Probing the area

Yet another university tour, this time it is to a public one that is only three years old. Parts of it are still in construction and they are paving roads of stone and rocks. We had a chance to chat with the vice chancellor of Meru University of Science and Technology. Even though they are a young university, they have amazing chairs for guest in their conference area and 700,000 aces (I believe metric since Kenya used to be a British colony. The dean would ask us what issues or problems do we see that they can improve on. They are constantly looking for good suggestions and be better. Since they were still new, a lot of the classrooms were only one floor. Some of the buildings that are newer have more floors. Again with KEMU, they are limited on human capacity and infrastructure capacity.

When you compare it to UM that was established 1817, KEMU and Meru U of Science and Technology have a long growth ahead. But it would be at a much faster pace. But the oddest thing was that we the students were always babysit by other faculties when we enter these universities. The faculties would have their private talk with vice chancellor. 

Besides all the educational side of these two days, I finally broke out of my shell (not like I wasnt doing this with other students on the trip) and started talking to the drivers. We have a total of 6 drivers and I've learned to recognize two of them. Honestly they are all African with dark skin-tone, how does one go about remembering their name and they drive different vans? For me I decided to ask what other job do they do besides driving. I've met Moses, who is a farmer with 10acres of wheat field and Jacob, a business man that owes his own shop in meru selling cell phone accessories. 

I also wanted to start probing the feasibility of my pharmacy questions on the community survey. What better than casually asking my drivers some basic questions. It was more on accident than deliberately. When the drivers asked me what I do, naturally my pharmacy side will take over. Plus I have no idea what Kenyans do with medicine and i needed to come up with a hypothesis that would drive my survey questions. The SPH faculty that had field study experience stressed the importance of doing some background research of the area im interviewing and grasp a universal answer to my questions. This way i will not be caught off guard when i come across an unusual answer to a survey question. Secondary, this also will bring contrast to your data results. Its important to show some contrast in your population and data than realize you've just interviewed a homogenous group with all the same answer. Hence composing reasonable questions that produces meaningful data are challenging obstacles I'm currently facing with my community survey. 

I had a great opportunity to sit with a driver at lunch today and briefly asked him about the role of pharmacist. I learned that there are a lot of chemist in the area, which are pharmacy shops. Interestingly enough, the new government in place is changing the requirement of chemist to be certified prior to opening a shop. Plus in clinics, pharmacists can write prescriptions for patients, or change an existing medication to something of equilvalences. Besides the chemist, there are herbalist that sells herbs and whatnot. Not too surprising, the driver would rather go to a herbalist than a chemist because of the chemical in the pills, not natural. This is pretty much the same as westerners, going natural. 

For me this makes me wonder how do I want to approach my survey and use its data. I know I will have a chance to interact with fellow pharmacy students and learn what they have. Perhaps I can take the route of using the data to paint a better picture of what pharmacy is around the world. Still more thinking to do.