93 Years Old and Feisty!

This was our last day of work in Kangundo – hard to say goodbye to the friendships we have forged in these past few days.

Team photo!

Home visits again. Because of great cooperation within the medical team covering tasks for each other, everyone was able to visit a home – always an excellent way to get a bigger picture of what life is like for the people we serve.

The outdoor cooking stove for one of the families we visited.

The homeowner with some of the plant starts she sells to help support herself.

Hard times plus some good fortune for this woman. Her property is quite small because when her husband died, his family swooped in and took possession of most of the land. Unfortunately, that is not an uncommon occurrence here. But she's in front of her granary and behind that is a power pole bringing free electricity to her home. Richer neighbors up the hill from her wanted electricity in their home and the shortest, cheapest route for the power lines meant putting a power pole on her property. In exchange for that, she was given a power line to her house and doesn't have to pay any electric bill.

Her very skinny dog which, though cautious, actually let me pet him.

Another home visit – their kitchen counter.

 A scaffold I wouldn't want to be on.

Dezarae is in heaven holding a rabbit. I thought it was probably being raised as a food source but it turns out the son of the woman we visited just likes to have them as pets. OK, yes, I'm jealous I didn't get to hold it!

The mama and her son – more avocados in evidence!! Two women in our group were given a couple as a gift.

A common method of collecting rainwater...

Here comes the 93-year-old! The woman in blue was sitting at the steps of the clinic by herself so I bent down to greet her. She grabbed my hand and started talking a mile a minute but of course I didn't understand a word. Not too long after, the other woman came by and together they chattered away. Soon Beatrice, the woman in blue, stood up and her friend escorted her to to the toilet.

We helped her back into her seat where she chatted and chatted to me again while we held hands. One  of her eyes is permanently closed and the other seems to have a cataract, plus I think she has only two teeth. I asked a translator to help me understand what was going on. Though at first he understood her to say she had been given her prescribed meds, we figured out they had not yet been dispensed so we got that taken care of. Then I was asking the translator to find out how she got to the clinic. "She walked," he said. Good grief! She said that if I just took her to the road, she'd be fine, but I wasn't excited about that as her best option.

Ultimately I was able to get hold of Miriam who suggested we hire a motorcycle driver to take her home and we'd pay the cost. Maxwell, one of our favorite helpers, was able to convince her to get on it by saying he was a grandson and would be coming to visit her shortly at her home. She had a death grip on her cane (understandably) and we had to coach her to hold on to the driver as well...

During our lunch break, Susan and I got to go the viewpoint that's part of Mama's property. Along the way, we got to pet an agreeable cow owned by one of our two guides (both of whom are related to Mama's late husband Isaac).

 Lots of fond good-byes to Anita, our clinical officer.

 Chairs used for clinic waiting areas are transported back to storage.

Dr. Bob reports that 824 patients were seen over that last four days, 469 of whom were women.

Tomorrow we head back to Nairobi at 7:30 a.m. Or at least that's our departure time goal (we rarely hit our departure time goals no matter how hard we try - ha!)