Let It All Out

I'll say it. I'm feeling a little lost and homesick this week. This is our first week of our internships and the emotional turmoil of mine, combined with the bullshit of USIU, and feeling pretty sick just really is dragging me down. Monday I had a pretty good day at Lea Toto. I went with Beth, a case manager who deals with all of Kangemi and has 250 kids on her caseload, to bring a girl to the hospital to get checked for sexual abuse. All turned out okay though, but we still brought her to this rehab place since her father is neglectful and she doesn't get to take her medicine and doesn't get fed well. Hopefully she will be healthier after spending a month there and we can find her a new permanent, safer placement. I really like Beth because she's very open with me and I'm not afraid to ask her questions, and she will always translate for me. It was a tiring day, but all in all, I felt good about it.
USIU on Tuesday proved to be a nightmare in getting one of my classes changed. All ended well there too, but it was bad and an advisor was just unnecessarily rude and disrespectful to me. Got home and went to the movies for some American time, which was very much needed.
Wednesday I was back at Lea Toto for food distribution day. Basically the most needy families come once a month and get food provisions like flour, corn, and oil to ease some financial burdens. All was fine until I was left to do the process with clients entirely alone for 20 minutes. I wasn't about to just sit there and not help these people, but the language barrier made things kind of difficult. Finally, the worker I was helping came back and things were fine. After that (and scarfing a quick pb&J since they don't have lunch breaks here?), I went out into the field with another case manager, Faith. Her area that she oversees is much more rural and outside of Nairobi proper- I think in Western province. So it was quite a trek and it really just hit me on that ride that I was actually here. Everyone spoke Swahili or Kikuyu without translating for me, even when I timidly asked. The families we visited were literally more poor than the slum families I've seen, and one father was very obviously not taking his ARV's and looked horrible. The kids were all just pretty confused as to who the HELL I was and what I was doing there. Since they're much more rural, a few of them had never even seen a white person before, so they were pretty scared of me at first. That's probably one of my biggest obstacles here. Kids always LOVE me, that's why I work with them; and facing kids who burst into tears because of my skin color is a huge blow for me. Most of them were really shy, but would come up to me and want to play, but those few who I just TERRIFY really get me down. It just got to the point yesterday where I thought to myself, "what am I doing here? And how am I possibly helping anyone?" I just felt like a tourist to poverty and that made me feel terrible.
I'm really just looking forward to this week finally ending, and getting some downtime. We're going on a little excursion Saturday to look at excavated bones and stuff and I'm really happy about that. I feel like I need it to remind myself of all of the good things in Kenya and why I'm here. It will be nice to get out of Nairobi for a bit.

also, sorry for the lack of pictures. I'll try to take some this weekend.
xo