In Ugenya part II

Taking a break from transcribing answers from the answer sheets into excel. (for those of you that know me well you can imagine the many mistakes I am making as I try to do this).

So what to say about Ugenya. First of all. Here I have had my first up close real life encounter with rural poverty. And in most ways it is exactly what you would expect. Lots of children and adults with out shoes or good clothes. People sitting along the road selling whatever little fruits they are growing or nuts and other little things (mangos and bananas are in season here). Los of "non-permanent" structures, these are huts made of mud with thatched roofs. and "semi-permanent" structures, which are mud walls but covered with plaster and with tin roofs. Its pretty hard to give a through description, but basically you turn off of the main road, onto the unpaved dirt road part and you might have an little village area with stores then you keep going and there will be fields of maize and people homes and animals, then you keep going and there might be another little village area. You can just keep going into the interior like this.

Here in Kenya there are definitely a lot of schools, you pass them frequently. Most are day and boarding, some mixed (coed) and some all boys or all girls. All of the students wear uniforms and have to keep their hair short. There are also a fair number of brick making business, and of course lots and lots of maize.

Other way to describe Kenya (at least this area) is that everything just seems old. The buildings look old, people homes, bicycles, bags, and clothes all look old. I started to wonder if there is anything new in this whole area. The school rooms look old too, and most don't have electricity. I was in one that looked old, just like all of the others, but then the principal commented how excited he was about this particular building, it was built a year ago.

The people are friendly for the most part, if you walk by they smile and greet you. But from a distance we get a lot of stares. There are a few other NGOs in this area so the people aren't shocked to see us, but they do stare because its rare to see a mzungu (white person). Young children get really excited to see us, and will wave happily for ten or fifteen minutes, if we stay in one place long enough. People frequently want to shake our hands, which is an important form of greeting here, probably more important than it is in the US, even if you not actually meeting someone you still shake their hands.

I've also learned that, despite what I always thought, I do in fact have an accent and it is rather amusing. When kids want to imitate us they plug their noses and speak in high pitched voices. At first I thought this was a very poor imitation, but now I realized that compared to the Kenyan English (derived from English accents) it is fairly accurate.

We have traveled around the area a lot visiting schools for the research project. We have four schools involved here, which is one more than our target of three so thats great. We haven't really had time to do much else here in Ugenya. We did visit the SOTENI banana farm on Thursday, which was a nice thing to get to do, but the bananas didn't have much to say.

Giving the talks has gone fairly well. The students have a hard time understanding us at first, but after a few minutes they get used to our accents. Most of them have been interested, but its pretty clear that the standard "HIV Education Package" has been deliveredto them before. They all know what HIV stands for, how its spreads, and the basic ABC's of prevention. They enjoyed the condom demo (Pat puts a condom over my fist and upper arm) I don't think thats something that they have seen before. And I think we did clarify some finer points, and hopefully gave them a little more of the science than anyone has bothered with before (Pat is a bio-chem major so thats nice). It might be very different in the next village we are going to which has a much more conservative society, where HIV is not as big of a problem, and there is much less NGO penetration. Basically its clear that they know they can get HIV, but its also clear that some, especially some of they guys, are unwilling to wear condoms. They also all enjoyed the "why being faithful isn't a good prevention strategy" diagram I like to draw (I show that if your partner is unfaithful its as if you are having sex with a whole bunch of other people).

Okay, breaks over, I really want to finish getting all of this data entered before we leave for Kuria tomorrow. There is obviously a lot more to say about Ugenya. Maybe I'll get a chance to post more of my thoughts later today.