Monday, August 27, 2007
Ongoing Medical Care for HCC Orphans
Milka (left) and Rose, two orphans with challenging medical problems.Thank you to all of you who have helped the HCC orphans in recent weeks by buying Holiday cards!! Your generosity is making a very big difference in the lives of these children, but there is still a lot they need and I have plenty of cards left for those of you who would like to purchase some. The money I raise from the sale of these cards is directly impacting the orphans' health.
I am pleased to be able to report that I was able to send Dr. Jeremy the money for Emmanuel's and Rose's surgeries and I sent some additional funds for Milka to visit an audiologist to determine the best course of action to help her regain her hearing. Jim gave Dr. Jeremy funds for Madame Antonia's daughter's surgery and Jim is now back in the States after being a month in Kenya. I'm hoping he and I will have a chance to talk soon so I can learn more about his experience.
I am waiting to learn when Emmanuel and Rose will be scheduled for their surgeries, and for Rose it might be awhile as she has severe anemia and malaria. She went with Dr. Jeremy to Kilifi, which is about 50 km south of Malindi, for further testing last week. Dr. Jeremy is concerned that she also has sickle cell anemia, but definitive tests are not back yet. This may complicate her surgery although her herniated bowel is a pretty serious situation, too. I will keep you posted as I learn more. The cost for her surgery may also be more than we expected because of these additional medical expenses and complexities.
Dr. Jeremy also took Milka to Mombasa last week (about 2-3 hours south of Malindi) to visit an audiologist. Milka has had chronic and very severe ear infections for most of her life and she is quite deaf. Dr. Jeremy treated her with antibiotics for her chronic infection, but we hope to help her hear again. It turns out that her eardrums are torn and she is not a candidate for a hearing aid at this time. There is a Norwegian organization that comes to Kenya to do ear surgery in Nairobi at certain times of the year, and they are in Kenya now. Dr. Jeremy is trying to determine if Milka is a candidate for this surgery. If she is a candidate, the cost for the surgery, transportation (including a relative to stay with her) and about 5-7 days in the hospital will run about $900-$1,000. I sent Dr. Jeremy all the funds I have raised and so to do this for Milka would mean generating additional donations. Please let me know right away if you might be able to help Milka. She is an orphan I interviewed last year and she has struggled at school because of her hearing, but she is a very upbeat and gregarious girl of thirteen.
Milka with her angel painting 2007.
Since I left HCC in early July, Dr. Jeremy has worked closely with Zablon, the teachers and the HCC board to care for the orphans' various ongoing medical needs. Today Dr. Jeremy sent me a list of everyone he has seen and all of the treatments he has given. It was a bit staggering!! He has examined 100 of the HCC orphans, and of those, almost all had some sort of medical need, the most common of which was intestinal worms. Worms are very common in Kenya and come from both the food and the soil. He has also treated the children for eplilepsy,malaria, anemia, diarrhea, upper respiratory illnesses, ear infections, fungal infections, tonsillitis, chicken pox, accidents and more. Of the 100 kids he saw, only about 20 were without some sort of ailment! Dr. Jeremy has been using funds I left him for the antibiotics and other medications he has needed the past two months, but that is all used up now. He goes up to HCC to check on the children and has been very communicative with Jim and me. Needless to say he has given a great deal of his time without charge and we are extremely lucky that he has been so generous and caring of the kids. Thank you, too, to the generous donors whose gifts made it possible for me to engage Dr. Jeremy's help in the first place!!
Health is something we take for granted in this country, especially the health of our children. It is such a daunting experience growing up in a developing country where clean water and healthy food are not guarenteed or taken for granted. To be an orphan in a place like Kenya means that you will most likely suffer some sort of health problem, despite your caretakers best efforts. Once I started down the path of helping the HCC orphans with their medical needs, it has become clear that this is going to require more funds and a plan from the HCC board for their ongoing care. But at least we have started the process and chronic problems that have been festering for years have begun to be addressed. We are very grateful for all of you who have generously made it possible to make a difference, one young life at a time!
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Updates From Dr. Jeremy and Jim
Since my return to the U.S. a month ago, I've heard from Dr. Jeremy several times about the status of the orphans' under his medical care. I am deeply appreciative that he has been so communicative and willing to help these children. I left him a bit of money before I left for their ongoing care for a month or two (medications, mostly) but funding their long-term care has not been worked out, and this needs to be something the HCC board addresses.
