Many, many thanks to Susan for setting up this blog for me! I’ll use it to record what I see and do and learn during my time in Kenya – and I’ll also use it to reassure my husband & daughters that all is well! This first entry may be somewhat self-indulgent; but I think I should tell at least part of the story of how I got to this point.

It’s Monday night, May 18 as I sit at my kitchen table beginning this blog. This time next week I’ll be living in a small apartment in Nairobi, Kenya, beginning a six week internship in the field of public health: four weeks of work in the informal settlement (slum) of Dandora and two additional weeks in rural Kisumu at a center of support for orphaned & vulnerable children. The thought is somewhat surreal and yet it is the very thing I have dreamed of doing for years… nearly a lifetime, in fact.

As a 56 year old woman with an extremely wonderful and extremely comfortable life, it may seem a little odd that I would make this move to Kenya to work in a slum for part of the summer… but to me, it is the most reasonable thing in the world to be doing at this point in my life. I had the wonderful fortune of growing up in the 60’s and early 70’s… those years during which all of us under 30 thought we would change the world in some remarkable way. Since I was quite timid and painfully shy, I decided marriage wouldn’t be in my future… so I planned to become a doctor, live in rural Florida (Palatka, Putnam County to be exact… the one county in Florida that refused federal money for health care for its women & children). My dream was to provide medical care for that county – and be reimbursed via barter… diagnose an ear infection; get a bag of tomatoes…the idealism of that day was wonderfully naïve. My plans were so certain that my best friend’s father, who was a physiologist at UF, even gave me a medical dictionary as a high school graduation gift.

But life takes unexpected turns and I took a 25+ year sabbatical from my first dream to live a second dream – I married a great man & raised three daughters, each of whom I cherish. I can attest, however, that a dream may be deferred without the dream dying; and over the years, my first dream underwent revisions that I could have never predicted. Putnam County, FL became East Africa; my patients were no longer rural southerners, but Kenyan children who had been orphaned by AIDS; I was not treating sick people, but working to prevent illnesses before they began or easing the severity when prevention didn’t work. In an odd way, the movie Out of Africa, paired with Bible verses about defending the rights of the poor, caring for widows and orphans, and feeding the hungry became the unlikely framework for my life’s next step.

I began a graduate program in public health at UNCC in Fall 2008 and this trip to Kenya (my third) will fulfill the 160 hour internship requirement for my degree.

My husband, whom I adore & who has been so supportive of my pursuit of a public health degree, says this first “blog” sounds more like a start to a novel than a blog post (they should be more like news reporting, he says). I don’t think I can promise that I will write “news reports”, especially in light of all that I will see…