Hey Everyone,

Today is my eighteenth day in Kenya and a pretty good one. To quickly get it out of the way, I got my MCAT scores back and scored well. I will be able to apply to all the schools and I wanted to, this summer. YAY!

The clinic yesterday was pretty typical. Although, yesterday I got to teach the patients about malaria. I covered: what is malaria?, signs and symptoms, treatment, prevention, pregnant women and children with malaria. The people from the community really seemed to enjoy the session. I made a poster (I keep forgetting to take a picture of it but I will). And the group in our education session asked questions at the end, which I was really surprised about.

I had Rose-Marie, the Kenyan volunteer, help translate mostly everything I said, so that they really got the most out of it. This morning we talked to the patients about diarrhea, dehydration and vomiting. This went equally as well.

After clinic yesterday, Charity (my house Mama), took me to a huge Masai market on the outskirts of the city center. It was really quite something to see. Going back to the markets a second time with a Kenyan made all the difference. They still tried to swindle me because I am a tourist but Charity was able to bargain with them in Swahili and she knew what the average cost of things were. When I went alone two weekends ago, I had picked out 13 things, all from different vendors, and the mediator guy that walked around with me tried to sell it all for 300.oo USD. Yea right! I bought everything I wanted and some from the other day and I managed to stay below 40.oo USD. Thank you Charity.

Clinic was busy again today because of the pre-natal clinic and the vaccination clinic, on top of the regulars. I was a little mad at the doctor today because he came for the last hour and the nurses had already done the bulk of the work. Shockingly, I also found out today that clinic nurses in Kenya, roughly, make 5,000.00 USD a year salary. OMG. That is nothing. WTF. I am lost for words. I am going to try and confirm this but I asked Lucy a few times and she seemed to understand what I was asking. Unbelievable. That money does go quite a long way here. But to think that they work ten times harder than Canadian clinic nurses, with so much more knowledge, makes it so unjust.

I have to get off the computer, not sure even if I will edit over this blog for now, so don't hate if there are mistakes... xoxoxox 'till tomorrow.

Jake