Welcome!

Hi everyone!

I'd like to get started on this new blog to talk about what is going on prior to my mission trip to Kenya September 20-October 2, 2008. Once I am in Nairobi, it will act as my tool to keep you all in the loop.

I just bought my plane ticket for $1600.00 last Thursday (6/12/08). I leave Saturday, September 20 in the afternoon then will land in Nairobi on Sunday.

Below is a brief itinerary on what we'll be up to (I am coming back on October 2, so will not be there for the last 2 days due to the price in plane tickets).

Sept. 20 – leave the U.S.
Sept. 21 – arrive in Kenya and begin set-up
Sept. 22- continue set-up
Sept. 23-26 – hold clinic
Sept. 27 – rest day
Sept. 28-Oct. 1 – hold clinic
Oct. 2 – dismantle clinic and pack up supplies
Oct. 3 - debriefing
Oct. 4 – return to U.S.

I've also pasted some information below on the mission, this was sent to me by Sally Platt, our team leader, who is a nurse at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. She is a Rotarian, which is explained more below:

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This mission is a Rotary club project. Rotary is an international organization of business and professional men and women united in the ideal of service. With nearly 1.3 million members in about 175 countries around the world, we are the oldest and largest humanitarian service organization in the world. You can read more about the organization as a whole at http://www.rotary.org/.

I am part of a special interest group called RFFA (Rotarians For Fighting AIDS). Our special focus is children who have been orphaned due to the AIDS epidemic and those who are vulnerable due to their socioeconomic circumstances. We currently have programs and projects in place for the benefit of these children in seven countries in Africa. Kenya is one of those countries and Nairobi has an especially large population of OVC (orphans and vulnerable children). As a result, several Rotary clubs have organized this medical mission in partnership with RFFA to serve as many of them as we can.

All of the children we will be seeing live in the slums – many in child-headed or adolescent-headed households, others with elderly grannies who barely have the means to support themselves, much less to support their grandchildren. Education is the only way out of poverty for these children, but unless they are well enough to attend school, that opportunity is lost. As well, most of the kids receive only one meal per day and they get that meal at school. So again, it's important to keep them in school.

Our plan is to set up a temporary clinic in one of the slum areas (either Mathare, Korogocho or Makuru) in Nairobi. We will conduct general health, dental and eye screenings. Illnesses and injuries that we can treat will be treated onsite. Those that we cannot treat will be referred to hospital or to the care of Rotarian physicians in Nairobi, some of whom will be working alongside us in our clinic.

In planning this mission, I am working closely with Rotarians in Nairobi. One of those is an American nurse named Vickie Winkler, who has lived in Kenya for many years and runs an organization known as HEART (http://www.africaheart.com/). Vickie has advised me that we can expect to see a lot of upper respiratory illnesses, a well as malnutrition, anemia, amoebic dysentery, skin conditions of various kinds (especially scabies and ringworm), minor injuries and wounds, malaria, typhoid and possibly TB. The CDC also will be providing us with HIV/AIDS test kits. A Rotarian pediatrician in NC, who is part of the medical team, is looking into obtaining rapid serum TB testing kits. (TB treatment in Kenya is free, but testing isn’t.)

We have also built in an education component, complete with health manuals, which Vickie has created, that are printed in both English and Swahili (side by side). We have arranged to have Kenyan-certified HIV/AIDS educators on site every day of the clinic. The health educators will teach proper hand washing, tooth brushing, HIV/AIDS prevention, and general disease prevention. Each child will then receive a toothbrush, a bar of soap, and a 60-day supply of multiple vitamins and iron.

The team will have a variety of options for lodging: home hosting by local Rotarians or hotels. Lunch will be provided to the team each day by the Kenyan Rotarians. As well, I have arranged to rent enough mini-vans to transport the team back and forth from their places of lodging to clinic every day.

Most of the supplies we’ll need will be purchased in Kenya and will be available upon our arrival. A Rotarian pharmacist in Nairobi is working with me on that. Other supplies will need to be purchased or otherwise obtained here and taken along with us. (I’m working with the airlines in hopes of gaining their cooperation to ship these items for free, since this is a humanitarian mission.) Any supplies/medications we don’t use for the clinic will be donated to other medical professionals in Nairobi.
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I am very excited to take part in this opportunity, and I hope you will check in on this blog from time to time!

With best regards,
Alexandra