Going back?

It's reunions this weekend (but I'm not there), my little '11 buddies are all grown up and graduating, and I have less than a month left in Kenya. A few days ago I wrote some reflections in order to help me try to decide what to do in my last month to finish up my project, but it turned into more of a personal reflection. So it seemed like a relevant thing to turn into a blog post, although now that I reread it it is largely nonsensical:

Today marks exactly one month until I fly back to the US and head almost directly to the Compton retreat in San Francisco. That means it’s been about 11 months since our retreat last year and just over 10 months since I arrived in Kisumu on July 19, 2010. The other night I was talking to Ricky and he was commenting on how looking back on the beginning of his time here (he arrived around the same time I did) everything seems sunny and happy and in recent months he has become more stressed about his work, more tired of the tiring things about living in Kenya, and more ready to go home. So I had to think about whether I have gone through a similar transition – was I happier when I started? Am I ready to go home? Is that a result of failures and challenges or just a desire to have fast internet and be able to relax and not stand out every time I leave the house?

In my first five months here I had no thoughts of wanting to leave. After I went home for Christmas, came back, and left again for my time in the UK, the idea of being back in a developed country, with my friends from college and where everything is easy, started to appeal to me more. Now, as my departure date approaches, I feel less ready to leave the great friends I have made here, abandoning my project, the beautiful weather, affordable living, access to incredible places. To make up for it I have planned to visit about 6 US states and 3 countries in the summer before starting graduate school next year. I think my experience in Kenya is roughly paralleled by the weight I have gained and lost this year – ten pounds on gradually, represents filling myself with Kenya and starting to feel like I don’t fit in my current set of clothes, need to change and shed and start over in a lot of ways. Most of that 10 pounds off again, still sticking with my new clothes, my new life, but being better able to control myself and no longer needing to gorge on Kenya-ness and feeling a better sense of fitting in here in relation to fitting in elsewhere, home in Kenya, home in Europe or the US, home nowhere, but it doesn’t matter. I am so lucky to have this experience, and I tell myself this every day. I am 23, and I live in Kenya, I travel to France for conferences, I can communicate online with people back home, and I am managing a project that involves Zebu cattle and learning about diseases and public health and pathology and technology and research and management. I think I am ready to go home, to start grad school, be taught microbiology and statistics and research practices – this year, I opened up the spaces in my brain by trying to teach myself all of these subjects and more, and next year, I will start to fill in the gaps and I will be able to do such awesome work when I come back to Kenya to do my MSc research.

Has the US changed since I’ve been away? Will Kenya change over the next year when I’m gone? KEMRI/CDC is facing major budget cuts, laying off close to 1/3 of all staff, cutting programs, cutting global health research. Will it be a different center when I come back? Or will it be the differences in my perspective and knowledge that are more important than these logistical transitions?

Lyonnaise is much better than Mayonnaise

Hello everyone,
I apologize for the extremely long delay in posting. There have just been so many better things to do!!

For the past week, I've been in Lyon, France at the International Conference on Animal Health Surveillance. I got to do my first ever conference oral presentation, and luckily got it over with within just a few hours of the conference beginning. For the rest of the time I have been enjoying the conference, which was held in a pretty amazing chapel, and not eating the incredibly fancy but undoubtedly meaty hors d'oeuvres that were served (for example, there was some tiny pita bread filled with an unidentifiable substance, and they were held closed with TINY CLOTHESPINS! and balsamic vinegar and soy sauce and such things were served in small pipettes. It's so modern.)

One of the people I met at the conference was the Principal Investigator for that participatory epidemiology study I helped out with a while ago - and after discussing some stuff with him it looks like we will finally move forward with writing that up! Hooray.

Otherwise, this fountain fairly accurately represents how awesome Lyon is. Lyon is a goddess riding four mythical (their hooves have weird claws) horses with steam coming out of their noses. Although the city's claim to fame is being the gastronomic capital of the world, my desire to not eat veal or mussels has limited me somewhat. But tonight I ate at a great vegetarian restaurant (Zone Verte) which is right around the corner from the hotel. They serve only fresh, local, organic food and they serve it on wooden trays which fit perfectly into slots on the table. It is fun.

