In which I narrowly miss a nasty virus, and climb a volcano

Well once again I’ve been slacking…sorry.

We left off after we arrived in Laisamis. We did the clinic there in this awesome site that solved all of our crowding problems. There was some building that had a yard with a fence. So we set up registration right inside the gate and had perfect control over how many people came in and therefore avoided all crowding all day long. Perfect. :-D So the doctors got to sit on cushioned chairs inside a somewhat cool building instead of those fold-out canvas stools so that was nice. Our pharmacy was a tent with a few sheets used for walls to keep out the sun and prying eyes, since we were right next to the fence and kids like to congregate there. But we hid behind the sheets and had a very nice day dispensing meds with Joseph translating for us. We had an awesome system going for a while. The meds were all on tables in a U shape and Chrissy and I were sitting close to the corners and we decided we would fill all the prescriptions without standing up. It worked quote well for a few minutes. I would get the papers from the runner, and call out the drugs…whoever was closest would grab it and then I’d toss the pile on the table for Joseph. Perfect. J

When we were packing everything up that afternoon one of the Australian girls was trying on the giant necklace-thing that the Rendille wear so we all went over and were taking pictures. It was much harder getting it onto a mzungu head than the Rendille, they had so much extra room and the three of us that tried it on all had the worst time doing it. They tried to put it on me next and 3 people spent 3 minutes pulling it onm pulling my hair and skin around trying to slip it over my head and finally gave up. It hung around my forehead like a visor for a minute, then I gave it one tug and pop, it fell down around my neck. Ha!

That night, the terror began.
Alicia wasn’t feeling well so she didn’t eat dinner. Danny brought out a cooler from the car that had not been opened since we’d left Sunday morning. It had ICE COLD water and coke and diet coke in it. We all jumped on THAT let me tell you! Then Alicia started throwing up. Then the doctors decided she could use an injection of an anti-nausea medicine…but that didn’t help because she was still throwing up all night, and I heard it because my tent was right next to hers. By the time we went to bed her tent-mate was also sick. The next morning I found out that Chrissy and James, one of the Australians, had also been sick all night. So we had 4 people losing the contents of their GI tracts from both ends. We ha been planning on doing a half day of clinic, but because of the sickness we debated doing a ¼ day or not doing it at all…we ended up deciding to let in 200 patients and then stop. So we were missing half the team…that made it interesting. Alicia and Chrissy and I had been doing the pharmacy and now I was the only one left…so Lisa switched over from triage and together we did the pharmacy.

Everything is so much more stressful when you’re in charge.
The other days we’d unpack boxes and boxes from the car and we’d all say “Chrissy, where do you want this?” and she’d tell us. NOW everyone was asking “Danielle, where do you want this?” and I said “I DON’T KNOW ASK CHRISSY!” but Chrissy was back at the camp trying to keep her insides inside her.
Somehow through the grace of God we managed to get through the day.
No thanks to Dr. James, who sent me like 400 special orders (most of the drugs are already packed in little baggies with the dosage written on them, so we just grab a bag for each patient…but sometimes the doctors change the number of days, or times per day, or something…which jus t takes a lot more time) despite the giant pile of papers we had to get through, he also sent someone to me saying he needed the drugs for these three people now, so he could explain the dosing to them. Ok. I take the sheets and tol the guy to go back and tell James I was gonna kill him. He had like 4 months of twice daily 4 different drugs that we HAPPEN to not have any pre-packed…for EACH PERSON…I had to empty out a box to fit all the drugs he wanted. All the while stressing out at the huge pile of papers I felt personally responsible for handling!
So when we were done and the doctors came out, I chased him around the yard hitting him with my water bottle. It felt good.
We packed up all the drugs…and then unpacked half of them because one of the pastors left her cell phone inside one of the bins….i don’t know HOW that happened.
Eventually we got back to camp and loaded up the cars and high-tailed it home. Because everyone was miiiiiserable.
A couple of hours outside Nairobi Lisa and I were beginning to notice that Danny looked like he was trying really hard not to be the 5^th victim of the mystery disease…and he did quite well until about 1 hour outside Nairobi, when he pulled the car over into the median…which isn’t like medians in the US where there’s just grass and sometimes trees and bushes…this median was dirt and might as well have been an extra lane for all the cars that were driving in it. So it was a bit dangerous but the only option, as he jammed on the breaks, opened the door, stuck his head out with his foot still on the break and emptied his stomach on the ground. In between throwing up he yelled back into the car “Is the car in park?” It was.
After that we managed to get home without incident, we all crawled into bed almost immediately. I spent that whole day and night terrified I was going to get sick…every burp and every tiny rumble of my stomach made me paranoid that I was gonna be next but somehow I never got sick, thank you Jesus.

So that was the trip into the desert! The Australians all went on a safari after that, they were feeling better by the halfway point of our trip so I trust they had a pleasant safari.
We spent the next couple of days recuperating, being lazy, etc.

