The hospital

“So, the chaplain asked, do you have any words of encouragement for this young lady?” Reika and I both stood there speechless. After gaining consciousness I asked, “Uhhh would you mind if we prayed for her?” What words of encouragement does someone give to a lady whose husband married another women (while still being in relationship with her), and then left her, lost her job at the tea factory, hospitalized for a sickness, had her legs amputated and her right hand is paralyzed, her left is getting weaker, and she still has to support three children? Today Reika and I went around the hospital with Helen, one of the 10 chaplains. This was the longest duration of time that we had spent in the hospital. We went from ward to ward praying and talking with very sick people. I can’t even describe the types of casualties that the people are dealing with in the hospital. I am not one to have a queasy stomach, but after about an hour in the hospital I could hardly even talk because I was concentrating on appearing to not look sick. Reika kept asking me if I was okay, and I was doing the same to her. It was always a nice break when we would walk outside to a different ward, because it was about a minute of fresh air.

The smell of the hospital is somewhat indescribable. It is a mixture between a hospital, open wounds, blood, food, bedpans, and body odor. Reika and I both agreed that the smell was worse than the wounds. The hospital beds are rusty old beds. The sheets are ripped pieces of clothe, and some of the wheel chairs, that they use, don’t even have wheels on them….you just kind of push them. It’s hard to believe that this is the hospital that people want to come to when they are sick and to have their babies. A lot of the patients are in the hospital because of motorbike accidents. The people in Kenya buy motorbikes without being trained on how to drive them. We saw a lot of men with legs that were swollen four times as much as their healthy leg and all sorts of rods poking in every which direction…at one point I looked at Reika and asked “are all those rods going straight through his leg?????” Theirs a lot of bloody bandages, open wounds, and stitches. Mom, you wouldn’t have made it out of one of the rooms before you would have fainted Haha. There are 7 to 16 people in one room. Privacy does not exist.

I think the more we start working in the hospital the less sick we will feel, but we could definitely use prayer. We also received our first real client today. There’s a child that has been brought to the hospital twice because of severe malnutrition. The hospital, knowing they could not send her back to her home situation, did some research on what is going on. Her mother has died, she has another sibling in another hospital for the same reason, and her father is a severe alcoholic and is not taking care of them. Community health at Tenwek went to the village to ask the chief if he would be sure that the child was fed and taken care of. He said that it was not his responsibility to check up on her. Reika and I have to do some investigating to make sure that the chief was actually talked to, and if he was, Reika and I will need to figure out if there is somewhere else the child can go. If there’s not anywhere else she can go she will be sent to a children’s home. She is so young, and if she suffers from severe malnutrition again she could suffer from a lot of developmental issues.

Yesterday Reika and I were asked if we would like to go live in a village for a weekend. We will work in the fields, milk cows, fetch the eggs, cook over open fires, and who knows what else. We are both looking forward to that.