Eldoret

I've learned to be really flexible on visits to the field. One of the things that is hardest for westerners to do, I think, is to surrender control of your schedule and time and be okay with the ambiguity of not knowing where you're going next, when you will be back, etc... The second hardest thing is not eating/drinking/or going to the bathroom for 10 - 13 hours. I hadn't considered it before, but these communities have no real places to do any of the above. I always pack snacks, but I don't always eat them. It feels rude to me to not share and/or eat in front of others who might be hungry too.

I'm in Eldoret. This community was the epicenter of last year's violence, and the tensions between different tribal groups can still be felt. The nature of my visits doesn't allow me to thoroughly delve into or understand the political/social/ecological context of the communities we work in. We rely on our implementers, those who actually run the projects, to do that. (But I still regret the impossibility of lacking the expertise that comes from actually living in the country)

We spent 10 hours yesterday driving from project to project in rural villages surrounding Eldoret. The entirety of the drive was exactly like riding in my dad's grain truck across a particularly bumpy piece of field (maybe something out by the housing, south of town.) So I have had lots of good practice. The sites included lots of travel time, and by the time we reached our last two, people had been waiting to meet with us since that morning. We saw a health clinic that had only recently started, fully run by the community, reaching people with counseling and testing and PMTCT. We also saw several young ladies' sewing machines for income generating (a problem when every young lady is trained to sew in the same small town, which happens.)

I almost pulled a Madonna a took home Emmanual, a beautiful healthy baby, whose mother is HIV-positive, but he is not. Thanks to PMTCT -- Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission -- medications and behavior therapies, he's healthy and strong and breastfeeding exclusively in line with WHO recommendations. I see a lot on these visits that needs improvement (otherwise I wouldn't be here) but the success stories are here too.