Balance

The weather is so perfect right now. I'm sitting outside on the balcony at the house, and I took a few pictures but unfortunately I can't capture the breeze.

I'm at home today sort of randomly, usually I go into the office with Darryn but he was only going for a few hours today and so I just decided to work from home. This of course is a bit troublesome because the reason I was tempted to stay home was because I was totally exhausted, so I took a nap this morning. Now I'm in the process of trying to decide to do some work, but now that I'm sitting on the balcony I think I'll actually be able to do it, although of course I'm tempted to watch DVDs, like Heroes, since Linda watched practically the whole first season the other day, or to read or do otherwise relaxing things.

I guess the problem with being "self-employed" or not really having anyone to answer to aka being a Compton fellow is striking a balance between working and not working. I'm still sort of in college mode, where I feel guilty when I'm not stressed, or feel like if I'm not working in the evening then I'm doing something wrong. In college this led to sort of working binges interspersed with periods of not doing any work which still involved thinking of all the work that I had to do. So today, I'm asking myself why it's okay to just decide not to go to the office or why the fact that I was very productive yesterday gives me any reason to be less productive today. I also feel like I want to be a person that works extra hard, but often when it comes down to it I really do want to get enough sleep. I am trying to balance my super high expectations for myself with a total lack of deadlines and enormous flexibility in terms of which aspect of the project I work on at any given time.

ANYWAY. Here are some pictures to keep you entertained:

A couple of views from the balcony, some children washing dishes and Lake Victoria.





The dogs that I live with, they are not allowed inside. Nene did a lot of posing when I was photographing them, but Kiki likes to hide from the camera.



 

A few snippets

The canteen here at CDC/KEMRI is amazing. Today for lunch I got an enormous plate of beans, mung bean stew, vegetable stew, plantain, rice, chapattis, and sukuma wiki for about 50 cents. DELISH.

Also in food news, my housemates and I had an awesome Kenyan dinner last night prepared by a couple of the guys that we know, followed by a conversation in which the Kenyans argued that divorce does not make sense and we argued that their lack of understanding of divorce did not make sense. Not very productive in terms of changing the views of either side…

CDC/KEMRI is awesome and has seminars every Tuesday morning at 8:30 so this morning was a presentation on repeated segments of DNA and how they can impact susceptibility to various diseases. Super cool, and my MOL 342 knowledge came in handy for understanding what the guy was talking about. Yay college.

The project is going well so far, too, except for FrontlineSMS somehow totally breaking down yesterday because they used a trial version of software to create the newest update WHOOPS (now fixed apparently but I haven't yet reinstalled). I came up with a pretty good diagram of how our information transfer will go (farmer > community reporter > animal health assistants > program manager (me)) and thought through the logistics of reimbursement and data transfer. Next week is the referendum election on the new constitution (and I'm going to go up to Mpala) so everything will be totally shut down, but after that we will be training the animal health reporters in using FrontlineForms on their cell phones (that I still have to set up) to report when there is an incident in their community. We also have to train the animal health assistant response team on the clinical signs collection protocol and diagnostic sample collection for the 20ish diseases that we are concerned about for now, that's what I'm working on putting together at the moment with lots of help from my favorite book, Infectious Diseases of Livestock (3 vols.). Darryn is going to be working directly with the author/editor in Pretoria pretty soon, but he might not be able to get me a free copy OH WELL. But in any case overall I feel like I have some good short term goals set up and know the way forward a lot better than I did before.

I got to go over to help identify a couple of ticks that Alice was having trouble with, and wasn't actually that much help, but did get to see a cool Amblyomma adult that looks tiny, pale and sickly because it fed on a less than ideal host, like a chicken or something, as a nymph and therefore was not able to develop into its usual impressive adult form. COOL.

There are tiny ants on my desk that hopefully are helping me by cleaning my keyboard. But possibly they are disassembling my hard drive piece by tiny piece.

Kisumu is almost Atlanta

Yesterday was awesome. So far my experience has been that I just feel relaxed and happy consistently when I am in Kenya. At Mpala, it was true, and here as well so far. I’m not sure if this is just a contrast with being at college and therefore not being stressed…so that “real life” in the US would be like this as well. Not that I was unhappy at Princeton, but anyway, the point is that yesterday I felt very happy and excited.

