In which I take a really long time to tell you about my safari!

Oh. My.
Sorry it’s been so long but it’s been a crazy week!
Last you heard was about Wednesday in the clinic.
It only got more…and more…and MORE insane. We saw 150 people the first day…and almost doubled it every day. 150-ish, 350-ish, 550-ish, then 800-ish. It was CRAZY. And every day the pharmacy got crazier because although the doctors seemed to be handling the increased load just fine, the pharmacy just got more and more backed up because we could never have any more help than me and Chrissy filling the prescriptions, with the Kenyan pharmacist Elizabeth explaining the drugs to the patients, because the room was SO tiny. Thursday we ate standing up, Friday and Saturday we just got a lot of samosas at “tea time” and munched on them all day, literally never sitting down until around 5pm. It was insane, but a lot of fun. Along the way we sent 4 more infants to the hospital and paid for their stay. One was severely dehydrated, one was having febrile seizures (non medical people: a seizure because the baby had such a high fever), one had a tumor behind its right eye that was pushing the eye out so far it couldn’t close the lid all the way, and one 2-week old baby with this impetigo skin infection that causes sores and peeling skin, that would have died within a couple of days had it not been treated.

Every afternoon they had a service at the church after the clinic and usually I didn’t go because we were cleaning up/packing up everything for the next day/trying to package meds into their little bags for easy dispensing. I heard they were really good though…and at the end of the week 300 people had gotten saved.

Saturday we ended up closing registration around 1 because we had about 150 people’s prescriptions waiting already, and we knew we were going to run out of a bunch of drugs…and we did. Chrissy and I told Dr. James he wasn’t allowed to leave the pharmacy because we had questions about every prescription because we had to substitute so many things. Eventually we managed to get through everyone and then had the joy of packing up all the drugs into boxes and getting them all in the car.

Sunday morning we went to church and I brought my suitcase with me and went back with the Basses and the team to where they were staying. We went to a shopping center that had a tourist-y African market in the parking lot and did a lot of shopping there. We all just hung out that evening and went to bed, since we were waking up at 4:45 to leave by 5:45 the next morning for our safari!!

We had all the big suitcases sent to the AG compound and we all took small suitcases with us to a little airport to wait for a while before getting on a little plane (propellers, 2 seats-aisle-2 seats, etc.) for a 45 minute flight to a private airstrip…which is just a strip of dirt in the middle of the savannah.
When we got off the plane there were zebras and gazelles and these deer-like things called topis grazing not far away. The trucks for the camp we stayed at, called Kichwa Tembo (elephant head- it used to be a hunting camp and there used to therefore be elephant skulls around, hence the name) were waiting for us. They served us tea and cookies, then we piled I the trucks and went for a long and convoluted ride to the camp, so we could see some animals.

Within the first HOUR we saw first topi (they have patches of bluish grey on their upper legs, and yellow-ish on the lower leg- “blue jeans yellow socks”) and zebra (I was amazed by how distinct the stripes were…they looked like they’d been painted onto a smooth surface rather than a product of different colored fur) and elephants, and gazelle, and impalas, and lions, and giraffes, and mongooses (geese??) and warthogs, and buffalos, and a bunch of different birds…it was incredible.

Eventually we got to the camp and had more tea and lunch and went to our tents. They were NICE. It was basically a platform with a built-in toilet, sink, and shower, with a tent pitched over it. It was about as nice as any hotel I’ve stayed in. Even the water pressure was good! We relaxed for a little in the afternoon and took a bunch of pictures of the warthogs that live all around the camp like cats (they know they’re safe from lions there, so they wander around, eat grass, drink out of the pool…etc.) At 3:30 we went on another “game drive” as they call them, and saw more of the things we’d seen in the morning, and a rhinoceros. There are only 9 in the whole mara…the drivers basically radio each other whenever they see hard-to-find things and they all come racing over. That’s what we did. When we got there she was lying down and we literally sat and waited 20 minutes for her to stand up so we could take pictures. Eveeentually she did. J Whenever the rhino is spotted the park ranger comes too and documents which one and where she is.

Apparently a while ago there was only 1, and they called her Virgin Mary. One day she walked to Tanzania and came back a while later with a mate. They had 4 babies over time, and there are 3 others that came from across the river, so now there’s 9.

It was getting late so we started back, they have to be out of the national park by 6:30 pm, but it’s still a half hour drive from the gate to the camp, and the animals are of course outside the park as well. It started raining so Sammy our guide, who was awesome and funny and the best ever, pulled out ponchos for us.

We finally got back, ate an AMAZING dinner (All the food was awesome. Like being on a cruise again) and then I spent the evening trying to put my 500+pictures from the day on my laptop and editing them.

