Water, Water Everywhere

Sarah writes about Monday, Sept. 6-

Back at home, water flows freely from the tap, and one of the world's largest sources of freshwater is a few scant miles from my door. In Kenya, water is their most precious resource. At Kimuri School, they had two tanks for water collection, but it wasn't enough for them. When washing the windows, for instance, we waited until we had water the color of chocolate before changing it to conserve it.

Talek Clinic Welcoming committee

When we left Kikuyu on Saturday morning, we drove more than five hours to the Masai Mara, the region where John Sankok's clinics are, traveling through miles and miles of high desert in the great Rift Valley. Sunday we attended church in a Masai community in the morning before seeing John's first clinic. It is fairly small, with just a few rooms, but the time since my in-laws last visit has seen much improvement. The generosity of many groups has ensured that every one of John's clinics has a robust water-harvesting system, gathering every drop of water that falls on a clinic's roof and diverting it to one or more large collection tanks.

Clinic director Juma explains the Talek clinic water harvesting

These improvements have been a huge benefit for the clinics and the communities they serve, meaning they can start their day with clean floors and treatment rooms, and they even have gravity-fed sinks near the pit toilets.

Those pit toilets are a huge improvement over what they could have, but I wasn't anxious to use them, so after breakfast I'd avoid drinking, slowly dehydrating myself until lunch. Lunch would be limited water, too, and then at dinner I'd pound down at least a liter to try to rehydrate. Here I was in a land where we'd passed women and girls carrying cans of water for miles, and I was playing games to keep from having to use the facilities they find a huge improvement. Pretty embarrassing.

Monday we went to the Talek clinic, one of the oldest in John's system, where we saw many more improvements. The clinics were the beneficiaries of the first Gulf War, with 150 surplus solar power batteries that made their way from Iraq to the US and then to Kenya. As a result, every clinic has at least a small solar array with a few batteries that power everything from refrigeration for vaccines and other medicines to a water well to the computer in John's office. And the number of clinics has expanded, too, with the total now at nine, plus seven mobile units that we will see later in the week. In addition to expanding the reach of the community health clinics, John has been appointed the Director of Community Health Partners with more than 70 employees serving the communities around Kenya.

John at the Talek clinic

After a tour of the Talek clinic, the team set to work getting ready to paint the clinic. Talek is much larger than the one we visited Sunday, with separate four-bed wards for men and women, two treatment rooms, a lab and pharmacy, and a counseling room that is dedicated to working with those receiving AIDS tests and treatment. We had to remove many posters that had been pasted to the walls, and with limited water to do so -- even with a well and the water-harvesting system, we didn't want to waste any of John's precious water -- it was a project to remove them. Painting started later in the day, but building of the waste incinerators was delayed. The fire-bricks needed for construction, along with the plans, were "on their way coming," a Kenya phrase that means things are coming sometime, but don't hold your breath waiting.

By day's end, the women's ward was painted, most walls were cleaned and ready for paint, and four bulletin boards were installed so they could use them for posters, instead of gluing them to the walls again. The bricks were reportedly nearby, but John told us to go; his team would wait and unload them when they arrived.

We won't know until tomorrow when the bricks actually showed up (assuming they do), but we headed back to our safari camp for hot showers. As I waited for the shower to heat up, and water spiraled down the drain, I worried briefly about that water, wishing for a way to capture it. But then I stepped into the spray and stayed for what was no doubt too long.

Walls being cleaned, floors being repaired, and patients waiting to be seen. The clinic is a busy place.