Youth Voices: The project has started!

I have been here for three weeks already. It is wild to think I am 8,000 miles away from my loved ones. Away from the people I call my family. I have barely been away from my mom for more than a week, so going on the fourth week without being in her home, having her hug me, and pushing her away is crazy. This trip has dramatically changed me, even though I have barely been here. Living in Kenya has made me understand how living in America is a privilege. I have always known that industrialized and non-industrialized countries are vastly different. But I never actually knew.

On Friday, I talked with a PhD student at icipe about Kenya. She said most people here don't care about mental health or therapy. At first, I was like, wow, I can't believe that, but I could. The things most people worry about in The United States are so different from the worries of the Kenyans. People in Kenya worry about their basic necessities. They don't have the resources to worry about mental health and therapy when they cost so much and poverty is so rampant. Whereas in the United States, most people have the basic needs or there are programs to give them basic needs, so we can worry about mental health or even minuscule issues that don't matter. Even the politics of the countries are so different.

On Monday and Tuesday, I started working on farms. Monday was our pretest day to determine whether our questionnaire was ready for our research. I had changed up a few questions because I felt they were redundant. On Tuesday, we started the actual study. We went to many farms and interviewed seven people! [CONTINUE READING]