Tuuuuuuuuuuuuesday morning we left at 6:30 for another game drive, where we saw hippos galooore. They are really fat. But surprisingly fast. And their tracks are ALL over the place. Apparently they spend the day napping in the water and the night wandering around eating grass, making all these tracks through the mud and grass with their giant feet. Then they go back to the river and poop, and fertilize the river vegetation and fish. It’s the circle of life.
PS we had the WORST Itunes ADD in our truck…for some reason everything reminded us of a song and we were constantly bursting out into song, or movie quotes…often from the lion king. Every time we saw a warthog nobody seemed to be able to resist singing “when he was a young warthog!” and so on.

So then we all got our trucks together and ate breakfast by the Mara River, and saw hippos sleeping in a line along the banks, and crocodiles waiting for the couple of weeks until the wildebeest make their great migration and cross over.
We saw some hyenas sitting in the mud outside their den…I tried to convince them that they should go hunt something but they weren’t having it. They just wanted to sleep.
In the afternoon we went to a Maasai village- a legit village where people actually live..not a tourist setup. We saw their houses, they talked to us about their culture/way of life…we went inside one of the houses, they did a welcome dance/song, the men had a jumping contest (they do this grunty-yelp-y singing while they take turns jumping. Whoever jumps the highest wins all the girlfriends) They started a fire by rubbing two sticks together, in like TWO MINUTES. They had a piece of a very soft wood, and put that down on a knife. Then they put a stick of really hard wood perpendicular to it and spun it between their hands until they had burned a hole in the soft wood. They wrapped it in dried out grass and blew on it until it flamed. Ta da!

This village had 4 families living in it. Each family has their own entrance to the village (which is fenced in with dried brush). Each wife has her own house. When a woman gets married she builds a mud house, so you can tell the number of wives in a village by the number of huts. The houses have a kitchen-y room, and sleeping room, and a room for the goats and sheep to sleep in, for protection. The cows stay all together in the middle of the village and someone keeps watch. Needless to say, there were a LOT of flies in the place and the ground over the whole center of the village was mostly manure, the edges were manure-y dirt.

Then they’d set up a market just outside where they had all sorts of beaded things and carvings etc, so we bought some stuff. We spent the rest of the afternoon driving either through the tall grass looking for cheetas or along the treeline looking for leopards…but no luck. :-/

Wednesday we did one drive in the morning before breakfast where we saw a couple of male lions lying lazily in the grass, but they wouldn’t stand up for us. The radio said that there were some walking around nearby so we went to see. There was a lioness who was just walking into the grass as we got there, and 2 seconds later laid down and we couldn’t see her anymore. By then it was time to go, still no cheetahs or leopards, so we went back to the camp.

Random things:
Sammy had to go through 6 months of school in Nairobi and 6 in Tanzania to get this job as a guide. All the guides are quite knowledgable about the mara, the animals behavior, identifying them and the birds and what not. They work 6 weeks at a time with 2 weeks off in between…quite a life.

There were a couple of times we got really close to animals, and it was pretty awesome. At one point, there were some elephants not too far in front of us…some on one side of the road, some on the other. There was a baby that had just realized its mom was across the road and started running after her trumpeting , it was quite a sight to see. J Later there was a baby elephant nursing, which was cool to see.

Some things that Sammy told us that I found amusing:

The way to tell male from female zebras: Males are black with white stripes and females are white with black stripes. (obviously he was kidding….)
They call the solitary male buffalo “retired generals” because they used to lead a herd but have since been kicked out by a stronger, younger male
Warthogs run with their tails straight up in the air, he called it a GPS. He also told us that they have a really short memory span…one might be running away from a lion and mid-run forget what it was doing, stop, see the lion, get scared, and start running again.
Swahili was born in Tanzania, got sick in Kenya, and died in Uganda. (very true.. Tanzania has the best Swahili in Africa, Kenya speaks a very improper dialect, and it’s quite uncommon by now in Uganda)
Every time we saw a lone male gazelle or impala (also known as “Chevys” [you know…Chevy Impala!? :-P]) Sammy would point out “there’s a loser!” since they are only alone when they’ve lost a fight for a harem of females.

It was just a really great, fun time…full of being amazed at the beauty of the landscape or the animals or “I can’t believe I’m here”s. The Illinois-ers were astounded by the mountains on one side of the Mara and I didn’t get it until I remembered they don’t even have hills in that part of the country. :-P

This is EXCEEDINGLY long so I’m gonna stop there and tell about my slightly less-exciting time after the safari soon.

Pictures will be up...SOON...but there are SO MANY of them that it might be a while before I get through all of them.