Remember when I told you in the last post that we were going
to Nairobi for the weekend? I lied. Or not really, but we didn’t end up going.
It was a culmination of many things. I have already lived in Nairobi (that
shouldn’t be surprising) and the main reason other people wanted to go was to
find a descent bookstore. Either way, I was going to go for something to do and
so that the other people could experience Nairobi in all its smelly scary
glory. (ok, its not that bad. But it is pretty smelly) So the other interns and
I got to the bus stage at 5:00 with hope of catching a bus in order to get to
Nairobi around 11:00 pm. We found a bus for 7:00, decided it would be fine
since we could still get some sleep that night, and booked a ticket. We grabbed
good seats on the bus around six and waited to leave. Four hours later we still
had not left and seriously evaluated our options. At this point we’d get to
Nairobi around 5 AM because driving at night takes longer, meaning sleeping
would hardly be worth it, meaning we’d be cranky for our one day in Nairobi.
So we got off the bus. And it was awesome.
The rest of the weekend was just fun. On Saturday we went to
Kit Makayi, which is a bunch of really neat rock formations outside of Kisumu.
As interesting as rocks sound (they don’t), it was surprisingly cool.
Cody
Kit Makyai
Kat, Ludi, and Shane
On the way back we could not get a matatu to stop for us,
but we did get a pick up truck. Also a way cooler way to travel than a matatu.
View from the back of the pickup truck
The following week was finalizing things with my grant
proposal. I am working with the
LIvliyhoods team at KMET and a local community called Kanyumba to build a rain
collecting tank. Now, I know what you are thinking: “Wait, I thought you went
there as a nutrition intern?! Rain isn’t nutrition related!” And you are
completely correct. But lets be serious- I really haven’t been working with the
nutrition department while I’ve been here. Most of the outreaches and work I’ve
done has been with Livlihoods. Plus, the rainwater collecting tank is more
sustainable than anything I could do with nutrition, as well as a means to
reduce the prevalence of water-borne illness in the area, prevent attacks on
women collecting water from the far away river, and provide a cheap source of
water during the dry season. The tank is community built and mostly community
funded. Currently they are going for a final push in their part of the
fundraising, so hopefully by next week we can start building. The actual tank
only takes 3-5 days to build so it might be done by the time I leave. Which
would be pretty neat.
This past weekend we were the ultimate tourists and went to
Maasai Mara for a safari. In the middle of the first day, our tire popped as we
tried to cross a puddle. Then the jack broke. Once the men (I don’t know how to
change a tire…) got a doughnut on, we drove for a few minutes. Then the fuel
tank fell out of the bottom. So the men (I didn’t even know a fuel tank could
do that, let alone how to fix one) fixed the tank by securing it with rope and
electric tape, it was time to leave the mara. But don’t fret, we made up for it
the next day. As with the last time, pictures will describe it better. Side
note: My camera sucks at zoom, so the pictures where the animals look really
close? They were actually closer.
Monkey in a tree at a rest stop. And then his friend bit my shoe
rawr
baby elephant!!
We are winding down our time here. It’s weird. Leaving it at
that.
Happy July everyone! It’s hard to believe that I’ve been
here for over a month or that I am leaving in less than a month.
I guess it’s been a while. And I thought I was posting
regularly. But suddenly, two weeks after the last post I have worried aunts
messaging me to check to see if I am still alive (Love you). But
I guess it is time for an update anyway.
look closely to see the mangoes
As a part of the Heston program, each intern is give $200 to
use as a grant towards a program we encounter. I really would like to do
something with food sustainability or food security. Lots of projects are available
that not only could use a grant, but would also be sustainable afterwards. So
two Wednesday s ago I went to visit Tom. Tom is basically KMET’s guinea pig for
their food security projects, and he was awesome. He has maybe half an acre of
land which contains his house, two fish farms, maize, mangoes, bananas, three
chicken coups, a goat pen, a couple of cows, and multiple gardens. Him and his
wife manage all of it. One of his favorite lines was “It’s all organic”, which,
unlike certified organic food in the US, it actually is. The project he was
most excited about was his breeding of chickens. In really simple genetics, he
crossed a bigger, “exotic” (his words) chicken with a local, small, but more
durable chicken. This is the result:
Tank chicken
I left with plenty of ideas for the grant, but I haven’t
finalized it yet. Just have to wait for the next post for that.
