As I sit on the back porch of the chumba with new friends ("room" in Kiswahili, which doesn't really have walls and serves as our dining hall, classroom, and library), bundled in my new scarf to keep me warm on this relatively chilly Kenyan night, I cannot believe how fast this time has gone. It feels like only a few days ago that we were all excitedly taking our seats on the flight from London to Nairobi, nervously and tiredly commenting to each other about landing in Africa in the morning.
Thinking too much about leaving makes me a bit sad sometimes, so at the moment, our excitement is having trapped a flying beetle the size of a golf ball. We are hoping some unsuspecting sucker picks up the random upside-down bowl. We have reverted to third grade type fun.
In the next few days, we will have to at least pretend to act like the "public health officials" that our translators have introduced us as. We will practice and rework our presentation until Saturday, when we finally present it to the community and the district level health officials. What we've found is that there isn't a whole lot of difference between the communities with and without the Community Health Strategy, which has cost the government a pretty penny. That... is going to be an interesting message to deliver to the Kenyan Ministry of Health.
It's nervewracking, especially since we are all students (read: amateurs) and know that our study wasn't perfect by any stretch. We could have used a little more time, a lot more paved roads, and a few less cultural barriers which prevented us from getting accurate answers all of the time. Even with all of these flaws, we learned a lot, and had some great conversations with people that will hopefully get to the ears of the district health officials who can implement changes that they want.
So for now, we try to put that out of our minds, sit and wait for the beetle to fly in someone's face. It's gonna be awesome.
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