Kids and Kiondos
on Erin in Kenya (Kenya), 11/May/2010 07:15, 34 days ago
One of my last days before my replacement showed up I had an interesting/depressing/uplifting day of work. The work days here are such a variety of highs and lows I fear working in Vancouver is going to feel very sedate in comparison.Our task for the day was to do some defaulter tracing. I’m not sure if I’ve explained this before but this is when we drive around the countryside trying to track down HIV/AIDS patients who have stopped coming to the facility and are presumably no longer taking their ARVs. Francis goes to the local facilities every Tuesday to pick up their latest list and does his best detective job to find these people. It is very challenging because many people are transient workers not from the area, children who don’t have full names listed with the facilities, and married women whose names have changed. Additional challenges arise when people use fake names at the facility because they don’t want anyone to know they have HIV/AIDs. Incredibly Francis can still find some of these people but it is not always possible. Some Tuesdays he comes home empty-handed and other days he is able to trace 5-6 patients.I hadn’t been with him on a defaulter tracing mission for several months so I decided I should come along and see how things were going. We got only a few miles out of town when a hysterical women came running out onto the road. She was screaming and crying and pulling at her hair so we pulled over at once assuming is was some sort of physical assault. We couldn’t make out anything she was saying and then she started rolling around in the dirt back and forth over and over. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such anguish. Her mother came out of the fields after her and told us that she had lost herbaby. At first I didn’t understand the horror of the situation. I figured it couldn’t have gone far, kidnapping is extremely uncommon, and we just needed to calm down and search for the child.Then the grandmother told us they had looked in the toilets and I started to realize just how horrifying it would be to lose track of your child in rural Kenya. Most people have pit latrines and it would be so easy for a small child to fall in and drown. And then there is the tea. It stands about 3 feet high in most places and if something happened that the child couldn’t call out you might never find them in such an expanse of thick growth.  Once I started I couldn’t stop thinking of different ways you could lose a child in the area and I decided that although I enjoy living in Kenya I didn’t want to raise a child there.Fortunately there was a happy ending to this story. The kid had wandered down the road and another rider brought him back within a few minutes. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the desperation of that young mother though.I felt like I’d had a full day emotionally but we hadn’t even made it to our first stop...Highlights of the day included tracing a 12-year old defaulter and finding that he had simply switched clinics because he had gotten a scholarship to a boarding school. Because his name was incomplete on the facility list we didn’t realize that he was actually one of our orphans so it was a pleasant surprise to get to visit him at home. He is a deaf mute and when we pulled up to the house Francis started speaking to him in sign language. Is there no end to this man’s hidden talents? I asked Francis if he spoke sign language and he replied, “Not really but I try.” They seemed to be having a pretty involved and animated conversation for someone who was just trying... We gave the boy some school supplies that Christian Children’s Fund had supplied for our orphans and headed on our way.We stopped by a client’s house to help them plant their kitchen garden. I planted the beet seeds and I hope they sprout or I'm going to feel really terrible. I always find the directions on the back of seed packets very unclear...Our final stop of the day was Jane’s house. Jane is a woman in one of our community groups who makes traditional handbags called kiondos. We are trying to see if we can help her market her product so she can create a business with her women’s group. She demonstrated her craft and her rapid fire finger action was even faster thanmy aunt Vanda’s when she crochets. She had offered to give me lessons but I think it would have taken me more than a few weeks to learn her craft.As with almost everyone in the area she had a family member who needed serious assistance. One of her daughters is mentally and physically challenged and like so many others in Kenya receives no special care or education. There are government  programs for the disabled but their capacity isn’t nearly big enough to handle all the cases. Disabled people who live in rural areas seem to be at a particular disadvantage when it comes to accessing these services because they aren’t as visible. Sadly we weren’t equipped to help Jane with her daughter but Francis gave her advice on the process of accessing government services.We made it home just before dark and decided all the paperwork that goes along with defaulter tracing would have to wait for the next day.