Kenya dig it?
After several long days of travel from the USA to our final destination of Nyeri, Kenya, the Mashavu team was excited to take their first trip to the Children and Youth Empowerment Center (CYEC) today. After months of preparation and anticipation, it was exhilarating to experience first hand what has been so frequently described to us. At 9 am we drove about five minutes down the road from our hotel to a dirt path that veered sharply to the left. It wound us in and out of farms and tightly knit properties laced with exotic plants. We arrived at a large iron gate, which was subsequently opened by our familiar friend, Joseph. Joseph is one of the students at CYEC who traveled with us from our hotel in Nairobi. From the minute we arrived, we were greeted with wide curious eyes of scattered students trekking around the complex.
Trekking up to CYEC
We were introduced to Edward, a staff member of CYEC, and given a tour of the surrounding buildings. We toured the carpentry building, dining hall, library and classrooms where respectful students rose from their seats to welcome us. We made small talk, learned about the facility, and roamed around the gorgeous garden that expanded a few hundred yards past the football field in the rear of the CYEC. The landscape was lush, green and full of vegetation. A stream marked the end of the property, which we found to be particularly serene. After the tour, we at last met one of our main stakeholders of the Mashavu system, the CYEC resident nurse, Marysimiyu. It was a relief to finally tour the clinic where the initial phase of Mashavu was to be implemented. The location and resources which we have discussed for an entire semester was finally put into perspective. We then were introduced to the students who would be our guides throughout the surrounding community to conduct our research of the usability of our system. It was a challenge to explain why we were there at first, but after we broke out and interacted with the students individually, we all began to warm up to each other and find grounds that we had in common.
Our website team and BioE device students then returned to our hotel to put the last minute touches on our hardware. The BioE devices met an assortment of issues while reconstructing them after travel. It was a relief, however, that nothing was broken during transit. The temperature and pulse rate devices were working successfully by the end of the day. Due to the audio input of the laptops we were using, it was difficult recording a clear signal from the stethoscope device. The spirometer also had difficulty callibrating, but further troubleshooting is going to take place throughout the end of the week. The website team installed a local instance of the doctor’s software, iPath, in case we ran into issues connecting to the internet during demonstrations. We also formatted the information being sent to the doctors in an appropriate manor to better organize important statistics.
Gorgeous Landscape
Meanwhile, the rest of us stayed at CYEC to begin community interactions. For the first day, we were asked to approach the community members cautiously; to listen and learn rather than to impede. Eight of the Mashavu team members we escorted by Abdala, a teacher at CYEC. She was very involved with the surrounding community members and helped aid our group by suggesting who to talk to and conversting in Swahili. The eight students that we had met earlier also came along to act as translators and escorts. The village surrounding the CYEC was more rural than expected, as opposed to the clustered sheet metal huts we observed as we were driving out of Nairobi. We found out that most of the properties were inherited down through a family line. The individual flats contained simple houses not made of more than bound pieces of wood or metal. There was also usually an area for a garden to grow a few crops here and there. The community was divided along a main road which parsed into smaller dirt paths on either side where the properties were located. The inhabitants of the village were often very sick and malnourished, sometimes to the point of being unable to walk. Poverty was pervasive throughout the area, and many of the people didn’t have food, water or a source of income. Abdala was easily able to initiate conversations in Swahili, and a background of the people we met were given to us as we spoke to them.
Amazing Tree
We told the residents that we were students and they ended up being very receptive to our conversations and questions. The health issues that were very evident throughout the town were a large part of the citizen’s lives, and they often felt stuck in their situations. However, this did not deter them from engaging us in friendly, informative conversations. Even though we made it a point not to mention Mashavu so as not to skew responses about life in the village, the inhabitants rarely brought up the question of what exactly what we were doing there. We figured that they may have assumed that we were on some sort of mission trip.
Many of the families’ children were currently attending CYEC Kenya because they could no longer support them in their environment. It was a very overwhelming and eye-opening experience, and we are looking forward to going back tomorrow.
Written by Anthony Zmoda