That Friday, KMET had a huge outreach to a local school. I was assigned to deworm kids again. Like normal kids, they don’t want to take their medicine.They try all sorts of tricks to get out of taking it. It's like a game- how quickly can the escape before I said "tafuna kwanza" (chew first). I managed to get most of them.A team of four managed to deworm over 1000 kids.
See how enthused he is?
Also, I have begun going to the pertiatric malnutrition
ward at Kisumu Distric Hospital once a week for some in-patient experience.
This is where the children end up after the community health workers refer
them. I went last Tuesday and mostly just observed and learned the different
types of severe malnutrition. Marasmus is the kind we usually think of- babies
with wide eyes and stick legs to support a body of ribs. Kwashiorkor is when
the child bloats. They look fat, but it is really edema fluid flooding their
limbs and organs. Kwashiorkor is actually the more serious of the two,
expecially since one of the symptoms is complete lose of appetite. How do you
cure a malnourished child who refuses to eat?
The treatment plans are actually very simple. They use therapeutic
food, starting with a milk supplement to stabilize the child. Once the child is
able to keep food down, they begin the Plump Nut regimen. Plumpy Nut is an adorably
named therapeutic food similar to peanut butter with a goal to solve a
not-so-cute issue. The results of Plumpy Nut are clearly visible as most children
are discharged after two weeks.
Many of the children I saw the first day were almost
ready to be discharged, minus Eliot, a clearly marasmus 2 month old baby. When
I went back today, I saw his bed was occupied by another healthier looking
child. I was impressed that they had managed to discharge Eliot so quickly, but
my optimism was quickly squashed when I enquired further. Eliot passed away on Friday.
There’s not much more I can say about that. It sucks.
Over the weekend I met the head of the CDC AIDs
initiative in Africa. I went to her house to play apples to apples. Very normal
for an extraordinary person. On Sunday I took Wendy, Junior, and three of the
other kids who hang around our house to the pool. Most of them went there not
knowing how to swim, but at least left knowing how to hold their breath under water.
The next two weekends we will be traveling, first to Nairobi, then to Maasi
Mara. Expect some more interesting stories and pictures.
This weekend we went to the Kakamega rainforest. It was our
first weekend out of Kisumu, and was quite well timed as we were getting a
little stir crazy. Kisumu is beautiful, but small. Our friend from work,
Brenda, had a friend who got us a great deal on a hostel. So the three
Gettysburg interns (Shane, Ludi, and I), two interns from another clinic at
Ring Road (Cody and Cat), and Brenda and her three friends (Malike, Steve, and Ken) took a 45 minute
matatu to the forest. Instantly upon walking in we saw monkeys and butterflies galore.
We went to the view point to look out over the forest and then visited the
falls. On the way out, Cody bought the group a stick of sugar cane to gnaw on.
Sugar can it weird to eat. You chew it for the sweet taste, but it is
impossible to swallow. Its much easier to eat when you resign to the fact that
there is no attractive way to eat it. As we were walking back to the gate, it
began to rain. Not unuaual for a rainforest. A family in a hut on the way waved
us inside, where we sat and hung out until the rain passed. American would
never causally let a stranger into their home to get them out of the rain. The
gesture was random and cool.
Pictures are worth a
thousand words, so here you go:
Almost everyone who went- left to right- Cat, Ken, Ludi, Steve, Brenda, and me
In the jungle
INCEPTION TREE (a tree within a tree)
View from the view point
The fall...were small
Adorable big-eyed baby from the field
Last week Shane and I went out to the community to deworm
some kids and hand out vitamin A supplements. The kids were adoreable. Some
were outright terrified of us. The outreach worker assured us it was ok, it’s
just our skin that freaks them out. I guess that makes sense since we are all
pasty and pale like corpses. Us walk through the slum is basically like the
zombie apocalypse. Outreach work is the most enjoyable thing we do here, but
sadly that is not every day.
Deworming
On the home front, my family is still awesome. Clyde, the
little toddler next door, is finally not scared of me anymore. While writing
this post he came into my room and hung out with me. He doesn’t talk, just
stares. Still cute though.
