Kibera

If you want to talk about irony and injustice, consider my last 24 hours in Nairobi. I stayed at an incredibly nice hotel and then got up at 5:00 in the morning to go out into Kibera, the largest slum in Africa and home to over a million people. Visiting Kibera is a very different experience than visiting Kisumu. Together with the public health advisor for IEIP-Kenya, I was dropped off at the field office on the edge of Kibera. She and I then began to walk into the area, carrying nothing but a bottle of water, lest any cameras, money, phones or other valuables be spotted by someone around us. Kibera is not a place many foreigners who are not in some way associated with IEIP visit. At one point in time it wasn't even recommended that foreigners enter Kibera in the daylight and now, even with the enormous lights that hover over the informal settlement having been donated by Kenya's largest chain of supermarkets, some would call it suicide to try to visit Kibera at night.

Yet, even with all this history and various warnings, I was just as comfortable in Kibera as I am anywhere else. I loved squeezing through passageways between shacks and responding to children who shout out "Mzungu! How are you?" and respond with "I am fine" when you say "Hello!" (Somehow, I'm convinced, a huge portion of the population of anglophone East Africa has switched the meanings of "Hello!" and "How are you?") I was thrilled to walk through clinics and sit with doctors and nurses who work in what many would consider the worst of conditions to make sure that even the poorest receive health care and medication. It felt a lot like home.

IEIP-Kenya has a large project in Kibera that is very similar to their population-based surveillance project in Kisumu. The setting, obviously, is very different, but they still use community interviewers to visit households every two weeks and also collect data at two (soon to be three) clinics in the area. Perhaps the largest difference in the projects is that IEIP-Kenya runs the clinics in Kibera on their own; there are no government and only one or two private clinics in Kibera, so there are no partnerships to develop.

I went out with one of the community interviewers in Kibera and accompanied her to several households. It was extremely useful from a work perspective to see the study and data collection firsthand, but at the same time it was so, so much fun. I loved the people I met, albeit briefly, and had a great time chatting with them.

The following picture is my only one from the day, snapped quickly by IEIP-Kenya's public health advisor in one of the households in Kibera. A couple notes of interest: (1) The baby I'm holding was handed to me as soon as I walked in the door of this household, (2) If you look closely, you can see that the community interviewer next to me is holding a PDA (Personal Data Assistant), which is a cross between a phone and a laptop that's being used to administer the surveillance questionnaire (I'll write more on this later, but it's a really cool advancement in the world of research ), and (3) That sign behind us that says (ESIDANT) is a campaign poster for Barack Obama. I love it!