One day I went with some of the kids to a “water park” in the local shopping plaza…it had a bunch of slides but they were so slow it was quite easy to come to a complete stop in the middle….one of them I spent the whole time propelling myself down the slide with my hands. We tried walking up them because it was so easy to do and almost more fun than climbing down but we got in trouble so that had to stop. :-P

Friday we went to Mount Longonot- a volcano in the rift valley. We stopped in Limuru along the way to pick something up from the clinic so I said hi to all my old friends there. Then we drove to the volcano and spent an hour and a half climbing it.
MY GOODNESS. It was a ROUGH climb. It was really steep…and at 8000ft there’s not too much oxygen in the air…or at least that’s what I told myself as an excuse for my constant out-of-breath-ness. But if was GORGEOUS the whole way up, we even saw some giraffes wandering around on the way up. When you get to the top you’re exhausted and hot and yucky but the crater is beautiful and full of grass and the rim goes up in and out of the clouds and the breeze hits you and it smells so perfect and clean and misty it’s refreshing and just beautiful.
We were too exhausted to walk for another half hour around the rim so we sat for a little, ate a snack and went back down.

Going down was almost as bad as going up…because the same muscles that you’ve fatigued by making them pull you up the mountain need to lock every step you take when you walk down. So…it took less energy but it was just as tiring somehow. We were thinking it would be nice to have a sled so we could just slide down the side of the mountain but no such luck.
We made it down finally and then drove to Naivasha to drop off the things we’d picked up from the Limuru clinic, so I got to see my old friends there too. Unfortunately the kids were all at school, but I went and found Nancy and she was SHOCKED out of her mind to see me, and very excited, so that was nice. J
Then we went home and were crazy sore by the end of the day.

This is getting long…I might write another tomorrow or I might leave it until I get HOME because TOMORROW NIGHT I AM GETTING ON A PLANE TO GO HOME!!! !I AM SO EXCIIIIIIIIIIITED!!!
I am going to miss Kenya and all the people I’ve become friends with…a LOT. But right now I am just super ecstatic to give my family and friends giant squishing hugs! And eat some really fantastic food. :-D

In which I recreate the missing link and have my 1st international 4th

After our first crazy day of clinic Chrissy and Danny and I got back in their car and had a secret little pleasure cruise- we drove back to the camp at like 1 mile/hour and drank cokes from the cooler that were still pretty cold. It was heavenly. We guzzled those cokes before we got back.
The people here have basically no medical treatment available to them, but they were surprisingly healthy. The two biggest complaints were eyes and acid reflux/ulcers. There’s a lot of people with dry/itchy eyes from all the dust, and a lot of kids with eye infections from all the flies that are constantly collecting in the corners of the kids’ eyes (not to mention any open wound), and lots of older people with cataracts. Unfortunately, we had this bin we’d filled with all the artificial tears we could find…but it accidentally got left in Nairobi. So we had antibiotic eyedrops but we couldn’t give them to everyone who had dust issues. Because medical care is so rare here people didn’t really understand how the meds worked. It took a bit longer than usual to explain how to take them (this drug is one at morning and one at night…this one is one in the morning…this one is one morning, afternoon, and night….) and we had to explain to them that there was no drug for cataracts or nearsightedness…both of those require something more than just a pill, and we didn’t have any glasses or surgeons.
After the first day of clinic I went with Danny and James and Jeff and Maria to the network tree to try and use the phones. We tried standing under the tree, and then up the tree, and then on top of the car, and then finally found some service in a random spot under a tree. It’s so bad up there that when the wind blows the service goes away. No joke. So I called my mom and informed her that I was still alive and we took pictures of each other trying to get service in funny places.
So day two rolled around…it was more of the same, but crazier. Word had spread so we had way more people to deal with than the first day. The problem was we were only planning on doing a half day, because we still had to pack up camp and travel back to Laisamis and setup for the next clinic, and we wanted that to happen before dark. We aimed to have the clinic packed up by 1. We ended up getting it done by 2 and saw about 300 patients so we must have been going a lot faster than the day before. We didn’t have enough people working with us to really contain the line well so there was often a huge crowd of people slowly pressing farther and farther into the hangar…so it was an effort trying to keep them where we needed them to stay so the people who needed to leave could leave. It’s interesting how having a mass of people around you, even if they’re not being unruly, stresses you out. Chrissy and I were about to lose our minds in the pharmacy because we just felt like we were being crowded in.
The corrugated tin walls of the hangar only went up about 6 feet, and above that it was a wire fence. There were lots of school kids hanging on the fance the whole day looking into the pharmacy and sometimes asking us to give them stuff “give me one medicine” and no matter how hard we tried to get them to go away or get in line or soooooooomething besides stand there and stare at us they just would not go away.
I found a somewhat scary-looking man and had one of the local church members who was translating for us ask him if I could buy his knife for my brother. We worked it out and I got his my-forearm-long knife and the sheath, which is made of two pieces of plastic from a plastic jug melted and nailed together, plus a few strips of different-colored plastic wrapped around it for decoration. Cool beans.
So we finished day 2 of the Log-Logo clinic and packed everything up and piled back into the cars and drove to Laisamis. Pastor Elias wanted to get there as soon as possible so those of us who had come in the Bass vehicle went ahead of the land cruisers, who’d be going much slower because of the trailer. So we started out on this road that we shortly thereafter decided was not just a path off the road, but its own road, and turned around to get back on the road to Laisamis. Thankfully it was only a 2 minute detour, because apparently that road was made for the Chinese, who are roaming around the bush looking for oil. So that road leads to absolutely nowhere except a place where there isn’t oil. Pastor Elias told us about some people who spent 3 days being lost in the bush before they reached civilization again because they took that road. HA!
We bumpity-bumped through the bush until we got to a nice dusty rutty spot in the road and I hopped out of the car, ran a few hundred feet ahead with my camera, and took a video of Danny driving the car through the dusty spot and the huge cloud that came up behind it because they wanted a video of that for something. It was hot. I was thankful for the air conditioning when I got back in the car. :-D
We soon got to Laisamis, saw the place where we were gonna camp, and then went to the district something-or-other’s office to tell him we were there. What should have been a 5 minute meeting turned into a 40 minute conversation where it was apparently necessary for everyone’s life story to be told and the district guy had to give a 15 minute speech about the area and ask us what we thought about the health problems in the area and James talked for 10 minutes about the differences between Laisamis last time he was there for a clinic 2 years ago and Log-Logo recently….and on and on.
Eventually we got out of there and went back to the campsite. Once again it was a house with a fenced-in yard and a latrine (this time with no bats) and there was a little hut there they used for cooking. After a short while the other cars arrived so we set up all our tents while 50 children crowded around the fence and stared at us and tried to make friends or ask for candy or money. There were a lot of little thorny bushes to avoid…and also a lot of pieces of various animal bones. I found a couple of vertebra and lined them up…then I got inspired and started collecting whatever somewhat recognizable pieces of bone- probably from cows, goats, and chickens- that I could find and setting them up in a skeleton. The kids caught on and started handing me bones through the fence as well- and by the end I had set up a nice little replica of some creature that has never actually existed, but I will call “the missing link”- since that’s pretty much how scientists recreate ancient animal skeletons anyways. :-P
I had lots of ribs, a few vertebrae, jaw bones with teth still in them, a couple of shoulder blades, and then I used random pieces of long bones to make arms and legs, and smaller pieces of ribs to give my creature hand and finger bones. It was fun. :-P
We spent the afternoon hanging out around the tables, then we ate dinner and went to sleep.
More to come tomorrow, but first- today!
It’s the 4th of July. It’s my first 4th of July outside of the US. But the missionaries have a party every year so we all got together and grilled burgers and hung out and ate a lot of food and even set off a bunch of fireworks. There are some people here for a couple of weeks who got out a guitar and a drum and played some patriotic songs and some completely random ones as well, and we sang (way, way too slowly, for some reason) the national anthem….it was good.  I also met some other people who are here for a couple of weeks who were talking about Chi Alpha, so I butted myself into the conversation to ask about Chi Alpha and it turns out they know Matt and Tracy and some other people I’ve heard of. Small world!!
So happy birthday USA, happy yesterday 1st birthday my baby cousin Melody Joy and Happy tomorrow 23rd birthday to my Heidleberg!

