Honeymoon in Kenya! Part 2: Sister Freda's Foundation

September 8

We caught the 7:15am flight from Nairobi to Kitale. We only had two days here, but I wanted Dan to meet the "Mother Teresa of Africa", an amazing woman named Sister Freda. She left her job as a nurse in a private hospital in 1994 to open a two-room clinic near the slums of Kitale in order to serve people who could not afford treatment or get to the hospital. With the support of Village Volunteers, she has since turned the clinic into a proper hospital with an operating theater, pharmacy, and laboratory! Only about 2% of her patients are charged for their healthcare because the rest come from extreme poverty.

Sister Freda's projects continued to expand and develop. In 2004, Sister Freda began offering a nursery school and daily feeding program due to the severity of the malnutrition and disease she saw in the children from nearby villages. At the same time, she has been running a small orphanage for the neediest. She soon opened up a nursing college and girl's high school in 2011. 

[See short videos from my April 2011 visit] 

Sister Freda picked us up at about 8:30am when we landed. She took us to brunch and then church. Service was held in one of the classrooms at the high school. Dan observed just how musically talented Kenyans are by the numerous spontaneous outbursts of song :-)

After church, Sister Freda gave us a tour of her campus. Her newest project is to complete a new building for the children in the nursery class. It will be in memory of her late husband, Richard Robinson. She is awaiting funds to complete the building. She has just secured enough funding from a past volunteer to complete the building!!!

We spent the evening enjoying dinner with Sister Freda and six American volunteers! There was another Village Volunteer there who arrived just a day before we did. Betty LaSorella is a 75-year-old writer from Chicago. She had great ideas to teach and work with the Girls High School students on creative writing. I bet they learned a lot from her, gained confidence, and embraced their imagination!

And there was a family of four from Texas who came to deliver a cargo container of used American medical supplies! The mother of the family was an assessor for Project C.U.R.E. She had come a year and a half ago to assess Sister Freda's work and her needs and came back this time with her sister, husband and daughter. WOW I think there was $400,000 worth of medical equipment in there (according to the Project C.U.R.E. website). Sister Freda requested to keep the container so that they can turn half into a consultation room and half into storage.

September 9

Dan began by teaching the children in the nursery classes about aerodynamics. Yeah, he's THAT good.

Ok actually he just explained that airplanes can fly without engines or pilots. This was demonstrated with paper airplanes.

In Kenya, English and Kiswahili are their national languages. But children grow up first learning their tribal language in their homes, and hearing Swahili in the villages and community. English is taught in school and used in most mass media and literature. That is why the teacher in the video has to translate for the children; they are still learning English. We started off in the classroom and then went into the playground, where the baby class joined us, too. The orderly line lasted about 5 minutes.

Later Dan did a lesson on electricity with the older students in the Dr. Ken Gerdis Girls High School. It was great timing, we were told, because the Form 8 students were just learning about it. The teacher was glad that Dan reviewed something he had just gone over.

The students were so engaged and interested! They asked great questions and seemed to be inspired by Dan's talk about the field of engineering. Dan brought some homemade electronics to demonstrate his topic. In this video, Dan had just explained that humans are also conductors of electricity, and electrons will flow if you complete a circuit even across two people.

Kitale and its surrounding areas are connected to the country's main power supply, so the students do have experience with having light in the rooms and access to a communal TV. However, the questions they asked at the end of Dan's talk were enlightening for us as to their daily experience and concerns. They had many questions about when it rains, such as "why does the power always go out when it rains?" and "why should we stay away from the walls of our house when it rains?"... and some clever questions about alternative energy! Several asked about solar power. One girl asked about geothermal energy and another asked why we can't harness the power of lightening.

After Dan's talk, I was taken to a class of second year nursing college students. I reviewed the normal swallowing process and introduced the types and risks of dysphagia. The students then paired up and practiced feeding each other as one acted as patient and the other as caregiver. The "patient" was to keep his/her eyes closed and arms crossed to simulate what it is like to be helpless and compensated. We then discussed the patient's experience and what they would've preferred, what are some safe feeding strategies. Hopefully they can then use the information/experience for when they train caregivers or feed their own patients.