Sick!

Well, I made it 200 days in Kenya without getting sick. Of course on my 201st day in Kenya, I got REALLY sick. I had been feeling a little light-headed on Thursday but Friday early morning I woke up with really sharp pains in my stomach. I then had stomach problems all day and had to leave work early because I wasn't feeling well. I had to cancel my usual Friday plans with the other MSID students and tried napping all afternoon. I finally admitted to myself that I was sick enough that I needed to seek help around 8:30pm. There are several hospitals in town - the district hospital (government run), Aga Khan Hospital (a private and very expensive hospital) and Marie Stopes (a private and affordable hospital). I chose Marie Stopes because several of the other students had gone there when they were sick.

I finally got to the hospital after 9pm. Kenyan hospitals are unique in that you have to pay before a doctor even sees you or you receive any treatment. I paid the 500 KSH ($6.25) for a doctor's consultation. Since it's a small hospital, they didn't have anyone working in the lab at night. They took a finger prick to test for malaria and injected me with a broad spectrum anti-biotic. The person doing the injections wasn't wearing latex gloves as she came towards me so I had to ask specifically for her to wear gloves. Her reaction was basically "oh yeah, the gloves."

I was still having stomach problems so the doctor said that she wanted to keep me overnight for observation and to rehydrate me with an IV. I couldn't get any other lab tests done until the morning anyways and they didn't want me to be far from the hospital when I was still feeling ill. I barely slept since I was hooked up to the IV and they checked in with me occasionally to see how I was doing.

Around 7am I was stable enough that they let me go home for a few hours before coming back for the test results. When I went back the doctor told me that I have malaria AND a bacterial infection. It's kind of frustrating since I take my malaria pills every day, I sleep under a mosquito net and I only drink boiled water. They prescribed a few different medicines and I'm feeling better now.

Spring Break Travel - Malindi

Colin and his dad were with us on our flight from Lamu but we got off in Malindi and they proceeded on to Nairobi. We took a tuk-tuk to the hotel where every other group of students from our program has stayed at. For whatever reason, the guy at the reception was being a jerk and refused to budge on the price of the room. We ate lunch at the Italian restaurant at the hotel and then sampled almost all the flavors of gelato. We lugged our bags around the hotel town with us trying to find another hotel. We went to 3 other hotels which ended up all being more expensive than the original hotel. We grudgingly went back to the original hotel and ended up paying 5 times more per night than the guest house we stayed at in Lamu. $20 may not seem like a lot for a hotel room but with the cost of living in that area, those prices were really expensive. We were both feeling very frustrated that we were stuck paying such an expensive price for a hotel room so when we had to fill out the room registration form, Kevin filled it out under the name "Ben Dover." I don't think the people at the reception got it...

All of the prices for food at restaurants in Malindi were also much more expensive than anywhere else we've been in Kenya. Malindi is a very popular destination for Italian travelers. Since a lot of these travelers don't bargain down prices, everything becomes more inflated which ends up hurting the local people who live there. As much as Malindi is a tourist destination, the district is also one of the hardest hit areas for the famine Kenya is currently experiencing.

Malindi doesn't have nearly as much history or interesting things to see and anything there was to see, of course cost money. On Friday we took a matatu to see the Gede Ruins. Gede was a Swahili civilization first active during the 13th century. We went in the late afternoon because the guide book said that the lighting would be better as the sun went down and peaked through the forest canopy. Being the cheap college students we are, we chose not to have a tour guide and we instead just explored the area at our own leisure. I think Kevin and I were unusual tourists because we spent the majority of our time at Gede ruins taking photographs of these really unique flowers and monkeys. I got some cool videos of the monkeys eating and playing.

When we got back to the hotel, we rewarded our "hard" day with gelato, of course! On our last day in Malindi, we even had gelato for breakfast. We caught a matatu for the 2 hour ride back to Mombasa. To cap off our vacation, we spent the afternoon in the only air-conditioned place in steamy Mombasa, Dorman's coffee shop. We caught our bus around 6pm and spent the next 14 hours riding back to Kisumu. The only interesting thing to report was that I saw a baby elephant on the side of the road a few hours outside of Mombasa.

