Brittany Ammerman, a junior on the Wisconsin women's hockey team, is taking part in a one-month trip to Kenya, where she will work with a women's health education program called Health by Motorbike. Over the next month, she will send updates to UWBadgers.com about the once-in-a-lifetime experience. Make sure to check back often to follow her progress!

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Habari!

We arrived in Nairobi late Tuesday night. Then around midnight Nairobi time, we arrived at the Kibera Community Self Help Program (KICOSHEP). This is where we have been staying for the past few days. We are just outside the slum of Kibera, which is the second largest slum in all of Africa, inhabiting over one million people.
    
At KICOSHEP we have been helping communities cope with HIV/AIDS in prevention and care. Today, a group of women community sex workers came to the KICOSHEP clinic to learn from us and allow us to share our knowledge with them. These women have mostly resorted to sex work to make money to support their families. Luckily, they were very open with us about their hobby and asked many questions while also sharing their own stories. I believe they were so open with us because we were very welcoming towards them and non-judgmental. We were able to teach them about maternal, sexual, and reproductive health, as well as the signs and symptoms of HIV, how HIV is transmitted, and how to most effectively protect themselves from infection of HIV.
    
The women were so happy to learn from us and interact with us. One of the women, Stella, came up to me and said, "I am just so happy that you are here! I will not sleep tonight because of my happiness from you". It is so unbelievably touching to here such remarks from these women as we work with them and attempt to better their lives. I was also wearing a Wisconsin hockey hat and about six of them asked if they could keep my hat as a way to remember me.
    
Later in the day we traveled to Kibera to see the slums and see one of the health clinics, as well as KICOSHEP's school within the slum. The walk through was very difficult. There was trash, feces, sewage, and more right outside the small shack-like houses of the people who live there. It is very unsanitary and hard to believe that over one million people live like this every day.
    
But what was so surprising was the level of happiness of the people who we interacted with in the slum. The children are so very happy and excited to see "white" people. I think they loved interacting with us especially because we did not take photos of them. They are not zoo animals, but rather human beings just like us. My only explanation for them being so happy is because they do not know life outside the slum, they do not recognize the rights they have as humans to lead better lives, and they do not realize how much better it can be in terms of health and quality of life.
    
The kids were so cute; whenever they saw us, they would wave and yell "How are youuu??" in a little Swahili accent. Many of them loved to fist bump with me and play with a volleyball. They also loved to read in their school and loved to lie on the floor of the tiny classroom to read and do work. It was nice to see that the KICOSHEP school was clean on the inside and offered a sanctuary of sorts for the children.

It's helpful to know that they are receiving an education and there is hope for their future. It is just a matter of self-will for those children in terms of who goes out of the Kibera slum to pursue their dream of becoming a doctor, accountant, or whatever.
    
We are all still digesting what we witnessed today in the Kibera slum and are mostly speechless. It is hard to put into words everything we witnessed and felt today. It was definitely a sobering experience and allows us all to realize just how privileged and lucky we are to lead the lives we lead. But that is not the reason we went to tour the slum. We went there to provoke thoughts of how to make a healthier life for these people.
    

It is important to understand, I believe, that just giving money to these communities will not work. We must invest money, but also develop a community approach and educate the people so they can change their ways of life. I hope in the near future that the slum of Kibera begins to shrink and becomes a healthier place to live
    
I will try to write again in the next couple days, but the Internet is very stubborn here. We are in Kibera and Nairobi until tomorrow night, when we take an 11-hour long train ride east to the Lunga Lunga community to educate women for two weeks. Until next time....Hakuna Matata!

You may not have heard, but Badgers' coach Gary Andersen met his wife, Stacey, while working at a burger joint as a teenager in Utah. Yesterday he went back in time a little bit, stopping by the Culver's near East Towne Mall in Madison to help out during their "Day of Giving." Ten percent of all proceeds from all Culver's sales at every location in Wisconsin on May 21 went towards the Badger Honor Flight.

Brittany Ammerman

Brittany Ammerman, a junior on the Wisconsin women's hockey team, is taking part in a one-month trip to Kenya, where she will work with a women's health education program called Health by Motorbike. Over the next month, she will send updates to UWBadgers.com about the once-in-a-lifetime experience. Make sure to check back often to follow her progress! Below is her first update as she prepares to leave the United States.

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Habari!
 
It is time for me to step out of the ice rink and gym for the next month and take a break from the student-athlete life. On Monday, May 20th, I am traveling to Kenya with a group called Health by Motorbike. Being an aspiring surgeon, and pursuing a double major in biology and women's studies and a minor in global health, I have always had dreams of helping people in developing nations and seeing the world. But I never thought I would have the opportunity to take part in something like this month-long journey I am about to embark on!
 
Health by Motorbike is an organization created by professor Araceli Alonso, a registered nurse and professor of women's studies at Wisconsin. A few years ago, Araceli and her daughter traveled to Kenya to meet a couple of women who they were exchanging letters with via a pen pal program. While in rural Kenya, women of the communities Araceli was visiting expressed their interest and need to learn more about maternal health, childbirth and women's health in general - While there were women in the communities who had delivered babies for years, they still did not know when to cut the umbilical cord!

It was evident that health services and education were out of reach to the women and girls of rural Kenya. With very few health clinics, a lack of health information and limited access to transportation, many preventable diseases were creating enormous health burdens in these communities. Araceli decided to take the initiative to change this. Being that the nearest health clinic to many of these communities was too far away, Araceli created a permanent health post in the Lunga Lunga community, along with a mobile clinic that delivers supplies and medical services via motorbikes. After her first trip to Kenya, Araceli wanted to bring college students to Kenya to train local village health workers and create a sustainable health project in Health by Motorbike.
 
On May 20th, 12 of us, all students at UW who had to apply for a very competitive position as a Health by Motorbike volunteer, will fly to Kenya. For the first four days we will work in the slums of Kibera and learn. We will then take a long train ride to the Lunga Lunga community and begin to work with the women. The women we will be working with are "health promoters" from many different communities. We will share knowledge with them about anatomy, reproduction, maternal health, nutrition, communicable and non-communicable diseases and much more. At the end of our trip, the women will "graduate" and receive a diploma from UW-Madison that officially deems them a "health promoter." They will then go back to their respective communities and teach the women there.
 
What is so great about Health by Motorbike is that we are not simply going to Kenya to "fix" anything and put a Band-Aid on the flaws in the health care, or lack thereof, received there. Instead, we simply teach a few women, who can then teach more women, and eventually we will have touched and educated thousands of women!
 
While in Kenya, I will be blogging about my experiences with Health by Motorbike. I cannot wait to share this life-changing journey with you, while also making more people aware of the change and help that is needed in Kenya.
 
Hakuna Matata!

UWBadgers.com chronicled all of the action from Wisconsin's game in the Big Ten Tournament vs. Minnesota in Lincoln, Neb. The Badgers defeated the Gophers, 9-3. The complete blog can be found below.