I went into work at CDC/KEMRI in Kisien for the first time, and Darryn showed me around and introduced me to some people I’ll be working with, and we spent basically the whole day attempting to get FrontlineSMS forms to work on one phone. We had about a billion little problems that led to this taking literally all day, most of which were ridiculous and involved switching sim cards around a ton of times, and spending an hour trying to figure out the number for one of the sim cards, and using VPN to access online help forums. In any case, even though it was a silly thing, it felt great to be working on something related to the project and to be problem solving, step by step, and then in the end to get it to work. Another thing that was just great was the atmosphere. In one of the offices downstairs, there are two clocks on the wall, one for Kenya and one for Atlanta. There is a strong sense of this really being a CDC field station. I think it is subtle, and I might not notice it if I didn’t have a sense of what CDC Atlanta feels like, since the vast majority of the people that work there are native Kenyans and the lifestyle is Kenyan, with a canteen where you can get tea and mandazi or samosas for your morning break. People here are working on malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, rickettsial diseases, zoonoses, basically everything, and the buildings are relatively high security. You have to have an ID card and they look in the car to make sure everyone belongs before they let you drive in, just like in Atlanta. You have to use a prox-type key to open all the doors, or from the inside you have to press a button to magnetically unlock them. Everyone is super friendly and really interested to hear about other people’s work and obviously also doing amazing work themselves. One woman who I’ll be working with is named Alice, she’s a Kenyan and she is a vet, and working on her PhD now, and she is studying rickettsial zoonotic diseases, Darryn and I talked to her a bit about trapping ticks and identifying them. I like her a lot even after just a brief meeting, and not just because she studies interesting things, haha.

I’ve been really lucky to get shown around by the people that live in the house I’m staying at as well as by Darryn and his girlfriend Nat, who is determined to get me introduced to anyone who is anyone in town, from the good tuk tuk drivers to the guy who makes the cakes at a certain restaurant, who apparently does special orders as well. I guess it hasn’t been very long but I’m really looking forward to getting on my feet and knowing my way around and not being new anymore, especially in terms of my project. For now (as in, on the first day) it has been mostly learning from Darryn about what is in place and what is feasible and now I have an enormous list of goals that each seem to need to be accomplished before any of the others can be done. I guess I’ll be working on a lot of aspects simultaneously and hope that it all comes together and works out. I also need to get better at explaining what I do to people, which I guess really requires knowing…but it has frequently been “okay so you are working on the animal health surveillance project, so what exactly is your role?” and the incredibly vague and unsatisfying answer is “yes, the project, yes, all of it…”

Getting Settled

Jambo,

So I arrived in Kisumu Monday night and have since been settling in, getting a new phone and internet connection and hanging out with the people living in the same house as me. It has been excellent so far, although I haven’t done any work yet other than one (3 hour long) meeting with my mentor. Tomorrow we are going out to the CDC base at Kisien and I’ll get to meet the people I’ll be working with. There are also a bunch of people doing work in a place called Kisii so be ready to be super confused with me. For tonight, I’m going to read up and think through some project ideas to be prepared for tomorrow and hopefully visiting the places will make the first steps easier to pull together in my mind.

I’m staying in a house where I rent a room and everyone shares the kitchen, the first night I arrived a Dutch girl named Masja who was leaving the next day cooked a bunch of salads for everyone, potato salad, pasta salad with and without tuna, and green salad. She also made a ridiculously garlicky mayonnaise/yogurt sauce to eat with bread. Linda, also from the Netherlands, is vegetarian so that has been helpful so far. On my way over I was concerned about the transition back to eating eggs and cheese but it has been okay so far, and since I was super hungry the night I arrived eating salads made with a bit of mayonnaise was okay and the garlic made the sauce I mentioned basically amazing. I avoided the hard boiled eggs that were on the side, though, still don’t think I’m up for that after last summer’s eggscapades. Last night I cooked some lentils and rice which turned out okay, and I shopped and bought the food including getting tomatoes, onions and sukuma wiki (greens) from a small vegetable stand at the market in town.

Besides the food, the transportation here has been a good experience. There are of course boda bodas, bicycles with seats on the back, plus motorbikes which are similar, and tuk tuks which are almost as fun, but lead to a very bumpy ride on the fairly bad road to the house where I’m staying. I had my first ride on a motorbike boda boda today, which, don’t worry, didn’t go very fast on the dirt roads and there are good handholds and I held on VERY tight. It also bounces with the bumps better than a car or tuk tuk, it seems. In a couple of weeks I might take a matatu up towards Mpala for a short visit, in order to get out of the big city when the referendum vote on the new constitution occurs.

