Kenya: Our Mission

I have been getting lots of questions about what I'm doing when not roasting goats and writing letters to my bednet, so I thought I'd give a bit of an overview of the project we're doing. Get ready folks, you might be just as tired at the end of reading it as I am living it.

So, I didn't actually know what this project would entail until we got here and started to work on it. As it turns out, we are not working strictly on increasing access to safe water. Kenya's Ministry of Health (MOH) has implemented sort of a grassroots healthcare system called Community Health Strategy (CHS) in order to meet the Millenium Development Goals - which they are quite far from achieving at the moment. Many of them relate back to having clean water, which was the vague description we all received before arriving, so I imagine that's why it was framed that way. For instance, malaria is really prevalent here and so are anti-malarial drugs BUT you can't expect someone to recover from malaria, even with medication, if they don't have clean water to cook with and drink.

Anyway, we are collaborating with the Kenyan MOH to analyze the CHS by interviewing people at almost every level of the structure they've set up - district leaders, health clinic nurses, both paid and volunteer health workers and the people in the communities. The idea is to see where the disconnects are in the system to see why health outcomes are still so poor in Kenya, which has a life expectancy of 51. So far, we've interviewed all of the managers, nurses and paid health workers, which was relatively easy since they all spoke English.

Today, we trained our translators and we head out into the field with them on tomorrow to begin surveying the community, who do not speak English and may not even speak Kiswahili. Just to give you an idea of what this entails, there will be a lot of walking through places that even the Land Rovers have trouble going, sitting in the sun, making quite the fashion statement in long skirts and hikers, sweating, helping them with their chores so they do not give up on the survey halfway through to feed the chickens or something, and hopefully at least a little bonding and NO lion sightings.

In addition to interviewing the community members, we also must interview people as they leave the health clinic about their level of satisfaction with the care they receive. This will be especially challenging since no one ever says anything is bad - everyone always answers "Mzuri" which means good. (Sort of like answering "Fine" when you mean that it's exactly not fine.) We also have to interview the volunteer health workers, which is going to pose its own challenge since our translators are all their bosses, so honesty will probably be scarce at best.

The whole point of this is to get the Kenya MOH and their CHS program more in line with the culture of these communities because ultimately, the solution needs to be built around them. Otherwise, it is going to work about as well as it does now, which, I hope you've gathered by now, is not good. Hopefully we can manage to at least start to do this - get the people of Kenya a more sustainable and culturally reasonable approach to their healthcare -  through our final report, written after the data collection this week and analysis next week.

We present this final report to the community on June 30 and fly out on July 2... which seems both extremely close and extremely far away. Wish us luck!