So the week before the conference, I was busy hanging out at the coast with Christina, who came up from Lesotho to visit! Vacation is hard work and I had barely any time to practice my presentation. For example, we visited the Gedi ruins in Watamu. It's a cool place - a Swahili city that was active from the 13th-17th centuries.

We also visited the amazing and empty beach (it's low season because it's rainy season so there is some seaweed) and played in the water a lot.

The sand is very white.

It was awesome. That's all.

I think I didn't know before how much I like the beach. We went snorkeling and it was like swimming in an aquarium, so many fish!! Amazing. Will have to come back during November when the sea is a bit calmer and you can find dolphins.

One of the most amazing things about Kenya is the incredible range of ecosystems and cultures and landscapes. Lyon is amazing too, as I mentioned. Traveling is awesome but I have been feeling torn between really wanting to actually live in a place (an amazing place, hopefully Pullman lives up to that standard next year...) and wanting to keep seeing new places. Perhaps the solution is to take reasonable length vacations interspersed with having one place to go back to. Something to work towards in life I guess!

Easter birthdays and weddings

Pascal the tuktuk driver was born on Easter, like me. Unlike me, he celebrates his birthday on Easter regardless of when it happens to fall, and claims to not actually know the correct date. Apparently he said "My birthday has never been at the end of April before!"

Most people here don't have birth certificates and may also take some liberties with their age and their birthday. A friend told me about twins that she knows - on the official government ID of the brother, it says he was born 5 years earlier than his twin sister. Either people don't know, or don't really care about their exact age. This kind of disregard for facts reminds me of my primary pet peeve [bigger peeves, such as rampant corruption, are not included...] about Kenya - which is that people don't care about how things are spelled! People spell their names differently at different times, which I can accept as personal choice, but this trend also spills over into the set up of our lab database and other places where data matching is essential. It kind of makes me twitch.

In other news, this past weekend I traveled to Ruma National Park, "the last home of the Roan antelope [in Kenya]," which is an incredibly beautiful park south of here. To get there, we drove north around Winam Gulf and took the ferry across to Mbita. Somehow they manage to fit about 9 cars on a fairly small boat, along with a lot of people, bags of charcoal, motorbikes, wooden poles, and just about anything you can think of. Luckily the ride is only 45 minutes and there aren't too many hippos or crocodiles out in the center of the lake...


The ferry ride is awesome, though, and we got to see a different perspective of the lake. Kenya has about 6% of the whole of Lake Victoria, most of which is a gulf that is frequently clogged with water hyacinth and which is full of schistosomes.


Once on the other side, the lake opens out and looks more like an ocean, with little waves and a huge blueness that is a really nice contrast to the brown and green lake that I'm used to seeing.

Ruma is a cool park - although it rained heavily on us when we drove through the first time. We say an enormous group (tower) of giraffes standing out in the rain, probably 35 of them.


We stayed at the Kenya Wildlife Service banda which is a self-catering cottage, and we did a lot of self-catering...we brought enough food for several armies. But we had an excellent time sitting on the terrace and enjoying this view over the park:


We were inspired to go to Ruma because a friend from the UK was getting married to a Luo man out there in his rural home, which is so close to Tanzania that as kids they would just ride their bikes across the border. The wedding was really fun, although we had to run away from the reception early before a huge storm blew all the tents over, and we possibly severely insulted the hosts by not shoving food down our throats as we ran away. Oops. It was exciting to see a wedding with such a fun mix of Western and African traditions - although the bride wore a white dress, the groom, groomsmen and bridesmaid were all decked out in colorful Kenyan fabric.

This week there is another long weekend - Monday is off for May day or some bank holiday or something. Perhaps I will take another exciting trip! But with all the traveling (conference, etc.) I have planned for the month of May, it seems I only have 7 weekends left in Kisumu. The past 9.5 months have just flown by...

