January 2007 - Trip Report from Rebekah Nesbitt

Posted on Feb 20, 2007

My name is Rebekah, I am a pediatrics nurse, and in January I traveled to Ndathi to spend two weeks living and working at Samaria. I was immediately welcomed into the Kaburu family-Susan runs Samaria, and her two daughters, Anne and Njeri, help with the functioning of the clinic. I spent my days at the clinic, seeing patients, and helping with some administrative projects. While I was there, they were treating around 40 patients each day. I saw patients with malaria, respiratory infections, typhoid fever, intestinal worms, wounds of all sorts, prenatal care patients, women seeking family planning options, children coming for immunizations, and many other illnesses.

I am a pediatrics nurse and therefore saw most of the children who came to Samaria. There were several children who I enjoyed seeing – there was Collins, a little boy who was diagnosed with an AVM at a larger hospital and told to go to Kenyata (the main hospital in Nairobi) to be treated for this condition. The physicians there had not explained what an AVM was to Collins’s mother, and so she brought him to Samaria to be treated. Well, Collins needed surgery, so I was able to explain to this mother what the condition is and what they needed to do. Then there was a toddler who came in late one night after ingesting cough syrup. This was interesting to see how to treat something without many of the resources I am used to having access to in America. Then there was Grace, an emaciated 8 year old with recurrent lung infections who we saw and ended up sending to a larger hospital for further work up (she probably has either HIV or rheumatic heart disease). And there were all the babies and proud mothers who came in to get their child immunized and displayed huge smiles as the white woman commented on how beautiful each baby was. I could tell many stories of the children and what I learned from working at the clinic. Anne and I also spent a lot of time working on computerizing their filing system.