Marissa and Paula arrived this week, so we decided to take them straight to Mbita! The clinic is looking amazing. There are doors, the painting is finishing up, and the fence is being constructed....it all takes time but it is really coming along! Our hope is to open mid-end of March. We spent some time walking around the community, and being the great Field Director that I am, I led these poor volunteers on what we thought would be about an hour walk but turned into a two hour hike up and down the mountainside to arrive at a school. We were dripping with sweat, and when the teachers asked where we were coming from, they were astonished us "Mzungus" had walked all that way. Community mobilization is my passion, and wow did we live that out or what!!! Paula, is a nurse from VM and is going to get her masters in public health at UW in the fall, so its great to have someone here to bounce ideas off of as we begin to really assess the health needs of this community. The next two weeks we will be hiking through the communities, working on peer educator groups in the schools, and interviewing fish farming families on the beach. Its exciting to continue to learn about the community, however, it is all difficult. Difficult to not be able to create change fast enough. My heart and soul continue to stir, with ideas and vision for the future, as my brain works through functional objectives we can attain right now. This is an exciting process, I can not wait to look back on things after 1 month, 3 months, 2 years. This is a very needy community and MED25 is going to make a large impact as we move forward!
Here are a few pictures, the little house, is a new technology called Pharoh Cement, its a very cute guest house, we hope to build many more so that all of our guests and staff can live there! Things are going well, I am learning more then I could have imagined!
I miss you all, keep the emails coming its great to hear about your personal lives!
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