Garissa!

Right now I am in Nairobi. This morning I was in Garissa, the provincial capital of Northeastern province which is on the border with Somalia. Don't worry – it turns out you only need an armored convoy if you drive past Garissa, for example to Dadaab, one of the main Somali refugee camps in Kenya. This trip to Garissa was planned and cancelled and planned again but I'm glad I got to go along for the ride – Dr. Njenga, the head of the new zoonoses program at CDC Kenya, worked in Garissa a few years ago during the Rift Valley Fever outbreak, and he's been wanting to get more projects set up there ever since. Now that we have a zoonoses program, and some exciting new collaborations, the plan is to set up a demographic surveillance system for livestock potentially in combination with an extension of my mobile-phone based surveillance – this time in a place with wildlife too!

Long story short, we met with lots of people, from the District Veterinary Officer to the Kenya Wildlife Service guys to my friends Kelly and Victoria who work in Kisumu but also happened to be in Garissa on Thursday night…Garissa is a predominantly Muslim town, so the only place that served alcohol (and since it was Victoria's 30^th birthday, the place where we had to go) is the Government Guesthouse. The town also features a lot of camels, a lot of dust, and one or possibly two fancy hotels that cost no more than 3000 shillings (about $35) per night. Our fancy hotel, the Nomad, had a staircase with stairs of varying heights. This is actually fairly common in Kenya and is extremely disconcerting. In any case, I had a really good time in Garissa and brainstorming how to set up an integrated human and animal disease surveillance system –plus I got to meet a baby giraffe rescued by the Kenya Wildlife Service after being abandoned by its mother. She is only a few days old (still has umbilical cord) and is already as tall as me!! I also got to see my first baobab trees on the drive over there. It is such a different part of Kenya than where I'd been before.

Giraffe calf being bottle fed at the KWS office

Baobab tree along the Garissa-Nairobi road

The extreme poverty in and around Garissa is in stark contrast to the ridiculousness of where some of the people that I work with live in Nairobi – there's kind of an ex-pat wonderland up near Muthaiga, which is a neighborhood full of extremely large fancy houses, and high stone walls with electrified or barbed wire on top. When we stopped inside Njenga's double-gated – think airlock except made of bars - compound to use the bathroom before hitting Nairobi traffic to get to our hostel, we wandered in to the community center which contains a store stocked full of American goods, as well as a large number of extremely well-dressed American stay at home moms and a group of teenage boys each on their own laptop with headphones on sitting around a table next to a pool and tennis courts. This is the neighborhood that I read about in It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong – where corrupt Kenyan politicians spend their millions. Speaking of millions, the top news story in one of the Kenyan papers was about $10,000,000 (yes, ten million US dollars) that one of the Ocampo 6 (the Kenyan leaders accused of war crimes for their role in the post-election violence in 2007) was clever enough to lose at the airport when coming back from hearing his accusations at the Hague. First of all, WHAT? And second of all, WHAT??? If you are carrying $10,000,000 in $100 bills in a duffel bag, shouldn't you handcuff it to your wrist? There is just so much fishiness in this story, including the question of how it is possible to carry 100,000 $100 bills in a carry-on, I don't even know where to start. Hopefully Robin Hood stole it…

Kakamega Birthday

Hello again - sorry it's been a long time, but the reward is lots of pictures (relatively) which will hopefully actually upload this time.

So since my last post (which was not a real post) I have been getting back into the swing of things with the project - we got our first lab results for an antibody test against toxoplasmosis, and we expanded so that our reports now will come from all 33 of the target villages. There has also been a lot of waiting for responses from people, as usual, and sadly as a result of that there are a huge number of tasks I haven't been able to cross off my list...I've tried to speed this along by putting very small and accomplishable tasks so I can cross them off. Things like "receive an e-mail from Amos" or "hope that the virtual server gets set up in time"... but anyway, things actually are moving along and I've been incredibly impressed with the drive of Victor, the guy who has been helping me set up RapidSMS, and hopefully together we'll be able to push through some progress.

