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afreakforjc
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Name: anDrew
Gender: Male
Interests: Currently I'm interested in not becoming jaded, embittered and generally dissatisfied with my life as an surgical resident. Many times I fail. Once in awhile, I appear marginally compassionate. Oh, the heights I've fallen.
Expertise: Discharge summaries, electrolyte replacement.
Occupation: Scut-recipient
Industry: Medical
Message: message me
AIM:  jcfreakout
Member Since:
7/16/2006
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| There is another children's home about five miles down the dirt road from Kapsowar. The Nerkwo Children's Home is run by the Catholic Diocese of Eldoret. Sister Lucy, an Indian nun who came to Nerkwo three years ago, teaches at the local Catholic school and also serves as headmistresses of the Home. This Home, like Kapchesewes, also has a couple volunteers to act as "mother" and "father" to the children.
Like Kapchesewes, the children are all between preschool and Class 8. After that, they can continue no further until they find sponsors to help with the fees for high school. (Dr. Lee, one of the previous family practice missionaries at Kapsowar, currently sponsors three high schoolers.) Technically speaking, the Nerko children aren't orphans -- most have parents or close relatives. However, their family is unable to care for those children -- and so they are sent to Nerkwo.
All the children at Nerkwo are physically disabled in some fashion. All but a couple of the two dozen kids have normal mental faculties, but because of their crippling deformities and malformations, they are deemed "too difficult to care for at home." They are sent to Nerkwo, where they attend a public primary school just on the other side of the fence.
The majority of the children can walk despite their handicaps, albeit not easily. The missing legs and deformed arms are congenital, not acquired.
Many of the children could benefit from corrective surgery -- indeed, a handful of them have been sponsored to go to the CURE Hospital at Kijabe, where pediatric orthopaedic surgeons have helped some of them. However, many more still need surgery. Only for lack of funds do they stay put in Nerkwo, unable to make the five-hour journey to Kijabe and pay for surgery.
For instance, this boy, though he was born with only one leg, is able to ambulate with a single crutch.
However, he has a slowly growing and painful and bony spike coming from the end of his foreshortened leg. Unless this is corrected, a prosthesis can never be fitted.
Other children have relatively simple things to fix.
A trip to Kijabe could fix this boy of his relatively mild clubfoot deformity.
However, the majority of the chidlren ultimately have non-correctable deformities. But they are still children -- they learn, adapt, laugh and play.
This girl was born without feet and a clefted right hand. However, she still can tie her "elephant boot shoes" and, in fact, just finished her 8th grade exams and looks forward to going to high school.
This boy, despite not having hands or feet, has learned to write, eat, and do most things that other people can.
His penmanship, frankly, is better than mine.
Only a few of the children are truly wheelchair-bound. However, there aren't enough wheelchairs for all their children that need them. Currently, there's only two -- one used but functional wheelchair, and another makeshift wheelchair created by bolting a plastic chair to a metal frame with two wheels.
Unsurprisingly, the makeshift wheelchair breaks frequently.
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| Over the past couple months, I've had the privilege of going once or twice a week up to the Children's Home, visiting the kids and sipping chai with David and Rebekah. I try to being some small, usually edible gift to the kids -- always in multiples of 25, so as to be fair. Hershey's chocolate pieces, mangos, passionfruit, papaya -- the kids don't get much fruit, since they don't have any close-by fruit trees save oranges.
The children weigh heavily on my heart, as I know they do on Laura, one of the long-term missionaries. There are seven kids who just finished Class 8. Assuming they can find sponsors, they will leave the Children's Home to go to a boarding high school, returning to Kapchesewes only during the holidays. However, due to the lack of real beds and blankets, the Home cannot accept any new children, despite the overwhelming need.
All the children will stay a week after school lets out for Christmas break to care for the animals and weed the garden. However, most of the children still have some distant relatives who they can visit for a few weeks at a time during school break. Only a handful of the kids have truly nobody -- these brave souls will stay at the Home for the month-long holiday, until all the children return to again to their Home under the shadow of the mountain.
The Faces of Orphans (a sampling)
Diana, age 6, preschool
Sharon, age 12, 5th grade
Dennis, age 12, 4th grade
Lillian, age 13, 4th grade
Justin, age 13, 6th grade
Lydia, age 14, 6th grade
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| About a thirty-minute walk west of Kapsowar (but only 10 minutes if you're lucky to have a pikipiki, i.e., motorcycle) is the AIC Kapchesewes Children's Home. It is, roughly speaking, an orphanage.
Orphans are something of an anomaly in Kenya. Even if both parents were to die, usually relatives and clansmen are close by to care for the orphaned children. In fact, uncles and aunts are considered almost like fathers and mothers to a child, to the point that the same words are used for "father" and "uncle," and for "mother" and "aunt." Thus, there's usually a large set of extenuating circumstances surrounding the child who is sent to a so-called "children's home." As far as I've been able to gather, these orphans are either considered too burdersome for relatives to care for, or the parents of the child were somehow ostracized by the community and the orphan pays the price.
Kapchesewes Children's Home takes care of 25 children, split evenly between boys and girls. The youngest is six. The oldest is sixteen. They attend a local public primary school from preschool to Class 8. After Class 8, the children are at the mercy of sponsors and "well-wishers" to help them pay school fees for high school. Currently the Children's Home has eight high-schoolers boarding at four different high schools around the province.