So now I'm back to reality in Kisumu. I have 5 more weeks at my internship before going back to Nairobi for a final two weeks of "research writing" and then I fly home April 25th.

Spring Break Travel - Lamu

During my week in Nairobi, I mentioned my travel plans to my host dad. In the time I've spent with my host family in Nairobi, I've found out that he seems to know just about everyone. Within 10 minutes, he called in a favor and got me 30% off my plane ticket for one leg of my journey. I definitely try to be a budget traveler as often as possible so 30% got me really excited. I haven't flown anywhere in Kenya so far and I usually choose the cheap but inefficient buses to travel East Africa. Several other groups of students from my program had made a similar trip to the coast that I was planning on doing and each group said that the road between Malindi and Lamu was just horrible.

I traveled with my friend Kevin from my program who is also working in Kisumu. We decided to take an overnight bus from Nairobi to Mombasa (8 hours) leaving Saturday night and arriving early Sunday morning. As I've mentioned I've done a lot of bus traveling, but this bus was the worst smelling bus I've been on. After 8 hours, the smell just kind of lingers with you. I am still amazed that as much development has occurred in Kenya, some of the roads are still in absolutely horrible condition. The Nairobi-Mombasa road has a section that you drive on for about an hour that barely resembles anything close to a road. There is supposedly construction on the road but nothing is of course labeled. The buses have to dodge huge potholes that more closely resemble craters in the lunar surface in addition to numerous diversions that often result in confused cars heading right at each other nearly avoiding head on collisions. At one point the bus came to a screeching halt because a group of hyenas were crossing the road. A few hours later, I got woken up by the bus honking and as I rubbed my eyes I saw an elephant standing on the side of the road waiting to cross.

All of us academic year students have come up with our own Kenya version of the saying "This is Africa (TIA)." Whenever something bad/interesting happens that you just can't explain through coherent logic, we just say "katiks" which has evolved from "Katika Kenya"- roughly translated as "Only in Kenya."

Kevin and I arrived in Mombasa around 5am. It was too dark out to safely walk around so we sat outside of the bus office and watched early morning Mombasa go by until it became light. Carrying our luggage we found a small breakfast place and ate chapatis and mandazi (fried dough) - an okay breakfast for 40 cents U.S. After breakfast we took a tuk-tuk to the matatu stage to catch a matatu to Malindi. The ride was about two hours from Mombasa to Malindi. We got to Malindi by 9:30am which was more than enough time to catch our flight at 2pm. None of the restaurants were open until 11am so we walked to the end of the pier and read our books for awhile. It was interesting watching people fish because two men would walk deep into the water with nets and then drag the nets to the shore by slowly walking. It didn't seem very efficient and the entire time we were there, we saw them catch 3 fish. We ate lunch at an Italian restaurant appropriately called I Love Pizza.

After lunch we headed off to the airport to catch our flight to Lamu. The flight only took about 25 minutes but I was so exhausted from the overnight bus ride that I slept the whole time. Lamu is part of the larger Lamu Archipelago. The airstrip is on an island across from Lamu island so we took a motorized boat for 100 KSH ($1.25). All of the guide books warned against the touts when you arrive on the island so we planned out a few guest houses that we wanted to go to. The guide books say that people will often to carry your bags and then escort you to the hotel/guest house of your choosing but then demand up to 1/3 of your night's stay from the hotel. The hotel then increases the nightly rate to compensate. Kevin and I both like bargaining so we went to the first guest house and got a good price but we thought we could do better so we went to two other ones. The first price ended up being the best so we went back and negotiated the price for bed and breakfast. The woman who owned the guest house said she was willing to work with us on a good price because we came by ourselves and not with touts. After some negotiating, we agreed on 500 KSH ($6.25) a night for bed and breakfast.

We did some walking around the town but we were exhausted so we went back to the room. Kevin fell asleep at 5pm and I fell asleep around 7pm and neither one of us woke up until 9am the next morning. I guess we saved some money by not eating dinner. Around 4am, I got woken up by a huge crash and I saw electric sparks. I turned on the lights to see that the support beam that had the ceiling fan on it had broken and came crashing down within 5 feet of our beds. There was nothing we could really do at 4 in the morning so we said "katiks" and went back to bed.

