A STOOP VIEW: #MISSIONKENYANURSING2018 (2)

I sit on a stoop in Africa. 

I watch the people of Busia, Kenya. 
I learn about the humans, who will be my patients.  

The dust from Busia dirt roads, blow in my face, fogging the view from my sunglasses. 

Motorcycles with more than four people riding its padded,tail edge, motorcycles with moms holding babies, Motorcycles whizzing past me, barely missing the humans crossing the busy streets. 

I watch the humans manning the fruit stands, and the families who stop by on their way home from church for a refreshing snack. 

Families on bikes, elders with canes, teens playing hard at soccer, and little boys intrigued by a bike tire. 

One little girl gets pulled down from high bar of her fathers bike, and he instructs her to go greet the Mezungo’s(white
people), she uses her right hand and greets me with “how are you?”. “I am fine”, I reply, as is expected of me. I feel really popular, as almost every child and even adults I see, greet me with same few words in English thag they know to greet a ‘Mezungo’ with. 

I watch from the stoop I sit on, and they wave at us ‘Mezungo’ sitting there, out of place, in their town of Busia. 

How often do we as providers sit back and try to know the humans we treat at the bedside. View them as the humans in the streets, living life, just like you?

Life goes by fast, almost like the speed of those motorcycles, that often fill the hospital beds with their riders. Sometimes it’s nice to sit back, as the outsider, the ‘mezungo’, and watch those lives as they live. 

Today I’m a nurse, an outsider, a ‘mezungo’, watching from be sidelines. 

Tommorow, I will still be a nurse, I will be a teacher, yet still an outsider, still a ‘mezungo’; but I will take it in, from within the inside trenches of the hospital, with the people I see today in their streets. 

Just a nurse in a mission. 

#KenyaNursing2018