The Home is situated in a beautiful locale, on the edge of the forest and in the shadow of the 10,050 ft mountain Kipkanur. The children are governed for by two non-paid volunteers, the patron David and matron Rebekah; however, it would be mildly misleading to say that David and Rebekah, as dedicated as they are, take care for the children. The children lovingly care for each other and watch out for each other, in ways that I am only beginning to grasp. The children eat, sleep, wash, cook, play, and garden together. They farm maize, cabbage, and oranges; they tend sheep, cows, and chickens; and they cook their own meals over a large wood fire. At night, the girls and boys sleep on opposites sides of a long, drafty, concrete building that they call home. The beds are all broken, sagging horribly with twanging, broken springs. The mattresses are nothing more than than thin, dirty futons. Each twin-size bed accomodates two children.
Looking behind the Children's Home at their farm, their livestock, their laundry, and, in the distance, Mt. Kipkanur.
Visitors to Kapsowar routinely make trips up to the Children's Home.
The children cook food in their kitchen, filled with smoke from the wood fire. They gather and carry the wood from the forest.
When walking into the boys' room, their belongings are (sometimes) organized on the shelf.
(the possessions of 13 boys)
They tell me that they shower daily. But, I suppose, kids will be kids -- they always seem dirty whenever I come to visit them.
(the girls shower)
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| I continue my quest for Kiswahili fluency. Occasionally a Kenyan (usually someone I don't know that well) will say, "Ah wow! Unaelewa Kiswahili mzuri. Unajifunza vizuri." You understand Kiswahili very well. You are learning well.
Other times, however, a Kenyan (usually a closer friend) will say, "What? You don't understand what I am saying in Kiswahili? Why aren't you learning more? Kiswahili is so easy to learn!"
That's easy for them to say -- people who have grown up learning their tribal tongue at home, Kiswahili in the marketplace, and English in school. By the time they're ten years old, they're often trilingual. However, technically, they are correct. Kiswahili is, linguistically speaking, not considered a very hard language to learn -- certainly nothing like Mandarin, Russian, or Arabic. It's probably why Kiswahili, originally a tribal language from the East African coast, became so dominant in the entire region, understand by 80 million people in places as far away as Congo-Kinshasa, Burundi, Madagascar, even Yemen.
Kiswahili is in the Bantu language group. Bantu languages share a common characteristic -- the idea of "noun classes." Every noun belongs to a certain class. (I'm currently studying the fourteen most common classes, although in total I think there are around seventeen.) The noun class determines verb conjugation, plurality, demonstratives, and a whole host of other grammatical thingamabobs.
Most recently I asked my Kiswahili teacher, King'ori, how to say this, that, these, and those.
"You know. Like, how do I say that child or these children?"
I figured there would be a rough but direct translation for these simple English words. King'ori had me draw a chart on a piece of paper. It was another matrix; but this matrix had five columns and twenty-four rows. There were 120 boxes to fill in.
"Sawa," he replied. "Let's start with the A-Wa class." (For those of you who know Kiswhaili, this is new classification for the previously dubbed "M-Wa" class.)
I should have known it wouldn't be so simple. For every noun class, there's a different way to say (what I thought were) these few simple words. When I was done filling out the matrix, I looked at my handiwork.
There were 13 different ways to say "this;" another 13 to say "these;" 26 ways to say "that;" and 26 for "those."
"You gotta be kidding me. So to translate four simple English words, I have to pick from a list of 78 Kiswahili words?"
King'ori nodded unapologetically.
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| I went to a local duka the other day to buy some minutes for my prepaid cell phone and Internet. I own a Safaricom-based cell phone and wireless Internet modem, which allows me surf in the Internet through the cell phone towers. (Hence, my Internet speed in Kapsowar is like dial-up, about 20-50 kbps). It's all prepaid, so I buy a certain number of minutes and megabytes and then refill my cell phone for more time to talk or my Internet modem for more data to download.
It's easy to buy Safaricom top-up cards in increments of 10, 50, or 100 shillings (15 cents, 70 cents, or $1.30, respectively). This is what most of the townspeople buy. There's only one duka in town that sells Safaricom top-up cards of 500 or 1000 shillings ($6.70, $13.40), and they close usually before I'm done with work. Therefore, I usually only buy my top-up cards one in a great while, and then I'll buy a few thousand shillings worth of minutes and/or megabytes.
When I walked into the duka, I saw Peter there -- a tall, imposing figure who works as a groundskeeper for the hospital. His Kenyan-style house is on the hospital station, just a couple hundred yards away from my Western-style house. I greeted him, and then tried to, as discreetly as possible, request 3,500 shillings ($47) worth of Safaricom top-up cards.
I could feel Peter's eyes piercing the back of my skull as the lady behind the counter gave me three 1000 shilling top-up cards and a 500 shilling card. I felt hot under my shirt as I slipped her the money, asked for a receipt, and then nodded to Peter as I quickly exited.
Maybe I should have bought those cards when no one else who knew me was at the duka, I thought to myself. I just flaunted -- well, I didn't exactly flaunt, but I just handed over -- 3,500 shillings in cash. That was about as much as Peter made in an entire month at the hospital.
I suppose if I were in his situation, I would have a hard time not staring either. If someone in the States walked into a 7-Eleven and paid the cashier $3000 (my approximate monthly salary as a resident) to buy an infinite number of Slurpees -- yeah, that would be something to stare at.
Somehow I felt bad for carrying around that much cash, even though the act of buying minutes and megabytes itself wasn't bad, but necessary. I'm used to not worrying about how many minutes I use on my cell phone -- this requires buying a steady supply of top-up cards. However, most Kenyans in Kapsowar usually run out of time on their pre-paid cell phones, and many times they haven't the money to recharge it. The very fact that I don't run out of minutes on my cell phone puts me in the top 1% of richest people in the district -- a fact I was uncomfortably reminded of when Peter became very silent as I bought my top-up cards.
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