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Africa is the great unknown.
Or, at least that was Kayla Bronder’s sentiment before she began a nine-month mission trip on Oct. 3 in Karungu, Kenya. It is the latest step in Bronder’s journey toward a career as a doctor in developing, impoverished countries, a dream she’s clutched to since a mission trip to Juarez, Mexico, in her adolescence.
On a two-week hiatus back to the United States in preparation for her sister’s wedding, Bronder, 22, spoke inside her Independence parish of St. Mark’s Catholic Church about her African experiences to date.
But, Bronder explains, the challenge exists in finding the right words to describe another continent that most Americans often just read about or see on TV.
“It’s just hard to really process all of this, and it’s hard to make these two worlds fit because it’s just one world,” Bronder says of her thoughts since arriving in the United States on Sunday. “We’re all human beings. We all live on the same planet, but how can these two worlds exist at the same time?”
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Bronder spends her days prying parasitic fleas from Kenyan locals’ feet, hands and other extremities. Jiggers, or fleas that live in tropical climates and soil, burrow themselves into the human skin and lay eggs. They hold a powerful social stigma in Africa, Bronder says, and some believe they are a result of witchcraft.
She had never heard of jiggers in her public health studies, but they’ve defined her entire stay in Kenya, Bronder says. Karungu residents call dirt floors “home” in their often one-room houses. Children frequently run around without shoes. Piped water is a rare treat.
Bronder has started the parasite eradication campaign in efforts to educate, to prevent and to treat the painful – and potentially dangerous – jiggers.
First, there was a three-member family known even by the poor residents as the “absolute poorest of the poorest of the poor,” Bronder says. Mary, a widowed mother, has two teenage sons, Michael and Gaston. Michael is mentally disabled, and Gaston suffers from epilepsy. Doctors have estimated Mary’s age at about 50, but no one knows for sure.
Both boys have never attended a day of school in their lives. Roughly age 15 or 16, Gaston is unable to count to 10 in his own tribal language, Bronder says.
Bronder would visit Mary and her sons daily. Though they spoke no English, their faces lit up when Bronder walked in, she says. “God sent angels, and our prayers have been answered,” Mary told Bronder’s translators.
Africa is the great unknown.
Or, at least that was Kayla Bronder’s sentiment before she began a nine-month mission trip on Oct. 3 in Karungu, Kenya. It is the latest step in Bronder’s journey toward a career as a doctor in developing, impoverished countries, a dream she’s clutched to since a mission trip to Juarez, Mexico, in her adolescence.
On a two-week hiatus back to the United States in preparation for her sister’s wedding, Bronder, 22, spoke inside her Independence parish of St. Mark’s Catholic Church about her African experiences to date.
But, Bronder explains, the challenge exists in finding the right words to describe another continent that most Americans often just read about or see on TV.
“It’s just hard to really process all of this, and it’s hard to make these two worlds fit because it’s just one world,” Bronder says of her thoughts since arriving in the United States on Sunday. “We’re all human beings. We all live on the same planet, but how can these two worlds exist at the same time?”
–––
Bronder spends her days prying parasitic fleas from Kenyan locals’ feet, hands and other extremities. Jiggers, or fleas that live in tropical climates and soil, burrow themselves into the human skin and lay eggs. They hold a powerful social stigma in Africa, Bronder says, and some believe they are a result of witchcraft.
She had never heard of jiggers in her public health studies, but they’ve defined her entire stay in Kenya, Bronder says. Karungu residents call dirt floors “home” in their often one-room houses. Children frequently run around without shoes. Piped water is a rare treat.
Bronder has started the parasite eradication campaign in efforts to educate, to prevent and to treat the painful – and potentially dangerous – jiggers.
First, there was a three-member family known even by the poor residents as the “absolute poorest of the poorest of the poor,” Bronder says. Mary, a widowed mother, has two teenage sons, Michael and Gaston. Michael is mentally disabled, and Gaston suffers from epilepsy. Doctors have estimated Mary’s age at about 50, but no one knows for sure.
Both boys have never attended a day of school in their lives. Roughly age 15 or 16, Gaston is unable to count to 10 in his own tribal language, Bronder says.
Bronder would visit Mary and her sons daily. Though they spoke no English, their faces lit up when Bronder walked in, she says. “God sent angels, and our prayers have been answered,” Mary told Bronder’s translators.
After Mary and her two sons, Bronder and other health officials found dozens of children and families with jiggers. Often, Bronder says, the residents hide them with shoes and deny the parasites’ existence in their community.
