The drop off...

The third day we were here, we experienced the "drop off". Our group leaders Jamal and Odoch divided us into groups of three and dropped us off at random spots around the city. Nate, Melissa and I had two hours to collect as much information as we could about Kenyatta National Hospital. We began by trying to figure out which building was the actual hospital. No clear signs pointed the way so we walked down a road for three blocks or so until we found a cement building that had potential. We streamed through the gate with about fifty other people. There were no doors on the building and only one guard, so we just looked down and confidently walked in. We had found the hospital. The first thing we noticed was that it was extremely open--think old orchard mall if you know Chicago. We wandered around for a good ten minutes looking for some sort of information desk before a guard dressed entirely in camouflage carrying a gun asked us where we were going. We tried explaining in our very limited 2 days knowledge of swahili: "Sisi ni mwanafunzi. Wapi information?" (We are students. Where is some information?). He told us to go down a hall, outside, around somewhere, and to the Public relations office. We said ok without really knowing what he was talking about and found our way out. Once outside we realized that the hospital was a actually a gigantic compound consisting of at least 20 buildings. We asked another guard where the public relations office was and he took us down a street, around two buildings, up some stairs and through another hallway. A woman told us to wait in the waiting room next door, so we did. The walls of the waiting room were filled with posters alerting the public about anti-corruption campaigns. After forty minutes of waiting, we decided to explore on our own, and told the woman we needed to get a bus. A man came out of a separate office and asked us what we needed. We again reiterated that we were students and looking for information about the hospital which students could potentially conduct research at for their ISPs. Immediately, he told the woman that he was going to the CCC and took us down the stairs.

The CCC turned out to be the hospital's Comprehensive Care Center for people with HIV/AIDS and the man turned out to be the senior Public Relations Officer for the entire hospital. The CCC was an extremely impressive facility that contained all the different needs of an HIV positive patient under one roof, including free labs, nutrition, counseling, social work, a pharmacy, etc. The money for the facility came mostly from USAID and the Clinton Foundation. I was glad to hear that some of the aid given by foreign donations went to good use. At the same time, though, most of the patients treated at the CCC (and Kenyatta Hospital in general) are extremely sick with slim chances of recovery (the fate of many public hospitals here, it seems). Additionally, Nairobi is a large city, so I am wondering how much aid makes it to the rurarl areas and how willing they are to use it effectively. The nurse to patient ratio was 35:1 and people were everywhere in the compound. We went into a conference room with the PR officer and Ruth, the senior nurse for the center. We asked tons of questions and got a full tour of the facilities. After an hour, we were led to the family planning center (which used to be where they quarantined infectious diseases) and spent a good hour there as well.

The opportunity to be dropped somewhere without having any information about it is extremely intimidating and nerve wracking. In the U.S., one could never enter a hospital, walk around aimlessly, and be given full tours of the facilities without notice, not to mention take away the time of countless important and busy hospital staff to show around some interested students who could not communicate anything more than "we are students, where is information?". No, this would never happen. But, in Kenya, this is the way of life. People take time for one another. They are always late--perpetually late, in fact. But, they don't see it as late. They seem to really care about their community and actually have no word for "busy" in swahili. Although I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge about the hospital through this experience, I also became fully immersed in the culture for the first time and began to understand a small part of the culture I am living in.