Week 3

We've completed our third week at Tenwek. Time is flying by so fast. The kids are doing well and seem to be more adjusted. They continue to amaze us with their observations and comments about life here in Kenya. --Jodi

(Eric) Although my favorite thing to do here is OB, we are now well staffed in OB. Pediatrics is very short staffed, so that is where I will be spending the rest of my time.

Peds is fun because kids are fun. Today I had a kid giggling so loudly by blowing bubbles that the whole ward (16 beds of kids with parents) were laughing. But peds is also tough because I am dealing with things that I am not accustomed to.

A lot of what I deal with is malnutrition and premature newborns that are having trouble gaining weight. That is not very exciting to me. On the other hand, there are always a bunch that are too exciting to me. Tonight we lost a two week battle with a newborn with tetanus. And just now I got back from the ER to help the intern admit some peds kids. The first one was a 4 year old girl that was in heart failure because of a huge amount of fluid around her heart. The next was a 3 day old girl with Turner’s Syndrome (birth defects) that hadn’t urinated yet – and never will. The next was an 8 year old with new onset seizures. The next was a 6 month old with such diarrhea that her intestine was protruding out and was partially dead. You just rarely see that much illness in a short time at home. And the night is still young.

The pediatric ward and nursery is full of things like meningitis, TB, hepatitis, AIDS, typhoid fever, burns (from cooking fires), an arrow wound into the brain (accidental from big brother), abuse, and four newborn spinal bifida patients. There are also a few that I just don’t know what is going on with.

Changing the subject to something more palatable, a lot of people have asked about our food situation. Many assume we have it pretty rough. Actually, we are eating quite well. Everything must be made from scratch which is time consuming, but tastes great. We eat plenty of homemade bread, desserts, tortillas, and even homemade corn chips. We eat great spaghetti and pizza, but have to make the sauce from a pile of tomatoes rather than opening a can of sauce. We eat chicken, but we first Crock-Pot a whole scrawny chicken and then take the meat off. We eat fillet steak, which is cheap. But it has to “bleed” in the fridge for a few days before we eat it.

We also eat a lot of local fruit and vegetables. Bananas, avocados, pineapple, and passion fruit are some of the local favorites.

Our drinking water comes from collecting it off our roof into a tank. We then boil and filter it. We haven’t been sick yet, by the way.

Because it is so time consuming to do anything here, we do hire a house helper for a few hours, 3 times a week. It makes us feel bad to throw away any food around her. We feel wasteful when we tell her we don’t want to save the skin on the chicken. But she is happy to hear that, as that means she gets to eat chicken skin for lunch.

Ok, so much for being palatable.

Jodi continues to spend time with the kids and other missionary moms and kids around the compound. She is trying to find a way to do special projects either from home or for a few hours a day. But for now, she has been experimenting with new recipes (with what's available here) and enjoying more quality time with Nathan and Julia. Nathan and Julia continue to explore around our home and were quick to make some new friends this week. In fact, Nathan disappeared a few times the other day to visit his new friend, Angela. She's about 2 years old and lives just down the sidewalk. I would see Angela outside, but not Nathan. Apparently "playing with Angela" means playing with her toys inside her house. So we've made a few new rules about when and how far the kids can go from our home. So much for these kids to learn and absorb!

Thank you for reading our blog. We hope that we are giving you a bit of a picture our current corner of the world.As always, thanks for your prayers. We are working hard but having fun.

Eric and Jodi