Much News

Hello! This past week helping out with the Zoonotic Enteric Disease participatory epidemiology study was GREAT! Except that the tiny hotel room I was staying in developed a puddle problem. My Luo language skills improved significantly, although unfortunately for real life mostly I now know lots of words for diseases, especially types of diarrhea. Oh well… I got to meet all sorts of cool people that do awesome public health work, and spend lots of time in rural villages where I obviously get to see cows and goats and dogs of all different colors (sheep too, but they aren't so exciting, the sheep here are really ugly). And people! Nice, welcoming people that really (for the most part) seemed to enjoy talking to us and telling us about their lives and all the types of diarrhea that their children under 5 have. One woman in particular was so enthusiastic (here they would say "keen") and always wanted to tell us what she thought or help arrange the button counters (used to indicated visually how frequently certain symptoms are seen with different diseases, for example), and then at the end of the interview she thanked us profusely for coming and made extra sure that we're really coming back to talk to them again in November (which we are). It made me really happy to see how much she (and other less expressive participants) appreciated us being there and learning from them. The only sad part is that I'm sure this particular woman would have loved to go to college, and done well, but probably didn't even get the opportunity to go to high school.

On Saturday when I got back I finally realized that I am never going to find this 8,000 shilling ($100) Android phone that I heard rumors about because they decided to sell it for 16,499 instead. So then I went and bought one, because $200 is still way not expensive for a smartphone! And now I have to figure out how to make it work perfectly for disease data collection!

Then today I went to Ndere Island National Park with Steph, Per, and Jo. It's about an hour's drive outside of Kisumu through the most beautiful/interesting area…there are a ton of rock formations and oddly balanced boulders. Anyone know how this happens? Would it have anything to do with the fact that a few geological time days ago the whole area was under The Lake? This drive and the PE study both made me want to spend more time out in the rural communities, so hopefully I'll get to actually stay out at the field site once things are up and running! At Ndere, I managed to pay the resident's rate and we took a boat out to the island and had a nice hike around for a few hours. The island is awesome, and we were literally the only people on the whole thing (it's about 4 or 5 km squared) until when we were leaving a school group arrived. We saw impala, baboons, monitor lizards, a huge crocodile in the water, a ton of birds, a bushbuck and also unfortunately a lot of invading water hyacinth. No giant snakes though.

I know I keep saying I will post pictures and I'm really gonna try now. And then I will try to post one picture each time because it has to work with just one, right?

At Ndere Island...the bright green in the bay behind me is water hyacinth.

An example of the boulders and the general landscape.