kakuma

I'm back in Nairobi after 3 weeks in Kakuma Refugee camp! Kakuma was amazing. I mostly worked in one of the two satellite clinics in the camp, and sometimes went to the main hospital. There is no health care or anything in most of the district, and it's one of the poorest in Kenya, so the hospital and clinics also treated a lot of the local Turkana people. Most of the people in Kakuma are Somali, and then Sudanese, and then a mish mash of Ethiopians, Congolese, Ugandans, and others. The IRC has a lot of refugees working with them, and they basically run the clinics when the regular IRC people aren't there. It's pretty cool. At the clinic I hung out with the Clinical Officer (a Kenyan who works for IRC) and he helped me ask my malaria questions. Turns out there's tons of malaria in the camp, and it's P falciparum which is the worst type. In the main hospital I spent time in the pediatric ward and the maternity ward. I also went with my friend Yuliya to outpatient therapy program feedings. She's doing her project on ready to use therapeutic foods, and they give out Plumpy Nut to malnourished kids in the program, which is basically super fortified peanut butter. While we were there they were doing a polio vaccine campaign, and I got to go around one day and vaccinate the kids.
The IRC people that we stayed with were really nice. We expected there to be more white people, but most of the staff at the NGOs were Kenyan. We would hang out with them at night and watch TV and play cards and scrabble. It was reallly hot and dry. There was electricity for the most part, except for a couple of hours during the day when they had electricity rationing. So most of the time when we were in our rooms we had fans on, but when the electricity went off it was sweltering. Needless to say I was pretty sweaty, but what else is new.
Now I'm in Nairobi writing my ISP paper, which is our big end of the semester paper. Next week we're going to Malindi (on the coast near Mombasa) for our presentations.