Transition for the second half of our internship

By Harrison Blizzard & Amy Rawlinson

This week consisted of mostly preparation work to get us ready for our last full month here in Kenya. It is hard to believe that we are over halfway finished our time here and it feels like we just got here! This month we have two projects that we will be working on. One is infant feeding sessions (which are headed by Amy). These sessions are for infant mother to teach them about proper nutrition for them and their babies. Most of this work will take place at the hospital as nursing mothers come in and also up at the Machaka orphanage to help the staff learn for the young orphans. Foodservice assessment (headed by Harrison) will also take place at St. Teresa’s hospital. Currently the hospital does not have a dietitian so we were asked to assess their foodservice practices to help the staff increase the wellness of the patients and make any recommendations if needed. On Wednesday, we joined the nursing and biology students in their health clinics that were being completed at the Ruuju women’s group. Thursday was spent getting ready for the infant feeding presentation for Friday and developing worksheets for the food security data that will be gathered all this month during our home visits. The work week ended on a sad note as we all attended the funeral of Jennifer Murogocho’s nephew who passed away the previous Friday. We wanted to help out the family during this difficult time so we took the morning to help pass out snacks to the attendees and then attended the funeral service. It was very important to help the family as the whole family has done so much to help us during our stay here. On Saturday we celebrated Canada Day by having a party inviting some of our Kenyan friends. This was a great event to bring a little bit of Canada into Kenya for the day. We prepared some dishes that are popular in Canada and had some Canadian music to listen to. It was so much fun for us and our guests and it made us feel as if we were back in Canada! (Without a visit from Prince William and Catherine of course!)