Clyde
Junior, aka Kim, my host brother, has a new favorite game.
He just tries to scare me any chance he gets. It worked once. He wiggled himself
under the couch I was sitting on without me notice and then kicked the seat.
Since then he’s tried to top it. He knocks on my window oat night, hides under
my bed, and even tied a battery to a shoe lace and hid it in my bed, hoping I
would think it was a snake. I threatened to spray him with bug spray and he
lightened up, but I still check under the bed before I go to sleep.
Junior
Last week we went to Jomo Kenyatta sport ground to play
around a bit and were joined by Charles. Hs English was flawless and smiled all
the time. Upon asking where he was from, he announced a was a street boy. Being
a street boy is a terrifying prospect in Kisumu. They are abandoned, beaten,
raped, robbed, and recruited into gangs. Often times you see them stumbling
through the street sniffing glue to numb whatever they are feeling. After a
while you get used to some unsettling sights here, but not this one.
Fortunately, Charles was only two days into his scary stay on the streets and
Cody knew a place specifically for street kids called Agape. Cody made him
promise to meet back at the sports grounds the next day to go to Agape. After Cody left, Ludi, Shane, and I took him
to buy some bread for dinner. The next day, we met up with Cody to find
Charles. Like the bright boy he is, he decided to wait under the tree we had
first met him at.
Agape seemed to be a fabulous facility. They are about a decade
old and did rehabilitation for street children. The manager told us of their
overwhelming success and preached that he believed that the primary thing the
children needed was a little love. As a hippy-liberal-psych major, I was
fascinated. Find a mindset like this in Kenya is rare and I was excited that
Charles was admitted.
A final story to put Kenya in perspective. On Friday, I fell
while on a run. The roads are rocky and I scrapped up my hands and knee. I
finished the run and arrived home. Typically, the women around my house freak
out over small thing. If there is too little rice on my plate or my shoes are
not clean, I will hear about it for ten minutes after. But when I walked into
the house bleeding, every woman stopped me, looked at me for a minute, smiled,
and said “That is life”, and walked away. It’s so true. That is life. Life
hurts and there is not all that much anybody can do about it except cover it
with a bandaid and hope it turns out ok.
A week in and Kisumu is still awesome. Over the weekend we
went to see Lake Victoria and then met up with a guy from Atlanta for dinner at
his house. He was a nice guy and is living in Kisumu for the next four years
with his wife while working at a clinic. His wife made quiche. It was nice to
muzungu-out for a little while.
On Sunday, my host- mom let me help cook, which is always
exciting to me. We were making omena and I had to sort through it. What is
omena?
this is omena
oh hai
Omena is a dish of little fish. You see people selling them
on the side of the road in huge piles. So, what do you do with a huge cluster
of little fish?
I'm a fish with a nose like a sssswwwwoooorrrdddd...
Typically they are stewed in a tomato-y sauce. The other
times I have eaten them it wasn’t very good. There’s not much to the fish other
than skin and the eye. But the way my host mom made hers was actually quite
bearable with minimal thinking about what I was eating.
On Monday the interns divided up into their preferred area.
I meet the nutrition staff and talked to Debra, the lady in charge. Right now I
am going to be doing simple things like making documents to store their client’s
contact information. The nutrition department at KMET makes and sells nutra-flour.
It is made of milled soybeans, millet, and peanuts and is used to make a porridge.
The porridge itself is a complete meal, with plenty of protein and fats as opposed
to just the usual carbs. After meeting
with Debra, I sat with the nutrition staff and sorted through the soy beans.
They tried to teach me Luo. It is really freaking hard. Their word for “thank
you” has like 7 syllables.
After the soybeans, we bagged some flour for the next day’s
trip to Busia. I got a chance to actually try to porridge, and it’s not bad. It’s
way better than just straight millet porridge.
Today we visited three schools to drop off the flour and
deworm the students. At every school dozens of faces squeezed out the windows to
see the weird looking visitor shake all the teacher’s hands. Deworming, while the joke stereotypical thing that people do in Africa, isn’t
such a terrible thing; you just give the student a pill to take. It’s very easy
actually.
