We woke up early with the roosters in the field. We crawled out of our mosquito netting cocoons and had breakfast with Jesse, Julius and Jesse’s father. Scott pulled out a jar of maple syrup his neighbor Jennifer had given him for the trip,which was a big hit. They had never heard of maple syrup before, and couldn’t believe it came from a tree. We dipped our masami buns in the syrup which tasted great. Then it dawned on us that this is what we should do at the orphanage – we’ll buy 40 masami buns and do the same with the children. After breakfast, we packed for the day, and before we left I caught a glimpse of Julius shining his shoes with shoe polish. This was somewhat of an odd sight, in a mud hut, dust and dirt everywhere, and his clothes are neatly pressed, shining his shoes. Very amazing, the pride some Kenyans take in themselves. We trekked the long walk back into town to the Kipepeo office, a small, dark storefront – kind of – with a bunch of dust, empty shelves and a 1990’s computer. Today we were to visit a group of people who were about to put together a micro-finance organization – that is, they will each put money into a pot, and each member has a chance in a merry-go-round fashion to borrow money from the pot. They must repay the money within a month, 3 months max, with 10% interest per month, the loan being to start a small business. We soon found the group to be The Andeka Men Group, a group of people who are HIV positive, that is what they have in common, and we were unknowingly about to embark on quite a journey.
We met Dan, who was HIV+. After chatting with him, he quickly verified my personal belief that eating enough vegetables and having a great outlook on life is the key to keeping your immune system strong, as he has been living with HIV for now over 12 years, and to see him and his love of life and jovial attitude, you would never know. When I asked him his secret, these are some of the things I learned. We were taken to the nearby hospital where HIV+ people receive their medication, supplied by US-AID, a US organization that supplies this medicine across Kenya. We were greeted by the admin staff, and as in Kakamega, we were taken into an office to meet the highest officials at the hospital in a very formal setting. Every meeting here seems very formal, a holdover I assume from the British influence before their independence in 1963. They were happy to see us and told us to tour the facilities. We will upload photos when we can, but even they won’t do the tour justice. It Is hard to believe the condition of this place, built with mud walls, quite dirty and not kept up very well – I suppose they do what they have to with what they have, with a lineup of 40 or so people waiting for their medication, the line constantly growing. We were taken to the dispensing room, and of course they stopped giving out medication to greet us. I’m like ‘Keep working, you’ve got many people waiting more important than us’, but they insisted we come in and have a formal name-introduction of everyone. I looked at the faces of the people sitting waiting in line, some with their kids on their laps, they didn’t seem destitute looking for pity, it was more that this was their life, welcome to it. And then there’s Dan, also HIV+ as I said, flitting around like a little bumble bee, introducing us to many of the staff at the hospital – it was a wide range of personalities dealing with the disease.
We proceeded to a final room, a small classroom I suppose, where we were informed we were to teach a lesson on small business start-ups to the group. Scott began the lesson, taking the group of men and women through how to start a small business within the context of this community. It was an interesting exercise to take our knowledge of small business and apply it to selling vegetables, or buying a few chickens, or renting a spot in a busy market to sell wares. We were to continue the lesson the following day at the headquarters for the Andeka Men Group.
They were very happy with Scott’s lesson, you could tell they were very eager to learn and appreciative. After the lesson their applause was rubbing their hands together before a cheer. Then we walked through a tiny village to a home of a woman Dan wanted us to meet, a young woman 22 years old who is HIV+. She is mostly bedridden and needs a critical operation, as she bleeds when she stands. We entered the mud hut and Dan took us to a room in the back where she lay. It’s an image that will stay with us: the smoke from burning wood in the cooking room wafting in the air of the hallways and into her small, dark, mud-walled room where she lay in a small bed. The only light in the room was streaming in from a tiny window beside her, the smoke making the light in the room glow. There she lay, a young, frail young woman, seemingly quite happy to see us visit her. She tried to sit up but it was difficult for her. We spoke with the woman, she was very nice, and spends her days in that room, seemingly just waiting. After some time we left the house, but couldn’t leave the image.
Out on the road we took a Matatu (remember that small minivan with benches to cram in passengers that we spoke of earlier?) for a 40 minute ride to Luanda. The highway was so potholed that most of the time was spent driving on the dirt shoulder or driving up and down the potholes, some a foot or so deep. Luanda is a very busy village with a large outdoor market selling everything from fruits and vegetables to nails to straw to pieces of coloured rope. There we stopped for lunch. With the girl in the bed still on our minds, we discussed the inevitable moral dilemma we were sure to encounter on such a trip. The only thing stopping her from having this operation is an expensive trip by their standards to Nairobi, a 6 hour or so trip of several modes of transportation. She’s one woman in need, but there are a thousand others like her in a bed in a mud hut elsewhere in Africa, will helping one young woman make a difference when there is so much other need? Do you inherit the problem because you’ve been exposed to it? Will this operation make any difference for her at all? Who rolled the dice and made us so lucky to live in a country where we can get the medical treatment we need? Lots of questions, few answers. We left and entered the cacophony of the marketplace.
When we see Dan in the morning, we’ll tell him to get the young woman ready to travel.