Monday was our first full day in Lamu so we did some exploring around the town which was really fascinating. A lot of the buildings are very historical and built in the traditional style. There are no cars on the island but people use some of the 3,000 donkeys on the island to get around or transport goods. We walked along the beach for awhile and took a lot of pictures of some wooden dhows stranded in the low tide. In the afternoon, we met up with one of our friend who works for Millenium Villages Project in Kisumu.

Colin, one of the other students in my program arrived Monday night in Lamu so Tuesday Kevin and I went on a dhow trip with Colin and his dad who was traveling with Colin during Spring Break. We sailed (with the help of a motor) for about an hour to reach the coral reefs near Manda Toto Island. We snorkeled for a few hours and then had a great lunch prepared for us by the dhow crew. We had fresh fish, chapatis, and a lot of fresh fruit. Even though I put on sunscreen my back got FRIED!!! I've been in extreme pain since Tuesday. I guess SPF 30 just isn't enough for equatorial sun.

On Wednesday we just did some more exploration of the island. We purposely got lost in order to discover the in's and out's of the different alleyways. We got lunch with Colin and his dad at a rooftop terrace restaurant overlooking the town and then headed to Shela Beach which is about a 10 km walk from Lamu town. We went swimming for awhile and then watched the sunset. Kevin and I decided to walk back to Lamu town around 9pm but we completely underestimated the tide. We ended up wading through waist-deep water for close to a mile and in the process cut up our feet.

Thursday morning we did some souvenir shopping and then caught our flight to Malindi at Noon.

Research Update

I was in Nairobi for the week of February 23-27 for my program's mid-term seminar. I met with a few of my professor's to discuss my progress with my research so far. The bulk of my research is already done and now I have a lot of data analysis to do. Along with two Community Health Workers who served as translators, I went to 42 homes of the orphans and vulnerable children who are in my research study. At each home I took a picture of the guardian in front of their house. I find it very interesting to look through all 42 of these photos because it really shows the variation of the styles and conditions of the houses in this area. The families who are the best off have a metal sheet roof and possibly even a few glass windows. One of the houses I remember as being different than all the rest had hard-mud walls with a metal sheet roof. The woman who lived in the house had taken a different kind of mud and painted flowers and other designs on the exterior of the house. I felt like it was really an example of a person making the best of their situations.

A fair amount of the houses I visited had mud walls and sometimes the guardians were even repairing the walls as we approached the home. The one family that really struck me had a young boy at the primary school who was disabled. He has a hunchback and a significant bulge in his chest. Of all of the children in my research study, he was the only one who was "very underweight." The house did not really have proper walls. The walls had a stick frame but there was little substance to the actual wall. About 3/4 of the walls had plastic bags as the barrier from the outside. The other 1/4 of the walls were just open to the elements. This particular family was particularly bad off so after meeting with the family, we made the decision to start him in our feeding center immediately. He was originally in my research study as part of the group who was not receiving help at the feeding center. I chose to not withhold the help at the feeding center in the name of "do no harm." Although we can unfortunately not make this exception for every student who is currently not receiving help at the feeding center, we continue to expand the feeding center's outreach and hope to eventually be able to include all of the children participating in the research study.

During my time in Nairobi for the mid-term seminar and my week off for break, one of my co-workers along with one of the Community Health Workers weighed and measured the children on the assigned date for the two weeks.

For the rest of my research, I will continue to measure the children each week until April 10th. I hope to set up a meeting with the head teacher of the primary school this week to discuss with him academic records. The third and final component of my research is to look at academic performance, attendance records and school drop-out rates at the primary school. I'm looking to compare the two groups of children - those receiving help at the feeding center and those who aren't currently receiving help. Almost every single family I spoke with in the household surveys said that their child never misses school because of chores or household labor. School attendance is a major issue, so it will be interesting to compare the responses of the family with the actual records.