Greetings from Kisumu y’all! As of right now, I have been in
the city for a few days. We arrived Monday night to our homestays. The flights
were fine other than long. Though, if you are following international news (or
at least Kenya related news. I know some of the more worried readers are), you
may have seen that a building exploded in Nairobi. I saw it on the TV when we
walked off the plane. At the time, they were insisting it was not a terrorist
attack, but instead an electrical fault. I could see the smoke from the
building as we flew over Nairobi on the way to Kisumu. By the time we arrived
at our homestays, the stories had changed to be in more support of a terrorist
attack.
Welcome back.
Here, in Kisumu, there is far less of a chance of such an
attack, so don’t panic people. I already
like my homestay family. There’s my mom, Joy, an employee of KMET in the HIV
section. Her daughter, Wendy, is 12 and reminds me of a quieter version of
Stacey (see last trip's posts). Her son, Kim, is 8 and spent the first hour and
a half hiding from me. He emerged when I gave them the giant bag of Hershey
kisses as a gift. It was as much of a hit as last time, though instead of
hiding the bag, there paraded their neighbors through the house to get some
chocolate. I cannot remember the names of everyone I met, which is going to be
super awkward later.
Jamaa yangu
The actual house is much smaller than my Nairobi home. There
is a small kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms, one of which is mine. It
has a window facing the narrow outdoor- corridor that leads to the front
door. I was asking the kids about the
room and why they are giving it up for me. I didn’t think that seemed fair,
even though Joy insisted. Wendy explained, however, that although it is
technically their room, they never sleep there. The window scares them. Slept there the last two nights and it seemed ok. I’ll let you know if the window starts
attacking though.
The house has no running water. The “shower” is a bucket in
a little outdoor shed. The bathroom is a pit latrine about a three
minutes walk from the house. I am not allowed to go there by myself at night
for safety reasons. I expected to not be allowed out at night, but I didn’t
take into account a situation like this. It’s quite the change from Nairobi,
where there was a hot water shower, sinks, and a toilet. Challenge accepted
though.
The family still won’t let me help cook or clean or do much
else for myself, as expected. I made my aunt (I think she is my homestay-aunt)
promise to let me cook tonight. But we’ll see. I can’t just casually start
doing the dishes like in Nairobi without running water, so sneaky helping-out
isn’t as easy.
During the day, my room is shared with Lydia, the maid’s
daughter. Lydia has cerebral palsy and cannot walk. Her mother lays a towel
down of the floor and rests her there for the day. Disability is handled a bit
differently here. Definitely more of an out of sight, out of mind
approach.
Today we got our orientation at KMET. The few staff who know
me keep introducing me as “Emily, the one who knows Swahili”, which is terrible
because now they expect me to actually know Swahili. I can mostly just apologize for not
understanding what they are saying. Apart from fudging their language, I’ll probably be working
with their nutrition program. More on that later once I start.
It feels like I never left this country. Kisumu is different
from Nairobi, but in many ways the same. It’s nice not to have the panic I
first felt in the fall.
Time flies. I got home from school about two weeks ago and I
am leaving for Kisumu on Sunday. I would say I can’t believe I’m going, but I really
can. The last two weeks have been crammed with appointments, check ups, and
shopping. I almost got my insurance to cover half my Larium (malaria prevention
medication. The one that causes the trippy dreams), but they decided that it wasn't a necessary drug since I was using it for travel. Funny thing- I wouldn't need it if I was staying in the US for the summer.
Shopping isn’t as bad as I thought. Occasionally I still
stop and think I might actually need the super-sonic, UV protecting, LED
flashlight with rechargeable solar powered batteries and a built in disco ball,
but I really don’t. As you’ve all seen from the last trip, I’m not going to the
middle of nowhere. They will have stores and batteries, roads and electricity
(sometimes). This time I know this, and my goal is to have a much lighter bag. See
if I succeed.
As a part of my internship, I am required to keep a second
blog. Here’s the link :http://heston2012.posterous.com.
It also includes the accounts of all the other Heston interns. There are two in
Nicaragua and 5 in Gettysburg, two of which are manning the Campus Kitchen
while the other coordinators and I are gone. I’ll still be posting on this one,
probably with the less professional stories. So stay tuned here if you want to
hear about baboon encounters and matutu hell-rides. Check out posterous for
stories about KMET and development. Personally, I think this blog is prettier.
