By Nina Woolley
Junior, Candidate for B.S. in Biology and Certificate in Global Health
Karibu! That is the word I’ve heard most often since I set foot in Kenya last night, and I will use it today as I welcome you to this blog. Welcome! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Nina Woolley, and I am a rising senior at Duke studying biology and global health. I arrived in Nairobi last night, exhausted from the 20+ hours of travel but excited for embarking on this new adventure.
This summer, I will be an intern for SOTENI, an NGO that works to break the cycle of poverty and AIDS in rural Kenya. During the almost nine weeks that I’ll be here, I will work in all four of SOTENI’s “Villages of Hope”– Kuria and Ugenya in Nyanza Province, Mituntu in Eastern Province, and Mbakalo in Western Province. I will be working on several projects, including doing needs assessments of all the orphans and vulnerable children sponsored by SOTENI, working with community health workers called AIDS Barefoot Doctors (ABDs) on a water sanitation project, and spending time at the dispensary and helping to write the process and procedure manual. There is a lot of other work I will be doing as well, and I write more about each village and what I am working on as the summer continues.
For now, it is good to be getting my feet on the ground and taking everything in. Since I have been in Nairobi for less than 24 hours, I won’t write about my opinions about it yet, but I will look forward to writing more about my experience in the coming weeks. I simply wanted to take the time to introduce myself and my upcoming global health fieldwork.
Note: The opinions in my upcoming blog posts are my own and not those of SOTENI Kenya or SOTENI International.
