Give Me Your Eyes

Painting the Ward In rural Kenya, where the average salary is about $1.00/day, you tend to rely on functionality and not aesthetics, but after being in the pediatric ward for 3 months, I just couldn’t look past the aesthetics anymore. Among many displeasing views in the ward, the worst was the walls, which hadn’t been painted in over 20 years. The buttermilk cream paint had been chipping off—onto patients beds and all over the cement floor—leaving gaping patches of half painted walls. To me, this place looked like a prison for children. As a child, the hospital is already a scary place, full of needle-poking nurses and invasive doctors that you’ve never met before, so to combine this with a prison-like ward can make the place seem like a child’s worst nightmare. I remember learning in school that the environment where a sick person is attempting to heal, can really affect how they heal. As medical professionals, we have to treat the mind, body, and soul because none of them can function without the others. A depressed person can’t start working through their issues if they have a gaping wound in their leg which is not being treated. In the same way, a sick person will take much longer to heal if their environment isn’t suitable to them (aka if they are scared to death of the place they are in). There are studies supporting this, but this isn’t a research paper (and I’m too lazy to look them up right now). After much deliberation, I decided that I would ask the administrator if we would be able to paint the ward. I normally would have hesitated about focusing on the aesthetics of my ward, when we usually can’t afford basic medical supplies, but I have been in contact with the principal at Bishop Kelley Catholic School, my old elementary school, and she had said that the students would like to do a Jean’s Day and raise money for St. Elizabeth. (At BKCS, the children where uniforms, so every once in a while, they have what is called a Jean’s day, in which each child can bring in a small amount of money—in my day it was $0.50—they get to wear appropriate clothes other than the dreaded uniform. The money raised goes to a good cause—in this case, a hospital in rural Kenya.) The administrator approved the idea and I was elated. I told him my plans of painting the ward a soft pink (research shows that the color pink has a calming effect on people), and painting murals of animals, flowers, and trees. I told him that we could just buy the paint and on my time off I could paint the ward, this way we wouldn’t have to pay someone to paint. He looked at me and laughed, and I just nervously chuckled, thinking, “What the heck? Why is he laughing?” After assuring him that I had painted many houses before because my dad used to build houses when I was a child, he decided that we would get a professional painter. I was a little miffed because I thought that he thought I couldn’t do it because I was a mzungu. (A lot of people are surprised that I cook, do laundry, and dig a garden, because they believe that we don’t do that stuff). Later on, I was explaining the situation to a few other nurses, who in turn laughed at the idea of me painting. I had finally taken enough heat for this. I snipped, “What’s wrong with me painting?” One of them stifled her giggles and told me that women don’t paint here. In fact, none of them had ever seen a woman paint before in their life. It’s apparently a man’s job here. I finally gave in, and decided to accept the cultural difference. Well, after about a month of waiting for any work to start on the walls, a man came in with a brush and rickety ladder and began painting. We had to move all of our children to a small area of the private maternity ward, because we feared that the smell of the paint could affect their little lungs, especially since many of them come in with pneumonia. The painter assured us that we would be back in two days, tops! Knowing the beauty of African time, I figured that 2 days meant a week and a half, which seemed a little more realistic anyway. We waited…and waited…and waited…week…after week…after week. It has now been almost a month and he is still not finished. Moreover, instead of the murals of animals, he painted a serious picture of Mother Mary holding baby Jesus and a freaky looking picture of Jesus at the ICU section of my ward. I had asked him to paint a mural of Jesus with some angels lovingly surrounding the ICU, since it’s such a sensitive place. I think other people were getting excited about the paint job and started giving their own input. The pictures are not at all kid friendly and it makes me sad because I knew exactly what I wanted and I could’ve easily painted it. I have to admit, the ward looks much better than it did before, but it’s still disappointing that we are paying this guy for a paint job with which I am not completely satisfied. Moreover, the ward that we have been placed in is tiny, which can promote nosocomial infections. We’ve had several kids come in with tuberculosis and no isolations room. Thank goodness that we haven’t had an influx of children yet. (During the rainy season, there is a high incidence of malaria and pediatric ward is usually full.) If this paint job takes any longer, Kenya is going to see their first woman painting, not to mention a mzungu (people even get surprised when I tell them that I know how to cook). Okay, I’m writing this part a week after this previous paragraph. After the painter decided to take a week vacation without telling me, I decided to through social and cultural norms out the window and paint my ward. I didn’t want to seem like a horrible mzungu, but now our temporary ward is filling up due to the rise in malaria cases, and I’ve had enough with being patient (especially since everyone keeps asking me when we are moving back). As I painted, listening to some jams and possibly singing outrageously loud as I worked, people would form small crowds and watch me paint. In fact, some of my students sat with me and kept me company. It was hilarious, but no one had ever seen a woman painting before. I painted for 6 hours straight until I had finished the gallon of paint and I was dog-tired. My Kenyan mom told me that I shouldn’t paint again because I might get very sick. I stifled an eye-roll and told her that I would be fine, but she was definitely not convinced. Last