Happy Half Birthday to Me!

I'm writing this from my teensy weensy hotel room in Bondo, a small town about 50 km outside of Kisumu. I arrived here earlier this evening with a group of 12 people that will be conducting a participatory epidemiology study to determine how much local knowledge there is about zoonotic causes of childhood diarrhea. In the process, I will learn all about participatory epidemiology techniques and hopefully organize to do some semi-structured interviews of my own next week or the week after. In any case, the proof of the teensy-weensy-ness of my hotel room is in the fact that the shower head will undoubtedly dispense most of the water directly into the toilet bowl, and the tiny sink that is less than 3 feet off the ground didn't even fit in the bathroom. The part of the room that is not the bathroom is also small, though. I almost got a bigger room but it turns out the hotel manager was reading the wrong line on the spreadsheet.

To fill you in on what I've been doing for the past forever since I posted, it has mostly been 1) stressing about applications for next year, 2) ordering pretzel m&ms from Amazon.com because now that I'm not being vegan it clearly makes sense to ship chocolate halfway around the world, 3) going to the movie theater to see movies that were out in the US when I was home 3 months ago but that I didn't get to see, 4) making lists, and 5) tallying all the Compton money that I've spent so far. Turns out the perk of my new(ish) house which means I no longer have to pay for public transportation very often is far outweighed by the extra money I spend on food because I live alone but still cook as if I had several extra mouths to feed.

The other night I went to a potluck type party hosted by the director of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Kenya. This party (held on the first Friday of every month) apparently inspires all the wazungu that normally hide inside their embassy security level compounds to venture outside, so I met a lot of people I had never met before. Mostly everyone else that works for Walter Reed has a southern accent, and mostly everyone that works for CDC has some kind of east coast accent, with the best one being this guy John who has a ridiculous Boston accent and sounds like JFK from Clone High, almost. I was told by two people that I "don't have an accent" which I think just means I am good at melding everyone else's accents. I have also now met two Peace Corps volunteers here, and as inconvenient as it is that Doug wasn't placed in Kenya, it seems like PC Kenya is extra screwed up and inefficient, and West Africa is probably a way better region to be in from that perspective.

In other news, my toe is healing nicely, but yesterday I narrowly avoided getting mown down by a bicycle (boda boda) and then a couple hours later tripped over the curb when the matatu I was about to get on started pulling away and I fell and ripped my jeans and skinned my knee. I think I will claim that my new(?) clumsiness is a side effect of Lariam.

I was thinking of going to Nairobi this weekend to try to track down the inexpensive Android smartphones (that supposedly exist and that I want to use for data collection), but I didn't go, for various reasons, and instead asked everyone in Kisumu that claims to work somewhere that sells phones about them and nobody knew anything about anything. Not helpful, but one of the people I talked to was nice enough to claim she'll look into it and call me back, so I may be on my way to becoming an Android developer. Once the smartphones are up and running I can hopefully stop trying to receive SMS reports in the tiny mobile network dead zone that surrounds the desktop computer in the field office, and get the project moo-ving.

I've also been learning to speak Dholuo, and yesterday had a lesson in which I learned lots of names of animals, which may be helpful in my interpretation of what we will talk about this week, but probably I still won't understand anything. I was hoping to be fluent by now, but shockingly, after two whole hour long lessons, I am not even proficient. People from the Luo tribe do not like to speak Swahili and do like to speak English, to make a broad generalization, so overall I have mostly been learning to speak Kenyan English… Me I think Kenyan English is great.

To Hell’s Gate and Back

Hello again. Sorry for the long delay in updating. I've been busy and also used up the credit on my modem so now only have internet access at work (until I buy more credit). This means no facebook either, so don't try to reach me there.

Work is going well – we're going to be expanding our pilot run from 2 villages to 10 villages because we are still not receiving reports. Last week we confirmed that the animal health reporters aren't having trouble other than the fact that the farmers aren't reporting sick animals to them. I think more outreach directly to the farmers will be necessary – hopefully this will happen when we do our participatory epidemiology stuff in the beginning of October. Which is really soon, by the way. Not sure how that happened.

Okay but the interesting stuff to tell you about is my trip to Naivasha/Hell's Gate/Nairobi this weekend! I skipped work on Friday and traveled to Naivasha in the morning to meet up with Theresa from Mpala and a group of VSO volunteers that I got put in touch with through Ricky, an American VSO guy that works in Kisumu. It was super fun to get out of town and meet new people and be outside! We went on a boat ride on Lake Naivasha and saw some hippos and pelicans and a fish eagle. The next day we rented bikes and rode to Hell's Gate National Park which is basically the only park where you are allowed to walk or bike…there are no lions, probably, and apparently the buffalo aren't a problem. It was awesome to just be biking along (even though the bikes were a bit uncomfortable). The road was fairly flat and there were lots of cool rocks and hills and zebras/warthogs/gazelles around. So we biked about 5 km to the gate then 8 km inside the park to get to the rangers post, where we left the bikes to go walk in the gorge. This walk involved a lot of scrambling and sliding and climbing up or down vertical slopes, but we had a really good guide who told us where to step and occasionally lifted up the really high spirited 5 year old that was part of our group. Then luckily we had climbed out of the gorge before it started to pour, so we just had to bike back 13 km in the pouring rain on dirt roads but it was awesome anyway and we had hot showers when we got back which helped even though I had forgotten my towel.

We were staying in the "dorm" at Camp Carnalley's, which was nice the first night but the second night we were joined by a man who claimed Theresa's bed while we were out and then proceeded to cough, grunt, talk, and yell in his sleep all night. Ricky pointed out that maybe he is taking Lariam and having dream-related side effects and so it's not necessarily that he is always a ridiculous sleeptalker.

Okay so then I went to Nairobi to try to find tofu and teff flour but was not successful because I didn't have that much time to look, but I did have lunch at a ridiculously fancy Italian restaurant (I spent a whole $12!!) which was nice but is still not Lebanese. It's strange that I was so excited to go to Nairobi when basically you can get anything you want in Kisumu (except tofu and teff flour, and fancy restaurants) but once I was actually there in the big city I realized it wasn't that exciting, and it's better to live in a place where you don't have to deal with so much traffic!!

Luckily for you, I even have some pictures!