While most of the orphans' health is improving with the medications that Dr. Jeremy prescribed (de-worming medicine, antibiotics, anti-malaria meds, blood builders for anemia, meds for epilepsy, etc.), there are several that need further treatment. One little girl, Rose, needs surgery immediately for a "strangulated bowel". I believe she also has sickle cell anemia, and I have asked Dr. Jeremy how that might complicate the surgery. I am in the process of trying to raise about $250 for that surgery (a bit more might be needed if she needs to have a blood transfusion) and I am ear-marking the card sales I make this next week for that cause. (See the previous posting on the blog for how to order cards and for image selection.) There is also another boy, Emmanuel, who needs to have testicular surgery because his testis never descended before he was born. His surgery will cost about $155-160. Milka, a teen with chronic and severe ear infections, needs to see an audiologist to try to help her regain her hearing. This specialist, transportation and perhaps a hearing aid will probably cost about $130-140. Obviously the price of Kenyan medicine is very different than the cost of American medicine!!! But it is far out of the reach of the HCC in its current financial state, and I know that helping these kids now with their medical crisises will have a profound effect on their future.
Currently Jim is in Kenya for almost a month and he has been sending me reports of his meetings with Zablon (the director), Bishop Mambo (the chairman of the HCC board), Dr. Jeremy and others. Jim is my colleague who lives in Colorado and his church congregation has been sending food money for the orphans since last September. One of his donors helped with funding the surgery for Madam Antonia's daughter, who needs to have her tonsils removed. Madam Antonia is the loyal teacher that has stayed the longest with HCC through thin and thinner months, and her child has been sick a long time with infected tonsils. Dr. Jeremy told me that the daughter cannot have the surgery right now because her hemoglobin count is too low, so he is giving her medication to build it up and he hopes the surgery will be in about three weeks time. Jim has reported to me that he also sees a big improvement in the health of the orphans from last year and that he has been told that their health has improved even since I left because of Dr. Jeremy's care. It is really heartening to know that we have made a difference in these children's lives, although there is so much more that needs to happen that it can feel overwhelming or discouraging.
This past month I have gone over the list of 93 residential orphans and looked through their photos from this year and last. I've identified the orphans (sometimes from their artwork) and then matched their photos with whatever family and medical histories I might have on them from 2006. I asked Jim, too, to provide the histories that he and Miles took last year. But there are about 35 orphans that Dr. Jeremy saw this year that neither Jim or I have any information on, so Jim is working to interview them now. I made individual sheets on each orphan, with their history and a photo, and sent what I've done by mail to Sophie, who has a secretarial service. While all of this may sound pretty straightforward administratively to Americans, it is actually a big step for the Kenyans. Not only do they not have the technology available to them that we do (digital cameras, easy use of computers, etc.) but the HCC board and Zablon have struggled to get this sort of basic record-keeping in place. Actually, it took me many hours despite all the technology I have! Part of this has to do with the orphans names and ages, which sometimes have varied a bit from one record to the next. It is my goal to have a baseline of records that the HCC board can work from and to which they can then add further information.
Jim is spending a lot of his time with various pastors under Bishop Mambo who live in the villages outside of Malindi. Jim has the goal of working with them to eventually develop home residences for the orphans and he has a link to a Christian organization that might help administer this. Some of the orphans actually come from these villages, but the likelihood that a home residential program will happen soon is slim. There is a lot to work out.
Right now the HCC school is on vacation, so only the residential orphans are at HCC right now. There continues to be the issue of completing the toilets and both Jim and I are pretty frustrated with this problem. But we are encouraged that the HCC board had a meeting a week ago and put in place some new mechanisms by which funds from donors or school fees will be handled and distributed so that the process is more transparent to everyone. It will now take the signature of three HCC board members to release any funds and we hope this will help us with our requests for receipts and accountability, which at times has been spotty. Both Jim and I have given the medical funds directly to Dr. Jeremy and I probably will continue to do so until the HCC board maps out how they will address the long term care of the orphans.
I am very grateful to Jim for helping develop the HCC board last January, but it has created some challenges. The board that Zablon had before January 2007 was more a "rubber stamp" and this board is not. Zablon is learning that as the director answerable to a board, he no longer has direct authority to make any decision he wants. He needs to consult his board and they need to make a decision together. This is a major switch for him and it has taken time for him to learn what his new role is. There is a saying in Kenya, "Slowly by slowly things get done" and it does take a lot of patience to work through some of the differences between our two cultures. While we Americans feel strongly about the priorities and about the welfare of the children, the Kenyans have to work through their community consensus building, and this can be a slow process as it is a complicated society and I cannot begin to understand all the layers of personal, community and political complexities. There is the urge to tell them what to do, and then there is the knowledge that this urge is also part of the problem because it feeds into colonialism and expectations of us, the foreigners, to solve their problems. So both Jim and I are still finding our way with how to balance American expectations (our own and that of our donors) with Kenyan self-empowerment. One thing that is clear to me...the children need our voices and they need to be the ones that we focus upon when the relationships between the adults, both Kenyan and American, become messy.
