

Jambo: Hi
Wapi Choo: Where is the bathroom?  (ALWAYS an important one!)
Habari gani?: How are you?
Nzuri: Fine
karibou: Welcome
twende: let us go
Asante sani: Thank you very much
Samahani: excuse me

...A good basic starting point I think, we learned several other things, most of which I have a hard time remembring now! Another perk about the flight from London to Kenya is that we flew over some beautiful areas.. including the Sahara dessert which is just an unbelievable expanse of sand cut through by nothing except for the Nile River, flowing north towards the sea. We also flew over an incredible lightning storm over Sudan/Ethiopia area, that was really cool to look out at from the airplane window as it lit up the sky below us.

It feels very natural to be where we are in Nairobi. I am confronted again with the familiar scent of Africa that I remember from Uganda several years ago... a mixture of dust, gasoline, burning trash and extra particulars you cant quite put your finger on. We met Kate at breakfast this morning, Kate is a nurse and she has worked in Africa for almost 30 years, her husband will meet us at the beginning of July and will continue traveling with us then. Today is our rest day, so we have been taking it easy around the compound. We also took a walk into Nairobi to exchange money and get a sense of where we were at. Most of us are quite jet lagged and will enjoy having the evening to recooperate and go to bed early in preparation for the days to come.

Excitement for tomorrow: Giraffe park and Elephant Orphanage!!

My Mediquest teammates!

Jeannie: From Pauline South Carolina, senior at Clemson College. Major: Psychology and Packaging science. Jeannie is excited to be a part of the churches in Africa and the different ways in which we will worship their: to jump around and DANCE!

Katie: From Phoenix, AZ. Sophmore at the Univeristy of AZ, premedical student. Katie is excited to experience Africa firsthand and be a part of what is already going on there! 

Kaitlyn: from Cutlerville, MI. Kaitlyn is a CNA and will have her RN this December. She attends Dordt College in Iowa. Kaitlyn is really excited about the culture of Africa!

 

Kristen: From Sedalia, MO. Senior at the University of Missouri and already accepted into Missouri's medical school. Kristen is very excited to meet new people, see new things and learn a lot about medical missions in Africa!

Preparing for the Journey!

It's hard to believe that a week from today I will be spending my first jet-lagged day in Nairobi, Kenya! For now, my room is littered with clothing and my head full of a very long TO DO list of all the things I need to take care of before my flight leaves from Omaha to NYC this Sunday for orientation. I am beyond excited to meet the people I will be traveling with and to follow God where He is leading me! God has proven faithful to me time and time again as I prepare for this trip, and I know that He will be present in the places I will travel, but nevertheless please pray for safety and healing as we travel through foreign places.

Please also pray for healing and peace for those we encounter.
Pray that God may use us for good and for his purposes in the places we are going.
Pray that the hearts and minds of the group are touched irreversibly and that our experiences will make us better people and better world citizens.

I have learned from my previous travels, that a new little piece of God's heart and creativity is revealed in each new place I visit. God reveals himself uniquely in different cultures and people groups and it is an absolutely beautiful site to see, I'm so excited to be blessed with the opportunity to seek Him out even more this summer in Kenya and Uganda!

I will do my best to post regular updates!!