Vacation is Nice

Well I'm back in Kenya, where it is nice and warm and sunny and happy. Except that there was a ridiculous thunderstorm yesterday, and I got pretty soaked.

Unfortunately, nothing gets done on vacation and the frustrating roadblocks that were slowing my progress in December before I left are, for the most part, still there.

But I am happy to be back, I really enjoy being here regardless of the status of the project.

Here's an excerpt from my mid-year report draft for the Compton Foundation, which expresses a general reflection on the past six months:

I’m back in Kenya now after a holiday break at home in the states, and it is really nice to be back. I feel at home here and I think that feeling is a very important accomplishment of my fellowship so far. Of course, the incredibly beautiful weather doesn’t hurt. While in the US, I hoped to be able to spend a lot of time reflecting on the past six months, but I ended up really taking a break and disconnecting myself from everything in Kenya for a couple of weeks. This turned out to be great and helpful, as I eventually realized that I hadn’t taken any psychological time off from my project since arriving here in July.

When I arrived way back in July (how is it possible that it can feel so long ago and yet also feel like time has gone by incredibly fast?) I didn’t know anyone or how to get around town, hadn’t met my mentor in person, and had very little hands on experience with the mobile technology I planned to use for my project. Right away, I made friends with a couple of the people I was staying with, and they helped show me around. I had a meeting with Darryn where we established a framework for the project plan and I learned that he would be leaving for a job in South Africa in September, and then I jumped into the project. It’s been pretty much a whirlwind ever since, both in the sense that it’s been incredibly busy and in that I feel like progress is more like a corkscrew than a straight road. Looking back on my notes from early in the fellowship, I see lists of tasks, many of which are no longer applicable or still haven’t been accomplished.

I’ve asked myself many times why progress is so slow and seemingly circular. I’ve tried to blame myself for not working hard enough, and spent a decent number of weekends and evenings working or telling myself I should be working. Luckily, I’ve made enough friends here that I now usually have plenty of excuses to relax on the weekends. Getting used to a working lifestyle rather than my school lifestyle has definitely been interesting – sleeping from 11 pm to 7 am, working from 8 to 5:30 and coming home and cooking dinner certainly contrasts with the unpredictable schedule I had at Princeton: eating when I was hungry (dinner at 3 pm or 10 pm), sleeping when it was absolutely unavoidable (often at 2 or 3 am, occasionally later) and thinking that class at 10 am was a bit too early. When I went back to Princeton for a night while I was in NJ, I was pleased to not be writing papers or studying for finals, and I told my friends that are still there that life in the “real world” is great!

Does a Compton Fellowship count as the “real world” or is it something else? If the rest of the real world is almost as unrepeatable, unforgettable, and amazing as a Compton Fellowship, then I’m glad to be a part of it. I think a large part of the Compton Mentor Fellow experience for me so far has been allowing myself to be convinced that I am qualified to be doing this and that I deserve to be here, while also increasing the depth of my understanding of how lucky I am to have the opportunity to do this. That luck has allowed me to get to know great people in an amazing place while many people I know at home or unemployed or struggling to enjoy their work. I’m also lucky to be working on a project where I can try to improve the health of livestock and therefore improve the lives of the people that rely on them. Seeing the poverty in this area, and learning about the HIV/AIDS prevalence (the highest in the country) and the high rate of malaria, as well as other infectious diseases, especially zoonoses, has made it easy to see why moving away from the easy life in the US in order to try to make a difference is worthwhile. The challenge is making that difference, and making it sustainable, and assessing whether the people here actually feel like a difference has been made. Even though I know I won’t accomplish everything I want to by the time my fellowship year is up, I will at least have opened up opportunities for myself to continue to work to improve the health of animals and people.