While most of the orphans' health is improving with the medications that Dr. Jeremy prescribed (de-worming medicine, antibiotics, anti-malaria meds, blood builders for anemia, meds for epilepsy, etc.), there are several that need further treatment. One little girl, Rose, needs surgery immediately for a "strangulated bowel". I believe she also has sickle cell anemia, and I have asked Dr. Jeremy how that might complicate the surgery. I am in the process of trying to raise about $250 for that surgery (a bit more might be needed if she needs to have a blood transfusion) and I am ear-marking the card sales I make this next week for that cause. (See the previous posting on the blog for how to order cards and for image selection.) There is also another boy, Emmanuel, who needs to have testicular surgery because his testis never descended before he was born. His surgery will cost about $155-160. Milka, a teen with chronic and severe ear infections, needs to see an audiologist to try to help her regain her hearing. This specialist, transportation and perhaps a hearing aid will probably cost about $130-140. Obviously the price of Kenyan medicine is very different than the cost of American medicine!!! But it is far out of the reach of the HCC in its current financial state, and I know that helping these kids now with their medical crisises will have a profound effect on their future.
Currently Jim is in Kenya for almost a month and he has been sending me reports of his meetings with Zablon (the director), Bishop Mambo (the chairman of the HCC board), Dr. Jeremy and others. Jim is my colleague who lives in Colorado and his church congregation has been sending food money for the orphans since last September. One of his donors helped with funding the surgery for Madam Antonia's daughter, who needs to have her tonsils removed. Madam Antonia is the loyal teacher that has stayed the longest with HCC through thin and thinner months, and her child has been sick a long time with infected tonsils. Dr. Jeremy told me that the daughter cannot have the surgery right now because her hemoglobin count is too low, so he is giving her medication to build it up and he hopes the surgery will be in about three weeks time. Jim has reported to me that he also sees a big improvement in the health of the orphans from last year and that he has been told that their health has improved even since I left because of Dr. Jeremy's care. It is really heartening to know that we have made a difference in these children's lives, although there is so much more that needs to happen that it can feel overwhelming or discouraging.
This past month I have gone over the list of 93 residential orphans and looked through their photos from this year and last. I've identified the orphans (sometimes from their artwork) and then matched their photos with whatever family and medical histories I might have on them from 2006. I asked Jim, too, to provide the histories that he and Miles took last year. But there are about 35 orphans that Dr. Jeremy saw this year that neither Jim or I have any information on, so Jim is working to interview them now. I made individual sheets on each orphan, with their history and a photo, and sent what I've done by mail to Sophie, who has a secretarial service. While all of this may sound pretty straightforward administratively to Americans, it is actually a big step for the Kenyans. Not only do they not have the technology available to them that we do (digital cameras, easy use of computers, etc.) but the HCC board and Zablon have struggled to get this sort of basic record-keeping in place. Actually, it took me many hours despite all the technology I have! Part of this has to do with the orphans names and ages, which sometimes have varied a bit from one record to the next. It is my goal to have a baseline of records that the HCC board can work from and to which they can then add further information.
Jim is spending a lot of his time with various pastors under Bishop Mambo who live in the villages outside of Malindi. Jim has the goal of working with them to eventually develop home residences for the orphans and he has a link to a Christian organization that might help administer this. Some of the orphans actually come from these villages, but the likelihood that a home residential program will happen soon is slim. There is a lot to work out.
Right now the HCC school is on vacation, so only the residential orphans are at HCC right now. There continues to be the issue of completing the toilets and both Jim and I are pretty frustrated with this problem. But we are encouraged that the HCC board had a meeting a week ago and put in place some new mechanisms by which funds from donors or school fees will be handled and distributed so that the process is more transparent to everyone. It will now take the signature of three HCC board members to release any funds and we hope this will help us with our requests for receipts and accountability, which at times has been spotty. Both Jim and I have given the medical funds directly to Dr. Jeremy and I probably will continue to do so until the HCC board maps out how they will address the long term care of the orphans.
I am very grateful to Jim for helping develop the HCC board last January, but it has created some challenges. The board that Zablon had before January 2007 was more a "rubber stamp" and this board is not. Zablon is learning that as the director answerable to a board, he no longer has direct authority to make any decision he wants. He needs to consult his board and they need to make a decision together. This is a major switch for him and it has taken time for him to learn what his new role is. There is a saying in Kenya, "Slowly by slowly things get done" and it does take a lot of patience to work through some of the differences between our two cultures. While we Americans feel strongly about the priorities and about the welfare of the children, the Kenyans have to work through their community consensus building, and this can be a slow process as it is a complicated society and I cannot begin to understand all the layers of personal, community and political complexities. There is the urge to tell them what to do, and then there is the knowledge that this urge is also part of the problem because it feeds into colonialism and expectations of us, the foreigners, to solve their problems. So both Jim and I are still finding our way with how to balance American expectations (our own and that of our donors) with Kenyan self-empowerment. One thing that is clear to me...the children need our voices and they need to be the ones that we focus upon when the relationships between the adults, both Kenyan and American, become messy.