At least for now.
I’m excited to go. Waiting is the worst part. It gives me
time to think of all the things I’ll miss from home. I am missing the annual
family trip to New Hampshire for the second year in a row and my 21st
birthday. Both of which I’ll obviously survive. It’s what happens when you give
up normalcy for a while. This time, however, I’m leaving missing friends and
family much more that I did last time. I had a whole summer to accept that I
wasn’t going to see people. Having only left school two weeks ago, I keep
thinking I should make plans with people, and then remember that I can’t/ shouldn’t/
really should be packing instead. So, to all my readers, keep in touch. I get
email and facebook, what more do you need in life? Miss you all already.
Remember back in December when I promised that it wasn’t my last post? You thought I was lying, that I just left you hanging. That implies that my life is interesting enough to have cliff hangers, but anyway…
SURPRISE!
I’m back. The transition back home wasn’t bad and I had minimal culture shock. I already feel like a normal “American” again.
Now on to exciting and blog-relevant news:
I’m going back to Kenya this summer!
After returning to college, I applied for something called a Heston Internship. It is run through the public service center at my school. Over the last few years, the internship has sent students to Nicaragua and Uganda. This year, they switched from Uganda to Kenya.
The internship is through an organization call KMET, located in Kisumu. If you remember (also from the last post), Kisumu is a city to the west of Nairobi located on Lake Victoria. KMET is one of the coolest organizations I’ve heard of as it seems to do everything.
Kisumu is a predominately Luo city. If you remember my Nairobi homestay family was Luo. While labeling isn’t really my thing, figuring out what tribe is dominant in the area is helpful. Chances are, there’s going to be a little anxiety going on while we are there. There has been a lot of discussion about the next presidential election. The last one didn’t fair to well for those in Kisumu. While a lot of the post election violence in 2008 was in Nairobi, Kisumu was hit almost equally as hard since it was a conflict between the Luos and Kikuyu. Luckily for us, the election date was pushed back to March 2013, making our time there a little less worrisome. Though the constitutionality of moving the date is under scrutiny, so who knows, they might move it again.
Knowing that Kisumu is predominantly Luo is also important because it means that many of the locals will speak Luo. So after months of Swahili (most of which I have forgotten), I will be back to square one as far as not understanding. All I know in Luo is my name, but even then I wouldn’t know when to say it since I don’t know basic Luo conversation questions. So I won’t know if someone is asking my name. So whenever someone asks me something in Luo, I’ll just respond “Akini” to be safe.
“Can you pass the salt?
“Akini.”
It will work well.
I am going with three other students from Gettysburg. We actually get to pick what program we want to work with within KMET. Origionally, I want to work with home-based HIV testing and counseling as that is what I did my ISP on. However, the program was taken over by the government so I can’t really work with it. Not a problem though, as there are at least three other programs I would love to work with. Once we get to Kisumu, we have a week to tour the KMET facilities and figure out what we would like to work with.
Facts you may want to know:
I leave May 27th, luckily out of JFK. Hopefully without a three-day delay this time. Our layover is in Dubia this time, which is also kind of exciting. We land in Nairobi and then almost immediately get on a plane to Kisumu. This will be completely different from my last trip to Kisumu. I’m hoping it is less painful, but it won’t be nearly as exciting.
We are there for 2 months. We fly back to the states on July 29th.
We are expected to do some kind of project with whatever program we work with. More on that at a later date.
We will be living with homestay families again. I don’t know if I get to know about my family before going this time. That would be nice since I went into my last homestay without a clue.
Kisumu is safer than Nairobi (or Nai-robbery as it sometime called. Not much competition with a name like that). The student who lived there during ISP often spoke about going out at night, something we Nairobi kids didn’t get to do. So that will be nice.
Weather wise we are there during the shift between the “long rain” season and a dry season. During July the temperature begins to drops. Kenyan “winters” are in August, so I guess our time there is technically “fall”.
That’s all I have for now. Words cannot not describe how excited I am to go back, and even more excited to be in a different city. Nairobi had its perks, but Kisumu seems awesome.
Ninarudi Kenya! (I don’t even remember if that’s right… I need to start studying again)
