wow fast internet

Just thinking how even though I'm home in NJ now, and the internet is super fast, I don't really feel like using it. Also been thinking about how lucky I am to live in Kenya. I wanted to find some pictures to convince you of that, but it's hard to express in pictures I guess. Come visit! I'll be back there Jan 8.


Those are impala on the side of the path.


Crater Lake, Naivasha.

Life on a Sugar Plantation

As you may recall from my last post, this past week has been incredibly busy as everything that needs to get done before the end of the year pretty much fails to get done. We successfully received our VIP visitors although we don't know yet how much they want to collaborate with us. On Friday CDC/KEMRI had a big retreat with enforced fun for all of the staff, including such amazing activities as an eating contest and trust falls. We (Darryn, Jo, Steph and I) escaped a bit early from the big day for our own personal working/writing retreat at a farmhouse about an hour outside of Kisumu. As you can see, it was both relaxing and productive, if you pretend that I could see my laptop screen while sitting in the 90 degree sun.

But honestly we did get a lot of work done, and went on a couple of horseback rides around the amazingly green landscape that is the sugar plantation. Actually it's not JUST a sugar plantation, they grow coffee, raise cows and make cheese, breed horses (they have 65) and run a guesthouse. Oh, those Kenyan Cowboys really know how to live the life! A few other visitors (two vets and a veterinary immunologist) came and joined us for the second night, bringing along a 12 year old Australian Cattle Dog that has lived on 4 continents. We had a lot of good talk about zoonotic disease surveillance etc leaving Steph to hopefully make progress on her solely human related work. The immunologist did her PhD and a postdoc at UCDavis before coming here. Honestly I meet more people with Davis connections than seems at all possible.

On the way back home this afternoon, we stopped at Tilapia Beach for lunch. This is the view over the "lake" aka invasive water hyacinth field... it drifts around disconcertingly and is sort of nauseating to watch because you don't really expect what looks like green land to be moving.

Tomorrow we have the day off for Kenyan Independence Day (actually today 12/12), Tuesday I'm going to the field to officially end the pilot stage of the surveillance project so that we can start afresh in January with a system that hopefully will work consistently, and Wednesday I fly to Nairobi for important work meetings with the important visitors from last week, then don't bother coming back to Kisumu before flying back to NJ on the 22nd! Wowee.

OH GEEZ

So…yeah, BUSY BUSY BUSY basically. That's all. I am taking time out of my packed schedule to write this because it seems like relevant procrastination.

So I was in Nairobi the past couple of days, so that I could meet with the head of epidemiology at the Department of Veterinary Services. I even briefly met the Director of Veterinary Services for Kenya, and he told us stories about the good ol' days when Veterinary Officers in remote districts could pretend to be doing work when they weren't. It probably seems like the meeting was a really big deal, and it was sort of, but I went with two of the Kenyan vets that I work with, and basically they are all buddies because there is only one vet school in Kenya and every vet therefore knows every other vet and all of his or her business (77 newly minted vets graduated last year, and apparently that is a huge class). Anyway, they weren't as excited about immediately implementing my mobile technology disease surveillance in every district as I would have hoped, but they did want to make sure that the information we collect gets to the local Veterinary Officer, possibly monthly, which sort of defeats the purpose of real time reporting but ANYWAY we'll see what actually happens. They are, on the other hand, piloting digital pen technology for notifiable diseases as well as mobile phone reporting for "zero reports" where they do active surveillance to make sure that certain diseases (like Rinderpest, which was recently eradicated) is actually not there. The mobile phone based syndromic surveillance that we are doing with ADSARS would do a third and separate thing, which is allow for timely surveillance of not-necessarily-notifiable diseases as well as emerging diseases.

I also had the opportunity to observe arthopod collection in the slum of Kibera, which basically involved following around a guy with a ghostbusters-type backpack vacuum cleaner mosquito catcher through the narrow streets and open sewers and into people's homes. The demographic surveillance they are doing in Kibera is equivalent to the study in the rural area near Kisumu, except it is about as urban as you can get. The part of Kibera that we were in is predominantly Luo, so they speak Dholuo, which is just like being in the field out here so it was quite an interesting contrast. The houses we went into were filled with a lot more stuff than I had imagined would be the case, but it made me realize that the difference between rural poverty and slum poverty, in a certain sense, is that by moving to a slum you have the potential for electricity sometimes, and to own a TV and furniture with cushions, and have a water tap nearby, and what you give up is a relatively clean environment and the ability to grow food to eat. Obviously that is a simplistic description of a very complex social phenomenon but it expresses my first impression, I guess.

But the primary reason that I am so busy, besides everyone freaking out about getting stuff done by the end of the year, is that we have some very important visitors next week and I have to do a presentation on ADSARS to try to convince them to collaborate with us. While in Nairobi, I also got to meet with our newly appointed head of Zoonoses at CDC Kenya (previously lab director), and he is awesome, and he loves ADSARS, and he has a ton of suggestions and can convince the lab people that this is a priority so that maybe we can actually get some lab tests to happen…and also next week when he's in Kisumu will find time to talk to me about my life plans and potentially making things happen in order for me to not just abandon this project while it's just getting going. So we'll see! But anyway, in addition to the important people, I'm supposed to be in Bondo for the third and final stage of the participatory epidemiology study Sunday through Thursday, plus Darryn and his ex-boss Sarah will be around and I'm submitting abstracts/papers for conferences, and writing about ADSARS for CDC's Global Disease Detection yearly newsletter by Monday! I'm also going to travel back to Nairobi with the whole group of visitors December 14 - 17 which is practically tomorrow, and then it probably wouldn't make sense for me to come back to Kisumu just for the weekend before flying to the US on December 22 so basically that means I'm leaving practically tomorrow. DOES TIME EVEN MAKE SENSE?

But it is just as important for me to mention that I ate Lebanese food in Nairobi and it was basically the best EVER EVER EVER and I ate at least 4 platefuls and then had leftovers for breakfast and why can't Kenyan food be more like Lebanese food?