night, hospital bought another can of paint, so I was able to start painting again. Again, a group of my students came and watched me paint. They all were saying that it must be very hard and was there anything that I didn’t do. I told them that they should never limit the activities they do based on their gender and that we can do anything that we put our minds to—except maybe trying to fly by flapping your arms, you won’t really get too far with that. After a while, one of the students donned a pair of gloves and asked if she could help me to paint (there was only one brush). I handed her the brush and she commenced painting the wall. She did a really great job, so careful and precise, and I made sure to tell her that I was impressed. It’s amazing what people can do when they put their minds to it. … Since pediatric ward moved to private maternity, we’ve had a new woman who washes the floor every morning. I had met this woman before in a church meeting, and found out that she is deaf after trying to talk to her when her head was turned. I felt pretty stupid because I had greeted her many times in passing and she would always respond with the correct response, so I never had a clue that she couldn’t hear me. She’s an excellent lip-reader. I have been pretty busy in my ward and she’s always so serious, so I never really sat down and had a conversation with her. The other day, she sat in our ward and started telling us how annoyed she was because she had just gone to a meeting and everyone was talking and laughing and she was thinking, “What the hell is everyone laughing about?” We ended up having a great conversation and she started to teach my students and me some Kenyan Sign Language. She told me that I had never wanted to talk with her before and now I was talking to her; she thought that I had not wanted to talk with a person who is deaf. I felt so bad that she saw my silence as rude. I apologetically told her that it wasn’t about her being deaf. I had just thought that she didn’t want to talk with me because she was always engrossed in her work. She ended up letting me borrow a small signing book. Now in the morning I always greet her in sign language and she always has a great big smile on her face. It’s interesting how we can misinterpret body language so easily. For a person who is deaf, they really rely on their eyes to observe what is going on around them, so when I didn’t talk with her, it seemed as if I was avoiding talking with her. … The other day, I was chatting with one of the pharmacy technicians, Maggie, about one of the store rooms in the hospital. She told me that the dusty, dingy room is chock full of donated supplies from the US, Germany, Holland and other developed countries. Then she told me something that shocked me: most of the stuff in that room was in working condition, but no one knew how to use it, so they just threw it in that room—I guess some of the equipment came with instruction manuals written in different languages and no one could read it. Of course, coming from my parents who like to save and reuse everything, I decided to roll up my sleeves and have a look. (Side note, my saver’s mentality originates from my dad’s obsession with cardboard boxes and my mom’s compulsion to save every card and letter she’s received—Love you guys, but you know it’s true. I’ve already told them that if they die before cleaning their hoarder’s basement, I’m just going to torch the place, rather than waste my time picking through spider-ridden boxes.) Maggie told me that she thought she had seen an EKG machine in there, which is amazing because we refer patients from our hospital to other hospitals because we don’t have an EKG machine. Of course, this made my quest even more exciting, and in my search through literally hundreds of thousands of eyeglass lenses, I found something spectacular. There beneath the dust and cobwebs was a genuine defibrillator, which the hospital also is lacking. I was amazed, excited, and frustrated all in one: how could something so lifesaving be left to rust in a storage closet? The techs just shrugged and said that no one knew how to use it. Now granted, I have never used one of these in real life (this is a defibrillator with metal paddles, like you see in the movies), but I’m been thoroughly trained on the proper usage of defibrillators. The techs ogled at this crazy mzungu who was practically peeing her pants because of this metal box in front of her, and when I explained to them what this machine was used for, they looked at me like I was mad: I mean really, if you think about it, a machine that can bring a person back from the dead seems a little Frankenstein to me. One of them spoke up and asked how successful it was (he wanted the percentage of lives it saves), and I really had no idea, but I told him that it was extremely helpful in resuscitation. I want to dust the puppy off and see if it’s in working condition, but I’m not really sure how to do that, unless I have a body on which I can rehearse. One of the technicians supposed that we should go down to the morgue right then and try it out on one of the bodies there, and see if he wakes up. I’m pretty sure he was joking…I think… Anyway, I’m on the hunt for the EKG machine still, but I know that we have one because I saw EKG paper in the store room. I’m going to seriously need to brush up on my EKG knowledge, but I want to utilize the equipment that we have. I may soon be teaching the staff of the hospital how to use a defibrillator and EKG machine! This is scary stuff. This also says something about us, who donate to developing countries. Please note that I’m not saying we shouldn’t donate equipment and money. Believe me, without a lot of the donations the developed world contributes to developing countries, they would probably not be where they are today. However, the best gift we can give is education. If the hospital staff was taught how to use the EKG machine and the defibrillator, those machines would be in use and maybe many more lives could have been saved. … Tomorrow, my parents and Rachael, my sister, are coming to visit me here in Kenya. I am so excited. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I see them. It still seems so surreal that they are coming to visit me. As I speak in fact, they are in flight to Nairobi. Pray for their safe arrival and an exciting adventure here.