First Aid, Village Style

I have been enjoying my new roommate, a Public Health graduate student from Seattle University. We have kept ourselves supremely busy with, among countless other things, outreach clinics and teaching first aid lessons to my health club students. It has been a great joy to see these students genuinely interested in knowing how to help fellow students or community members in the event of an emergency. It has been interesting trying to adapt American first aid curriculum to village life. For example, calling 911 or “waiting for help to arrive” doesn’t really apply when you are 12km from the nearest paved road.

We try to bring up a lot of discussion during the lessons to find out what the students already know and to answer questions about traditional or local remedies that they may have seen. In a lesson about fainting I asked anyone in the class if they have experienced fainting or witnessed someone faint. One of my very dear students admitted that she had fainted but did not want to share her story. Another girl piped in that she had seen it happen and was willing to share the story. She began to explain… “Bilha was being caned by one of our teachers, and suddenly went limp and fell to the ground.” For those of you who do not know what “caning” is, it is a harsh form of corporal punishment where teachers use a large stick or ruler to beat the students. I have been lucky enough to not have witnessed this, but I absolutely crumbled to pieces inside imagining my sweet student being beat to the point of losing consciousness.

Natalie and I spent yesterday organizing the clinic’s supply room and ended up stocking the treatment rooms with missing items. It was a good thing that we did because despite being a very slow day, we had two interesting wound cases. I sometimes feel like MacGyver trying to turn saline, iodine, and gauze into a magical wound healing dressing. I guess that’s just life in the village.

Community outreach in my village

Happy 4th!

 I spent last weekend with some of my closest Peace Corps friends hanging around the pool, playing beer pong, and enjoying the closest thing we could get to a 4^th of July party. The hotel had an amazing buffet dinner planned for us and we all stood together around the banquet tables singing the national anthem in unison while some made speeches about how these were the Peace Corps moments we will remember for the rest of our lives.

Back in my village I met up with a Public Health graduate student from Seattle University who will be working alongside me for the next six weeks. I sometimes forget how beautiful my village is until I hear the words out of someone else’s’ mouth. I didn’t even know it was possible to take living in the village for granted!

Our first big project together is first Aid training with my health club students. The students were so excited about the lessons and the certificate at the end, although a few seemed a bit queasy when I had to explain what the word “amputation” meant. One of my students was especially enthusiastic sitting in the front row and asking me for the topics that would be covered in next week’s lesson. He is the student that during my Goal setting lesson, told me he wanted to be a doctor. He is the same student that asks me to photocopy pages from my HIV/Aids handbook and told me his dream is to see what a hospital looks like.  I don’t think I have ever seen a high school student with such thirst for knowledge.

So here I sit, appreciating the country I was born in, the country that I am privileged to experience now and the amazing people, Kenyan and American, that I am surrounded by.