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.

Scotland is greyt

This past weekend I did some things which I can do in Kenya (lay around in bed; overheard conversations that at first seemed like a language I don't know and then turned out to be English) some things which I maybe can do in Kenya (saw The King's Speech with Brits that didn't know it was about Elizabeth II's father; went shopping and had to deal with huge crowds of people; watched Scotland vs Wales Rugby at a pub), and some things which I definitely can't do in Kenya (stream TV shows over the internet; take the bus from right in front of my house directly to the Royal Botanic Gardens!)

The view of Edinburgh from the Royal Botanic Gardens.

It was great but I did spend more time than usual by myself and I miss all my friends in Kenya. Being somewhere for only a month when everyone else lives there permanently isn't the best way to meet people, especially when there isn't a community of expats that you automatically join by being obviously foreign. Plus my flatmate Amy was busy because her boyfriend was visiting from some only slightly distant place.

On the other hand, I am really enjoying working here, the people are great and focusing on data and programming is a fun change: I did some productive internet stalking to find a guy who may or may not have developed a mobile phone based diagnostic support tool (he agreed to send me more details but hasn't yet), remembered how much I enjoy applied math, and applied said applied math through some R codes.

On the other other hand, I keep forgetting to put on my coat before going outside...

Wienerconference

Hello again! It's a beautiful day in Edinburgh, and I'm sitting at Roslin, overhearing conversation about research on chicken breeds. I contemplated working from home since none of my people are actually at Roslin today, but I realiSed that having a place to GO to actually makes the day feel more productive. Although maybe it's not, since I'm clearly writing a blog post instead of R code.

Yesterday I gave a presentation for the Epigroup meeting at King's Buildings, which is one of the other University of Edinburgh campuses, and I got to meet a lot of evolutionary biologists at tea time. I tried to convince them that I know something about evolutionary biology since it was half of my major but it's not really true. Oh well. The tea break was held in a room called the "Darwin Dance Hall," so that's amazing. But anyway, continuing to move backwards in time, this past weekend (Friday to Monday) I was in Vienna for the International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance, with my buddy Dr. Jo. I presented two posters and she did a talk and we ate a lot of falafel instead of not-delicious traditional Austrian veggie options and it was super fun - story in pictures below. Since the internet works here!!!

1) Vienna is amazing. They have an ice rink which they call Wiener Eistroum which sadly we didn't get to skate on because they were zamboni-ing. It's got cool long narrow pathways and is not just a regular oval rink.

2) I don't know why I'm numbering these because they are very out of order. We had dinner with a friend of a friend of a friend's friends at an AMAZING Pakistani buffet place where you pay as much as you want to!!! Plus the veggie options were amazing and all vegan.

3) We also went out for some famous Viennese cake and late night coffee at an awesome packed coffee house with an awesome atmosphere.

4) Every night we walked back to our budget, non-conference hosting hotel past this ridiculous building with a crazy lit up ceiling. Still don't know what it is.

5) Eventually, I remembered to take out my camera when it was light out. This building is covered in scaffolding that is printed with an image of the building. CLEVER.

6) Flying out of Bratislava I was reminded about ONE HEALTH. Hoorah. Speaking of flying, I am very proud of my success at smuggling a 4 foot long poster tube in addition to my carry-on bag onto both Easyjet AND Ryanair. On the second flight I was aided by the incredibly long coat of an American that I randomly met while waiting for the bus in Bratislava.

7) Bratislava has a cool changing of the guard thing going. This was before I went to the airport. (I took a train from Vienna to Bratislava to get a direct flight back to Edinburgh. Sadly the high-speed catamaran ride up the Danube wasn't running at convenient times.)

8) Bratislava is not as clean as Vienna. It felt fairly depressed. But on the other hand I spend less than 5 Euros on a meal of the most amazing sandwich ever plus a decent sized glass of incredibly delicious fresh squeezed orange juice at a cafe called Tri-sty-ri which had a bookshelf with a door hidden in it. So overall a good experience. Slovakia: CHECK!

Asechopo Edinburgh

"Asechopo" means "I have arrived" in Dholuo. It also means my language lessons are paying off! A bit.

Anyway, arriving in the UK was a bit of a shocking transition, flying in, seeing all the bright lights that indicate a city, and realizing that everyone here has electricity all of the time! Wow! Also, it's cold, and the morning takes a long time to get bright. I'm staying with Jo and Amy, vet epi people that work in Kenya, and we are next door to a Waitrose supermarket and a Chinese restaurant and across the street from a pub. We have a washing machine but no dryer, and I'll be doing my own laundry again! And I went shopping at the supermarket and got SOOOOOOOO excited, I bought all my favorite British vegan items.

I've spent a lot of time in the UK and I feel very comfortable here and am used to British money and British queueing and all of those things, but I still really feel the contrast between here and Kenya which I didn't feel when I was home for Christmas. For example, I got excited about the potable tap water! And the availability of certain delicious food items, and the bus system! I think the difference in feeling comes from the fact that when I go home, it's just home, and I know and expect things to be the way that they have always been. But Scotland is not quite home, and I'm staying in a flat I've never been in before, and so all of the exciting things about being back in a developed country actually stand out.

I also realized that Edinburgh has approximately the same population size as Kisumu. Which is crazy, considering it feels like a big city and Kisumu most definitely does not. Edinburgh also doesn't have slums and the population isn't half children and the children that there are don't yell in excitement when you walk down the street. But it's not hot and sunny every day and people don't always ask you how you are and everything is expensive.

So anyway, this morning I bought food and unpacked a bit and then took the bus up to the Roslin Institute, where I'll be based for the month that I'm here. My very brief tour of the building was "that's where they cloned Dolly the sheep" and "in this hallway they deal with TSEs" and "they make a lot of things fluorescent here." Pretty cool place to be! We had a brief lunch meeting where it was determined that the data I will be working with isn't ready to be worked with and the code that I need to adapt we don't have yet. But that's okay, it will all happen eventually, and hopefully the fact that I've actually arrived will lead to more things happening, and I'm going to Vienna this weekend for a conference and I have plenty of things to teach myself in order to be able to use the data anyway (what I'll be doing, fyi, is using the data from a study that these guys did in Kenya to improve and expand an existing diagnostic support tool for cattle and making it so it can be used on a smartphone). Hopefully.