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…”
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