Also since my last post, I turned 23, and I had a lovely party hosted by my friends Jason and Ricky, who are amazing, and many other also amazing friends turned up. Sadly I did not take many pictures, but Tor made homemade pita bread and there were many other deliciousnesses, and the cake, a three layer Banoffee Cake (banana bread/cake layered with dulce de leche and bananas with caramel frosting), was incredible, and we all have to appreciate it more because apparently Jason slaved over for almost 6 hours because there is only one springform pan in Kisumu. Thanks friends.

Yesterday I finally made it out to Kakamega Forest with Jo and Steph and Per and Karen and Darryn (my mentor, who is in Kenya probably for the last time before my fellowship ends). Kakamega forest is a fragment of the rainforest that used to stretch all the way across equatorial Africa. We hiked, and picnicked, and ate more delicious cake (carrot cake with lime frosting this time, also incredible), and saw birds and fungi and trees and bugs and lots of monkeys and sadly even some dead reptiles (a 4 foot long adder and two chameleons - one in the forest and one in the parking lot in my compound).

Here are some mushrooms on a tree:

Here's what the top of the hill at the edge of the forest looks like:

Here are some bats living in an old gold mine shaft:

Here are my travel buddies that didn't want to go and see the bats:

Monkey watching:

Hanging out with my favorite new housemate, Karen. We accidentally say the same thing all the time and also do a lot of crosswords together. We make a pretty good team, if I say so myself.

So all in all life continues to be excellent, although I have been stressed lately by possible last minute changes in my plans to go and see Doug. In order to tackle this stress, I have eaten an enormous amount of tofu which is homemade at the chinese restaurant in town. Next tactic: make a decision at deadline time (in 3 hours and 40 minutes)!

Well then.

For the past three weeks I have been doing things that don't involve creating blog posts. But luckily, for half of that time I was on vacation with my family and they did an excellent job retrospectively tracking our journey. So, although most of the readership of this blog was actually on the trip with me, those additional few might enjoy seeing the photo summary of our trip.

Since being back in Kisumu and sending the fam back around the world, I have been mostly having meetings and hoping that these meetings lead to progress. For now I'll have to leave you in suspense on whether that progress is actually occurring and get back to trying to make it happen.

Mountains and Molehills (Love the Place You're In)

I am having a great time in Edinburgh - it's hard to believe that in a few days I'll be back in Kenya... A few weeks ago, when it was suddenly time to leave Kisumu and head to Scotland, I was really sad to be leaving my friends, my routine, and my beautiful place behind. But now I feel the same about Edinburgh. Am I just really lucky to be in awesome places, or would I love living anywhere? Something to contemplate.

Meanwhile, check out some pictures from the hike we did on Saturday.


We drove past this horrible sight on the way to the bottom of the hill...apparently it is sort of Scottish tradition to kill moles that are making molehills in your grazing fields and impale them on the barbs of your barbed wire fence. Probably not a very effective warning to other moles that are underground and mostly blind. Maybe someone should write a mole Watership Down where one far-sighted mole can sense all its dead conspecifics up on the fence. Seeing as my impression of how moles act when anthropomorphized comes entirely from Redwall, such a book would be extremely difficult to understand, but would involve a lot of delicious descriptions of "deeper'n'ever turnip'n'tater'n'beetroot pie." Ohh Brian Jacques, too bad you're not still alive to write it. [EDIT: Apparently there is a novel about mole society which I have somehow missed, which has almost entirely excellent reviews on Amazon.]


The view.


At the top. It looks a bit like Kenya, except for the part where I am bundled up.


Perhaps one of the best parts of the hike was the fact that the way down was so steep that we had to sled. On our butts, without any sleds, and without any snow. This video, which can also be found on my facebook, shows the fearless Maia leading the way down the hill. Thanks to the extra rain pants she lent me (visible in photo above) I was able to get down the hill the same way with only a minimal amount of wet-butt-ness.