AMPATH Programs and Service Work

Due to severely limited internet over the past week, I've had some
trouble putting anything up, but rest assured that we've been too busy
to notice.

Our time in Eldoret has been organized between two main purposes:
lectures at Moi University and time spent at our respective service
sites. The lectures are on topics varying from Kenya's political
history (did you know there are 42 identified ethnic groups?) to
educational organization, to HIV prevalence and healthcare issues.

I've spent my days at Sally Test, a large room connected to the
children's wards at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital that serves
as a playroom and care center for children in the hospital, children
of people who are in the hospital, and children who have been
abandoned but are not yet legally orphaned. When I began there, we had
around 13 babies and a whole slew of older children who would come in
for playtime, designated learning activities (arts and crafts,
shopping games, reading, puzzles, etc.) and music. Eight of our babies
went to court last week and were either adopted and sent to orphanages
in the area, so the number has become far more manageable. Sally Test
is an incredibly bright, sunny environment and the children who are
taken care of there spent their days being held, cuddled, and played
with. Unfortunately, when the doors close at 4pm, the children and
babies are left to sleep in hospital beds. They will not be changed or
held again until the following morning. On the units, space is a huge
issue. Forget single hospital rooms, patients sleep in cots right next
to one another, with 6-8 beds in a small space, divided by curtains
from the rest of the ward. Because housing is a huge issue here
anyway, parents will often sleep in the twin sized beds with the
children or on the floor, if they can afford to not work and to stay
close by.

The staff at Sally Test are absolutely amazing. One of the women who
works there just adopted on of the oldest abandoned children, Moses,
who is 2 1/2 and deaf. She is working with a speech pathologist to
learn Kenyan sign language and when he's old enough, she can enroll
him at the school for the deaf. There is another woman who sets up a
sewing machine on the porch and teaches anyone interested how to use
it. When I complimented one of the employee's outfits today, she
offered to sew me a Kenyan-style dress! She took my measurements this
afternoon and says it will be finished and ready for altering on
Thursday. One of the women told me that once I have this dress, I will
look like Michelle Obama. I have no idea how she could come to that
conclusion, but I am flattered all the same.

Last Wednesday, we toured the facilities set up for some of the AMPATH
(Academic Model for Providing Access to Healthcare, formerly the
Academic Model for the Prevention and Treatment of HIV/AIDS) which is
the program that Indiana University has been working with and helping
to fund for a number of years now. We toured the hospital and then
visited a rural clinic, a sort of model for a project they hope to
expand into more rural areas. We were told that when the project
started, the leaders of the town were convinced that absolutely no one
had HIV in their area. Now, anyone tested positive for HIV (which we
know is a huge problem in this country, with this particular area
being no exception) has access to free medical care and medicines. It
is an amazing place. There are quite a number of doctors from not only
IU but other universities around the US who are working with these
patients as well as working on new programs to address other medical
issues these communities face (which is why the name was changed to be
more general). One of the men I spoke to this afternoon has been
working with Kenyan with diabetes, who just cannot afford insulin.
Through donations and grant funding his program is keeping people
alive by providing them with testing kits and medications. He said
that when some of his patients can get insulin, they can make it last
for months, something unheard of in the United states.

Joe Mamlin, who was one of the founders of this program/partnership,
lives on the IU house compound with his wife, Sara Ellen. Sara began
the Sally Test program and runs it, and Joe, who is a physician, is on
the founding team of many of the AMPATH programs, though when I last
saw him, he was working directly with patients at the rural clinic.
The other people who are staying here seems to be doctors (or med
students), pharmacists from purdue, or others working on their PHDs
from various universities across the US. The house is great for
facilitating connections.

On our AMPATH day, we were also able to visit the farm and food
distribution site, where food is shipped in from international donors
and vegetables are grown to provide HIV positive people and their
families with food for a limited amount of time. The IMANI workshop
creates jewelry, clothing, and souvenirs by teaching craft skills to
people with HIV and promotes a positive lifestyle, even in the face of
disease. The workers may stay there for something like 6 months and at
that point may begin making these crafts on their own, hopefully to
bring in some income. It is an absolutely amazing, positive place. The
people there seemed to be having a good time, and what was really
amazing was that one of the men who had set up the program came by
while we were there and the workers went absolutely nuts! They were
screaming and hugging him, one of them said to one of us, "We love
him. He is like our dad." It was just really amazing.

Right next door we visited the juice factory, where jobs are available
to anyone on the poverty level (as they say, anyone "Infected or
affected" by HIV). They grow their own fruit organically and gain a
profit from selling it to local hotels and stores, which allows the
money to come back into more AMPATH projects.

That's the briefest overview I could muster. We've got a full day of
lectures for tomorrow and I'd like to find some time to study. Coming
up next time: a visit to a gold-medal winning athlete's house, what
milkshakes taste like in Kenya, and a running total of the number of
people in our group who've gotten the "throwing up" bug.