Sorry for the lack of posting, my dear readers, but this has been a really uneventful few weeks. Last week we had the entirety of our in-class development, health, and society lectures all squeezed into 3.5 days and the end of our intensive Swahili classes. This week we had our Swahili test and a bunch of written assignments due, thus reminding me that I'm here for real classes and not just the experiential learning. Of course, now it's over. I would say the best summing up of my Health lectures is that there are a lot of health problems here and although the government has tried to do a lot of reforms, they basically haven't worked for various reasons including corruption and extreme miscommunication.
Tomorrow I'm headed back to Shirazi in order to prepare for my month there in November. Part of my program is a month long Independent Study Project (ISP) where we take all of our in-class and experiential learning out into the field to study something and use our Swahili. I've decided to head back to Shirazi, the little village I fell in love with, to study the interaction between traditional medicine and Western medicine. When I was there before, we were split into groups to study different aspects of the village and I was in the traditional medicine group. When I was there, I found that the local traditional medicine consisted a lot of herb manipulation, but more interestingly, the idea of the djinn. Most of the coast of Kenya is Muslim, and in the Qu'ran there is the idea of the djinn. Allah made three types of beings: the people of the earth (us), the people of the air (angels), and the people of the fire (the djinn). According to the Qu'ran and Shirazi culture, there are good djinn and bad djinn and the bad djinn are the cause of a lot of diseases. For some reason they decide you have done them wrong and they sort of take over and cause these illnesses. Much of the traditional medicine in Shirazi and the surrounding area involves certain spiritual people using the good djinn to fight off the bad djinn and cure you.
For my month in Shirazi, I'm going to study the interaction of traditional medicine and Western medicine by going around and talking to the villagers of Shirazi and Bodo, the next town over, to get an idea where their faith and confidence lies. There is a Western clinic in Bodo, and I'm going to spend some time volunteering there as well. I'll be doing a lot of sorting of drugs and doing blood pressures. Very exciting!
So anyways, tomorrow I head back to Shirazi to figure out my living arrangements, translator information, transport, etc. Plus I'm going to get to see a wedding! Very exciting. When I come back, I'll be back in Nairobi for just a few days and then I head to Uganda and Rwanda for an educational tour.
Miss you all!
Alix
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment