day one hundred and five

The Lord said “let there be light” and about a month later Kenya power agreed and fixed the electricity. And the people rejoiced, with shouts of joy and long hot showers. Finally, after a month of no television, no refrigerator, no hot showers, and for the past two weeks no lights, or power to charge your phone, Kenya Power fixed the electricity line supplying our village. Many shouts of joy were heard from the surrounding shambas (farms).

The rainy season makes for unreliable electricity but much water

I finally had myself a threesome… chocolate bar! Hahaha, not that it’s any of your business but my love live is not getting action, not that I would tell you because I know my Mum is reading this (Hi Mum, love you, yes I’m being safe, boys have germs). But back to the chocolate bar, yes it’s called threesome, probably because it contains dark, milk and white chocolate… Dark on top, white in the middle, milk on the bottom. You can eat all three layers at once which is like a party in your mouth, or you can savour each layer separately. Either way it’s delicious and I shall never buy it again because I ate the whole packet in one go (that was supposed to be my chocolate supply for the week).
 

Dangerous stuff... seriously dangerous

On Wednesday our Posho Mill opened up. “What is a posho mill?” I hear you ask? It’s machine which it grinds the maize into ugali flour. So now my African family has a milk bar (small shop) and a posho mill on the compound. The other day I was the fundi for the shop which was a great opportunity to practice my Swahili… thank goodness Cetty was there to translate! My Swahili is getting there pole pole, although I have found myself a few times this week just zoning out when people are speaking because I can’t understand it. It’s so frustrating having all these conversations go on around you and you can’t understand!

Work has been rather intense this last week; peak malaria season has been taking its toll, with several children dying, including one that died whilst having a line inserted to receive IV malaria treatment (artesunate for those wondering). There have been other elderly deaths as well. I just don’t understand how someone can leave their child being that sick for so long… I know they go to the local herbalist “daktari” to get traditional medicine first. It breaks my heart seeing these children, and I pray that what I’m doing here in my internship in some way prevent them from getting this sick.

So what am I doing here? I’ve kinda split my projects into two lots – laboratory based projects and public health based projects. I’ve told you previously about my laboratory projects, so let me tell you about my public health projects. This week I started work on my public health project [warning nerdy epidemiologist language alert] – I am working with the Community Health Volunteers (CHVs) to create an app so they can do their reports on their phones. This will improve all of the system attributes of the current reporting system (like that MAEs?), especially the accuracy, reliability and timeliness… right now we have no way to confirm that the CHVs actually went to the households to collect this data, it is collated into sub-location so we can’t have line-listed household level data, and it’s reported on paper once a month. Once we start getting this data electronic the usefulness will be immense – barazas (these community health workshops run by the village chiefs), grant writing, government policies… oh I am drooling at the all the possibilities. But first things first, I am building the app using the CommCare platform based off the MOH515 reporting tool… should be able to run it next week with the public health officers. After that I’ll be running a case-control pilot with one CHV sub-location team – there are 12 members of their team and three of them currently own android smartphones, so those three will be using the app to report whilst the other nine will be reporting traditionally, after which we will be comparing the data that has been reported electronically with the traditionally reported data, both from the same month and previously reported data. The coolest thing is that the app has geolocation capabilities so we can track the activities of the CHV on a map. I’m super excited. If this works, my supervisor has already started dreaming about the capabilities for the whole sub-county. For me, it would be a success just for the pilot to happen, as that would mean I have developed an app, communicated it with my team, trained the CHVs to use it, have them use it to report, and then have a party after it’s finished.