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.

Kisumu is almost Atlanta

Yesterday was awesome. So far my experience has been that I just feel relaxed and happy consistently when I am in Kenya. At Mpala, it was true, and here as well so far. I’m not sure if this is just a contrast with being at college and therefore not being stressed…so that “real life” in the US would be like this as well. Not that I was unhappy at Princeton, but anyway, the point is that yesterday I felt very happy and excited.

I went into work at CDC/KEMRI in Kisien for the first time, and Darryn showed me around and introduced me to some people I’ll be working with, and we spent basically the whole day attempting to get FrontlineSMS forms to work on one phone. We had about a billion little problems that led to this taking literally all day, most of which were ridiculous and involved switching sim cards around a ton of times, and spending an hour trying to figure out the number for one of the sim cards, and using VPN to access online help forums. In any case, even though it was a silly thing, it felt great to be working on something related to the project and to be problem solving, step by step, and then in the end to get it to work. Another thing that was just great was the atmosphere. In one of the offices downstairs, there are two clocks on the wall, one for Kenya and one for Atlanta. There is a strong sense of this really being a CDC field station. I think it is subtle, and I might not notice it if I didn’t have a sense of what CDC Atlanta feels like, since the vast majority of the people that work there are native Kenyans and the lifestyle is Kenyan, with a canteen where you can get tea and mandazi or samosas for your morning break. People here are working on malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, rickettsial diseases, zoonoses, basically everything, and the buildings are relatively high security. You have to have an ID card and they look in the car to make sure everyone belongs before they let you drive in, just like in Atlanta. You have to use a prox-type key to open all the doors, or from the inside you have to press a button to magnetically unlock them. Everyone is super friendly and really interested to hear about other people’s work and obviously also doing amazing work themselves. One woman who I’ll be working with is named Alice, she’s a Kenyan and she is a vet, and working on her PhD now, and she is studying rickettsial zoonotic diseases, Darryn and I talked to her a bit about trapping ticks and identifying them. I like her a lot even after just a brief meeting, and not just because she studies interesting things, haha.

I’ve been really lucky to get shown around by the people that live in the house I’m staying at as well as by Darryn and his girlfriend Nat, who is determined to get me introduced to anyone who is anyone in town, from the good tuk tuk drivers to the guy who makes the cakes at a certain restaurant, who apparently does special orders as well. I guess it hasn’t been very long but I’m really looking forward to getting on my feet and knowing my way around and not being new anymore, especially in terms of my project. For now (as in, on the first day) it has been mostly learning from Darryn about what is in place and what is feasible and now I have an enormous list of goals that each seem to need to be accomplished before any of the others can be done. I guess I’ll be working on a lot of aspects simultaneously and hope that it all comes together and works out. I also need to get better at explaining what I do to people, which I guess really requires knowing…but it has frequently been “okay so you are working on the animal health surveillance project, so what exactly is your role?” and the incredibly vague and unsatisfying answer is “yes, the project, yes, all of it…”