- Hello!
This is my second time visiting Kenya and I am excited to be back! On my first day after landing, I met with a family friend for lunch. After a long time traveling I was a bit nervous about spending four weeks in Nairobi, but after the first day I felt very welcomed and at home here.
On Monday, we had our first day of class at Kenyatta University and gave presentations on the disease states we researched before class started. Tuesday we started our hospital visits for observations. Throughout the week we visited Thika Level 5, Kiambu Level 5, Kiandutu Level 3, and KUTRRH Level 6. Each day we spent a few hours making observations in the hospital and had some work time to talk about what we observed and work on the needs finding and filtering process. We practiced writing needs statements and by the end of the week filtered down to one top need to research for our final presentation at the end of week 2.
Getting a tour of Kiandutu Level 3
The second week we had Monday off, so before we went back to class, we had a 3 day weekend safari at Masai Mara. We had great weather and were able to see so many animals. We saw three of the Big Five: lions, elephants, and buffalo, but didn’t find a leopard or rhino this time. We did get to see a cheetah, lots of zebras, giraffes, Thompson gazelles, topi, impalas, warthogs, olive baboons, vervet monkeys, eland, Grant’s gazelles, hippos, ostriches, and crocodile. On our way back to Nairobi, we stopped at a Masai village and saw the dancing, houses, market, and how they make fire. Everyone in the village was from one family. The grandfather of our guide had 15 wives and 57 sons and his family was the village, though he was in Tanzania with the cows when we visited.
Masai Mara
The Masai village
Week 2 focused more on implementation. We did three site visits during the week. The first place we visited was the Drop Access warehouse. They gave us a tour and showed us what they are working on with the VacciBox which is a vaccine fridge designed to be used in low resource settings. They demonstrated some of their design process and testing for us. Then we visited Gearbox and saw where they design, build, and test PCBs. They took us through the entire design process from start to finish with an emphasis on design for manufacturability. Our last site visit was to MSF Nairobi Biomed Office where we learned about how they handle the engineering challenges that come with providing care in the areas of the MSF missions. The visit touched on a lot of the logistical challenges of sourcing and delivering equipment, training, and working around resource constraints and volatile areas. We saw their workspace, VR, and the warehouse.
MSF visit
Learning about the pick and place machine at Gearbox
On the last day of EDES 350, we did a morning safari in Nairobi before our final needs presentations. Our driver was so good at finding the right angles and getting us right where we needed to be to see the animals. We finally got to see a rhino and even saw both types. We also saw 8 little lion cubs! It was a good way to calm down and relax a little bit before our presentations in the afternoon. And with our final presentations done, we had time to finish up our implementation assignments and our final report, so we went to a coffee shop to work on Saturday. I spent the rest of the weekend getting ready to start again on Monday.