Update:
He arrived home last night, safe and sound and bursting with enthusiasm to tell us all about it. His academic advisor is an MD and spends every break from the school year running a free clinic in the slums of Nairobi. He said the clinic saw 300 - 400 patients a day. They worked ten hour days, days off in the middle of the week to be able to serve people on weekends who couldn't get off work during the week. He visited some people in their homes which consisted of 6 foot square corrugated roofing shacks. The had nothing. I had given him a heads up about the smell of third-world slums...he said that's how it was, smelled like an open sewer all the time.
They did get some opportunities to do some tourist stuff on their days off. They went white water rafting one day. He said after the safety lecture (mostly how to not get killed by hippos or eaten by crocodiles) five of the original group decided not to go. He saw a croc get bit in half by a hippo; saw buffalo, hippos, lions, elephants, rhino and cheetah, but was a little disappointed not to see a leopard. He said once you got out of the city, it was the most beautiful place he'd ever seen.
It was a great experience for him. Not the least valuable, was the fact that he had to travel to Nairobi on his own (Charleston to Charlotte to London to Nairobi.) That is a valuable experience in itself for a 20 year old. We've always believed in preparing the kids as best we can, then nudging them out of the nest.
After a few days at home, he's heading up to Myrtle Beach to spend the rest of the summer interning for a cosmetic surgeon who, after a military career, now specializes in "enhancements" for a bit more affluent clientele than what he had in Kenya. talk about both ends of the socio-economic spectrum....
