Thursday, October 29, 2009

Its been kind of a sad week. Another client died, and while its terrible when ever any child dies, this one hit close to home. His name was Kevin and not even a year old. I'd been to his house, taken him to the clinic. He came to therapy almost every week. And his story is so sad. His parents are super young- his dad is away at secondary school, his mother is 16. Her parents kicked her out when they found out she was pregnant and she was living with the dad's parents. But mostly, its sad b/c he died from neglect and it was completly preventable. And in some ways, I feel like St. Julie's is partially at fault. While I was going over his file, I found the reports from his Community Based Rehab Worker and each of the last four visits said that the child was too ill to do anything. I just wish someone had alerted us to his condition. We could have provided him with help at the hospital or food. But we didn't know, so we couldn't do anything about it.
Next week Tom and I are headed out of Kenya. The center is closed on Wed and Thurs so we're using 5 days off to see Uganda and Rwanda. It'll be whirlwind, but I'm so excited to have a chance to see more of East Africa and quadruple the number of stamps in my passport. Expect a long entry and pictures sometime after the trip.
Unfortunately, we had to cancel the trip to Karunga this weekend. We'll miss partying with Americans, but we're going to have a smaller version with all our Malava friends on Saturday. I still don't have a costume, but I have one more day to figure it out.

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