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.

Vitamin D

I don't have much to say about life other than that since getting back from my visit to the US I've started missing things like fast internet and being able to drive myself around. Exactly one week from now I will be in the UK, and so the internet problem will be solved. Unfortunately the trip also means giving up sunshine and blue skies for quite a while. But, when you have the internet, you never need to go outside, right?

In terms of the project, I had a frustrating and depressing week last week trying to make things happen before I leave for Scotland next Monday, but Darryn pulled through in a Skype call and gave me just enough mentor encouragement to rekindle my optimism and help me get things done. So, reporting is starting up again this week, yay!

It is also necessary for me to post a picture of one of my favorite new puppies. Unfortunately, the internet just can't handle the picture uploading thing so you'll just have to make an assumption about her cuteness. In the comments, please debate about my puppy-acquiring aspiration. I'm pretty sure it won't be impossible for me to bring her back with me to the US in June.

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.

wow fast internet

Just thinking how even though I'm home in NJ now, and the internet is super fast, I don't really feel like using it. Also been thinking about how lucky I am to live in Kenya. I wanted to find some pictures to convince you of that, but it's hard to express in pictures I guess. Come visit! I'll be back there Jan 8.


Those are impala on the side of the path.


Crater Lake, Naivasha.

Life on a Sugar Plantation

As you may recall from my last post, this past week has been incredibly busy as everything that needs to get done before the end of the year pretty much fails to get done. We successfully received our VIP visitors although we don't know yet how much they want to collaborate with us. On Friday CDC/KEMRI had a big retreat with enforced fun for all of the staff, including such amazing activities as an eating contest and trust falls. We (Darryn, Jo, Steph and I) escaped a bit early from the big day for our own personal working/writing retreat at a farmhouse about an hour outside of Kisumu. As you can see, it was both relaxing and productive, if you pretend that I could see my laptop screen while sitting in the 90 degree sun.

But honestly we did get a lot of work done, and went on a couple of horseback rides around the amazingly green landscape that is the sugar plantation. Actually it's not JUST a sugar plantation, they grow coffee, raise cows and make cheese, breed horses (they have 65) and run a guesthouse. Oh, those Kenyan Cowboys really know how to live the life! A few other visitors (two vets and a veterinary immunologist) came and joined us for the second night, bringing along a 12 year old Australian Cattle Dog that has lived on 4 continents. We had a lot of good talk about zoonotic disease surveillance etc leaving Steph to hopefully make progress on her solely human related work. The immunologist did her PhD and a postdoc at UCDavis before coming here. Honestly I meet more people with Davis connections than seems at all possible.

On the way back home this afternoon, we stopped at Tilapia Beach for lunch. This is the view over the "lake" aka invasive water hyacinth field... it drifts around disconcertingly and is sort of nauseating to watch because you don't really expect what looks like green land to be moving.

Tomorrow we have the day off for Kenyan Independence Day (actually today 12/12), Tuesday I'm going to the field to officially end the pilot stage of the surveillance project so that we can start afresh in January with a system that hopefully will work consistently, and Wednesday I fly to Nairobi for important work meetings with the important visitors from last week, then don't bother coming back to Kisumu before flying back to NJ on the 22nd! Wowee.