Removal and educational efforts on jiggers are ongoing, and Bronder is aiming to raise additional funds for the parasite eradication campaign during her two-week stay in Eastern Jackson County.
Once Mary’s and her sons’ jiggers were removed with tiny razor blades and scalpels, Bronder made several phone calls to raise funds for a new house. The family’s entire ceiling was exposed, allowing rain to pour in. The mother and her two sons slept on reed mats on a dirt floor.
Bronder’s sister Sara, a nurse, contributed $700. Another donor pitched in $500. The family now has a one-room, hut-like house with wooden poles as the foundation. The walls are filled with reed and mud – and with the extra funds, cement completed the walls and flooring, and a metal roof was installed.
“For them, it’s like moving into a mansion,” Bronder says of the one-room, two-bed living space. The family also received new plastic chairs and a few cooking supplies.
“You can’t live the way they lived,” Bronder says. “They were literally dying.”
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Death is all too common in Kenya. According to AVERT, an international HIV and AIDS charity based in the United Kingdom, Kenya is home to one of the world’s harshest HIV and AIDS epidemics.
Bronder takes a deep breath and looks away, searching for words to describe what she has seen HIV and AIDS take away in just four months.
“That’s... It’s hard to... It’s easy to talk about AIDS. It’s hard to live it and know it and have people that you know die of AIDS,” she says.
She visits patients with AIDS daily at St. Camillus Mission Hospital where she works with the Catholic Medical Mission Board. Within a three-week span, four people died whom Bronder had gotten to know personally.
“When you see that and live that, it makes... It just changes the way you think,” she says. Death statistics Bronder previously knew were just numbers until she actually saw it, she says.
A 2005 Lee’s Summit North High School graduate, Bronder graduated in spring 2009 from Tulane University in New Orleans, La., with degrees public health and Spanish. In August 2005, on the eve of Hurricane Katrina, Bronder moved in the very day of the mandatory evacuation. She left on a Saturday, and the storm hit two days later.
Tulane University closed the remainder of the semester, and Bronder returned in January 2006. She witnessed the rebuilding efforts in New Orleans, saying she never once regretted her decision to attend college in a demolished city.
“It was almost like being able to go and live and work in a developing country because everything was in shambles, and there was so much work to be done,” Bronder says, “so I was able to go and be a part of that and really experience the revival of the city. I wouldn’t change my college experience for anything.”
During her college spring breaks, Bronder performed mission work in Honduras and studied abroad in Chile, developing a fluency in Spanish. Bronder, who maintains an upbeat, talkative personality in recalling her experiences, says keeping a mental-health balance while serving developing countries “is a really big struggle.”
“You come from America where there is constant entertainment, constant action and activity – there’s not a lot of time to just sit and think and be,” Bronder says in drawing a comparison. “And then you go to Kenya where there is literally nothing.”
She plays with children, reads books and runs in her more relaxing moments. “You’ve just got to find ways to decompress ’cause you spend your days seeing things and interacting with people that it’s just hard to grasp everything, so at the end of the work day, all I want to do is veg and play with kids.”
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Karungu is a rural community within Kenya’s southwest corner near Lake Victoria – “totally forgotten, next-to-nothing,” Bronder says – with mud huts and dirt roads. A traffic jam, she says, is getting stuck behind a herd of cattle. Children play naked in dried creek beds.
The social justice that Jesus preaches in the Gospels, Bronder says, take on a new meaning in Africa. Each day, she’s exposed to the widow, the orphan, the hungry and thirsty and the naked.
“You can’t avoid it,” she says. “It’s this really incredible dichotomy between really depressing and almost uplifting and encouraging because you can make a huge difference in a person’s life by just doing something small. You can literally save peoples’ lives with a few hundred dollars and just building a cement floor in their house.”
Bronder spent her first Christmas away from family several months ago. During the December holiday season, all the Kenyan population really wants to spend time with their families, she said, and any left over money is spent on rice – a special treat.
She’ll enter the Tulane University School of Medicine this fall, as well as complete a master’s degree in public health with an emphasis on tropical medicine. Once, Bronder says, she used to be able to simply say, “I want to be a doctor.”
But, she says, laughing, “You grow up.” After what she’s seen worldwide, Bronder says, no option exists for her except practicing health care in developing countries.
“Do you know Paul Farmer? I want to be the next Paul Farmer,” Bronder says, laughing, about the anthropologist and physician who co-founded Partners In Health, an international health and social justice organization. “He’s my living hero. I want to be somewhere between Mother Teresa and Paul Farmer.”