The referendum is a huge deal, but I have been unable to find good information on what exactly is involved in the new constitution that has been passed by parliament that the people are voting on whether to accept. There seem to be phrases like “abortion is allowed to save the life of the mother” and “every person has the right to marry a person of the opposite sex” involved, the full interpretation of which is unclear to me... Right now there seems to be a rally going on in the park visible (and super loudly hearable) from the rooftop bar where I am using free wi-fi.



It’s partly in English, so I occasionally catch snippets, and there seem to be musical intervals between speakers. I haven’t figured out whether they are “yes” or “no” supporters, but apparently the majority of people (especially in this area) are in support of the new constitution, and the prime minister and president support it as well, although it would eventually supposedly limit some of their or their successors power through the imposition of term limits and maybe some other regulations. So, the only thing that seems like it might lead to unrest is if some high up people that claim to support “yes” somehow rig the election to have “no” win, which would be pretty slimy. The thing is, apparently, that even though this vote has nothing to do with tribal differences, tribal stereotypes are so ingrained that dissatisfied people will make their dissatisfaction about tribes and that could potentially lead to violence targeted at other tribes.

Dubai is not Kenya

I flew Emirates this time to get to Kenya, and for some reason I was super excited to try out this fancy airline and also to see Dubai, or at least a bit of the airport. I realized why I have such a super fascination with Dubai and that is that when I was in Cairo I watched a lot of tv and all of the ads were for Dubai. Even on the plane they had some ads for dubai and they play the same kind of do do do arab inspired music which I guess is the dubai jingle. Also all the advertising that Emirates does is pretty convincing because that was extremely exciting as well. “Fly emirates” is a great campaign. I almost want to buy a t-shirt that says Fly Emirates because I am so convinced. And after my 12 hour flight from NY I was perfectly willing to advertise for them because it is a super airline to fly on. I felt totally good and refreshed after my first flight, on which there was a large selection of tv & movies etc, and the seats recline in such a way that the bottoms slide forward when the back tilts back so it’s much more comfortable and natural. Also the flight wasn’t that full so we spread out and I shared a three seater with a nice older man who asked me a couple of questions and mentioned what his children study and is from Bangladesh but studied at BU but then at the end of the flight he gave me his card and guess what it turns out he has two masters degrees (econ and political economy) and a PhD in Econ and he is also a MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT in Bangladesh. The flight on to Nairobi was fine, on time and okay, but not as comfortable as the plane for the long haul flight although the food was still good, mostly it was shocking to me that the food must have been microwaved because it all seemed so fresh and tasty. The breakfast even included mushrooms that I thought were good, and if an airline can make mushrooms taste good, then why can’t everybody else?

Flying into Dubai was crazy, there was a beautiful sunrise which I managed to capture the color of in a picture, and we flew over a few different sites of what was clearly island building going on. They are sort of shipping sand out onto the water and smoothing it out into a nice island shape. I have no idea what the ecosystem of this coast was originally but artificial islands are so ridiculous. From the plane the smoothing out of the sand piles looked like someone playing with a zen garden or something.

I guess the thing about emirates and dubai in general is this question of where the money is coming from and development into a super capitalistic commercial society. So maybe the money doesn’t all come directly from oil but indirectly through the airline and airport which seems to employ probably almost everyone in the city, since now tourism is one of the primary sources of income. So is that a feasible way to develop an area? Bring in lots of international travel and money and have your city be mostly just a hub plus some tourism? I guess you need the oil capital to get started on it and then you can be continually expanding your airport and building new islands all the time. It seems like such a city of the future in that it is all modern and expanding fast and they are doing everything they can to be at the forefront of urban-ness. But in some ways it seems too good to be true from a development standpoint and at some point their investments won’t pay off anymore. But probably not for a long time – emirates only flies to 4 cities in the US but they really get around in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and it seems like basically anyone traveling anywhere really does need to go through Dubai, and the US is really not important in that scheme.

The transition to Kenya from the over-funded Dubai airport is pretty shocking, although Kisumu is a fairly big city where you can get basically anything you need, and Nairobi is even bigger, they haven’t figured out a way to prevent the dirt/dust from getting in everywhere and it’s clear that most things are built out of concrete blocks which gives everything a particular kind of look which I now associate with Kenya. More on Kenya coming soon!