part of our samburu experience

Woah. It’s been a while since we’ve blogged. We’re currently just outside of Thikatown (~1hr outside of Nairobi). We’re here to help with a women’s conference that is being hosted by a team from the women’s ministry at Southeast Christian Church. We arrived here Sunday night after being picked up from Samburu.
I apologize now for the scatteredness of this blog. The time we had in Samburu was busy and we all have many, many stories that have come out of it. I’m going to do my best to capture as much as I can in this post, but the girls will have to supplement it with their own stories.
Samburu…wow. What a week. I’ve yet to figure out if the place we were at was actually called Samburu, but we were in the area of the Samburu tribe, and the mission we stayed at was called the Segera mission. The closest city was Nanyuki, but the only way to get there was on 4-wheel drive through the rocky/dusty country roads.
If you want to get a visual image of where we stayed, picture this: the lion king with a big barn like building and some smaller one-story buildings. It was rural and rustic. The area outside of the mission is very different from what we had experienced to this point. First off Segera is not a partner of LIA, so we didn’t have an LIA organized program/field oriented staff member to come alongside. We got to experience a more traditional mission during our time there. Segera operates a medical clinic that is the only medical facility for 400 square miles. Two nurses operate it, and they have help this summer from three American students (one medical student and two nursing students), and us while we were there.
It was an intense week for many of us, but it was a good week. We really felt like we were on a short term mission, which was really different for us. The climate was semi-arid, sort of desert like; all the soil was more dust than actual soil. It was as warm as Kisumu during the day and colder than Nairobi at night, (about 90 during the day and 40s-50s at night). The stars and moon were so clear at night, it was incredible; the cold made it unpleasant to lie out and watch them like we did in Kijabe (details to follow in another post, we went to kijabe before we came to samburu). Story time:
Like I said, the mission has a medical clinic and several of us spent a good amount of time in it. Our first day at the mission had a time for home visits (our specialty), so we split into two groups and went to two locations. My group (Rayray, Commander Ponton, Myself and Jayne (LIA Staff that came with us)) went to visit a widow who was living in a mud hut with a grass roof. The home was tilting quite badly, and was propped up by a log on one side. We took tea with the homeowner who shared her story with us. Unfortunately I remember few details of her life, but like many of the people in the area, struggled with tribal traditions. After taking tea, she showed us the inside of her home. It was a one-room building, and typical of homes the cooking fire was kept inside the home which had no chimney. We then took some time to visit her two neighbors. One of the neighbors turned out to be a pastor who had worked at the mission as a night guard for 7 years before resigning to become a full time pastor. We visited him (Tony) and his wife (Phyllis) and heard how, in addition to pastoring a church of 150, they had just begun their own real estate business. They both spoke fluent English, and Phyllis looked to be about 6 months pregnant (turns out she wasn’t). After the home visit, we got a tour of the mission from it’s director, Richard. He showed us the place and gave us all sorts of fun facts about where it’s come from and what his vision is for the future. When he was showing us the water cleaning system, I took a short gander at the source of the water (Filthy river is putting it lightly) and was informed by Richard that the tall grass I was standing in happens to be home to some spitting Cobras. I thought he was joking at first, then I realized that he never jokes and ran out of the grass faster than I ever have in my life. We took dinner in the dining hall, and during that time a mother getting ready to deliver came in. The nurse helped her get settled and we continued on with our night. Sawyer and Emily (one of the other nursing students previously mentioned) helped Samuel (the clinic nurse) with everything while we waited long into the night for the baby to come. At 12:03 am the baby came, and it came in a hurry, I barely made it in before it was out. It was a baby boy and surprise, the mom was Phyllis. Turns out she wasn’t six months pregnant, she was full term! Went to bed a few hours later.
The next day Katie Lane and I were in the Clinic. There are a lot of cases of water related illness, and lots of coughs. When you constantly have a fire going in a house with no chimney, you’re going to have a cough. Another common condition is thorn sticks. Everything that has leaves in this area also has thorns, big ones. On this day, a girl came in with a two inch thorn stuck under the skin in her head. I have no idea how it got there, but it was buried in there. With no anesthetic we had to remove this thorn or risk a life threatening infection from it. The girl was about 10 years old and tough as nails, but it took three of us to hold her still enough to get this thing out. I had to hold her head down in my lap so she couldn’t squirm there, her grandmother held her legs, and the missions mechanic had to hold her arms while Samuel did his thing with a scalpel and needle and Katie wiped up all the blood and pulled the thing out. Ouch. After we got the thorn out, the girl sat up and looked like nothing had even happened to her. The next day, we repeated with another girl who had one stuck in her foot, similar story.
There are so many water borne illnesses from the river and a nearby dam. Apparently a team of engineers from the US came out sometime in the past to examine the water from those places and determined that if they were in the US, a human being wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near it. It’s ripe with E. Coli, Typhoid and all sorts of pesticides and other pollution. The mission offers clean water for free but not everyone takes advantage of it. Apparently, many people like the taste of the river water because it tastes sweet, and there’s also a traditional tribal history of drinking from the river.
Tribal traditions are prevalent in the way of life in the area, which really isn’t good for the women. Common traditions are female circumcision and full FGM. Girls as young as 7 (usually 12) are married off for their dowries. Women are also the source of income as the men just sit around all day. I can count the number of men I saw outside the mission on one hand, all sitting on the side of the road doing nothing. In this area, wealth is measured in livestock (cattle, sheep and goats). It’s really the only industry out there (90% unemployment, really puts our 10% in perspective), though there needs to be a paradigm shift for that to change.
Another cultural difficulty we saw involved a 10-year-old boy. He had a badly injured right knee, which prevented him from walking. It was swollen and it looked like his patella was not in the right place, but we couldn’t be sure of anything. What is sure, is that the treatment of his injury at the hospital in Nanyuki cost about 600 Kenya Shillings. His father said he didn’t have the money to pay for it and expected the mission to pay for the treatment of the child’s injury. Here’s the problem with said proposal: he had more sheep and goats than we could count…well over 100, probably closer to 300. Selling one adult sheep would have garnered about 2,500 Kenya Shillings. Two cultural issues, 1. Livestock are more valuable than children in this area. 2. Even though he had plenty, he still thought he was poor.
Much more to come
Sam and the Mi2s