It's a new year and much is happening.

The clinic is operating at less than full staff as the holiday season is a time for vacations. We have been short staffed since the middle of November and next week will finally be fully staffed again. I am looking forward to that time and am very grateful to the staff who have worked so hard in the absence of their co-workers, everyone has really worked hard as our numbers seem to go up and down daily.

We have a few new staff members, a female nurse named Mary, (that brings our Mary count up to 3), and a new translator. Since it has been so difficult to find qualified nursing staff from our own community, we have had to hire outside and that means a language barrier. Most everyone speaks Kiswahili to some degree and can communicate to a small amount, but with so many words having multiple meanings we need translators who can communicate in Karamajon and Kiswahili and English, all very proficiently. Even those people are hard to find, but we are working at it and the nursing staff are quickly picking up more and more of the language, so translators will only be needed for a few short months more. Then Craig and I will need them as the new staff are so much better at picking up the language than we are.

Craig has been hard at work, doing long over due maintenance at the clinic, and loving every minute of it!!!! Just more of a "honey do list" but for more people, and bigger projects. He has been replacing light fixtures, burying cables under the ground, patching the bullet holes and leaks in the roof, filling in holes under the containers to help keep out snakes and rats, putting on door latches, and repairing the busted pipes under the big sink after a recent snake killing spree. The snake lost it's life, but the sink pipes needed to be completely replaced afterwards. Next time the killer will have to pay for the destruction!!!!

The clinic is having water problems, it is either the pump or the well that is going bad. If it is the pump, as soon as we can get funds we will try to put in a solar pump (very expensive to start with, getting the equipment, after that sunshine is free) but if it is the well itself we may have to haul water in 20 gallon jugs daily to try to operate because this is not a good place for water. The current well took many tries for a good water source and is farther away than is ideal but it has functioned well up to this time. So when Bob has time (ha ha) we will see what needs to be done.