Younguns

I think it's getting to the point where things don't seem so new and exciting and therefore I don't get overcome by an urgent need to post every time I see a dead dog. So, sorry about that.

This past weekend, Isaac Holeman paid me a visit! He is super cool, and he had a Compton Mentor Fellowship last year during which time he did more than several amazing things including living in Malawi, creating a non-profit called FrontlineSMS:Medic, and winning another fellowship so that he can continue to work on this project for the next two years! This is excellent because it means that he was in Nairobi and so he could come over to Kisumu and give a presentation on FrontlineSMS:Medic for our mobile technology working group and maybe help me out with fixing the problems I'm having with FrontlineSMS and give me advice on mobile technology in general. He was, in fact, very helpful, despite not being able to actually visit my computer server at the field site because his half hour flight was delayed for four hours.

Okay also we did fun things like go on a boat ride on Lake Victoria! It was in the afternoon so the water was very choppy, indicating again that Lake Victoria is pretty much just an ocean. Although apparently Lake Superior is bigger, but is that really true? I don't know. Measuring either the surface area or the volume of a lake is basically impossible. We also visited the Impala Park, which has free ranging impala and zebras but lions, a cheetah, a hyena, and some jackals in cages. It is sad that their cages are not really big enough, but apparently they used to be even smaller. We did both of these activities with this guy named Josh who, like me, is lucky enough to have an awesome fellowship that allows him to live in Kenya for a year after graduating. He is based in Nairobi and graduated from Stanford but he also loves infectious diseases so that's cool. My friend Ricky introduced me to someone by saying that I have an "enviable enthusiasm for diseases" so basically the same is true of Josh but I don't have to be envious because I am already enthusiastic. For example, this is cool!

I also watched the movie "Sideways" this weekend, and enjoyed it, and mostly finding out that it came out way back in 2004 was shocking to me. When I mentioned that that was high school for me, everyone else was shocked and appalled and no longer wanted anything to do with someone so young. So I didn't point out that I wouldn't even have been able to get into the movie in theaters because it was rated R and I was only 16. Also I think as a defense mechanism I am almost already thinking of myself as being 24, which is really going to make my next two birthdays pretty disappointing.