I am getting on a plane one week from tomorrow! :-D

In which I go back to the desert, where the latrines double as bat caves.

Confession: I’ve been home since Thursday but we were all miserably tired and sick…and then I’ve been putting this off because I knew it was going to be really loooong to type up.
Summary: This trip was insane through and through. A great experience…but full of misery to go with the fun parts.
Warning: This is probably going to be broken up into 2 or maybe even 3 posts that I’ll post over the next few days.
Details: Here we go.
Sunday morning, 5:30 AM: I wake up, take a shower, finish packing, eat breakfast, sit around for a couple minutes.
6:30am: We’re supposed to be leaving. But we’re waiting for our two Kenyan doctors, James and Jeff, to arrive. Chrissy and I spend 45 minutes chatting while Danny runs around doing last minute packing and reorganizing things…we would offer to help, but we know better than to mess with a man with “the packing gene” on a mission. :-P
7:15am- I go lie down on the couch, fall asleep, and juuuuust begin a dream I won’t remember after 3 seconds of being awake when at
7:30- Jeff and James finally arrive. Turns out the guy they had driving them to the Basses’ house (a friend of James’ brother) was drunk…spent the whole night out drinking through the morning and arrived at his house at 6:30, after James had been waiting there for 20 minutes and (after the 20 minutes) called him…THEN they had to go get Jeff.
So finally we left around 7:30…and I tried to sleep but the delay between waking up and getting in the car was too long (Thanks James) so I stayed awake and wondered why I didn’t bring my kindle until 11-ish when we stopped to meet the team, which had left from Limuru. We hung out for a little, got food for lunch, and left around 11:45. A few hours later we stopped in a small town called Isiolo where we got gas and picked up our armed guards. Also…one of the back tires was leaking air so we stopped at a service station to try and find and patch the hole that was in the tire. After splashing water on it for a few minutes they found the hole, and the small-ish nail that caused the puncture. So we got plugged up and went on our way. One of the armed guards went in the land cruiser with the whole Australian team, and the other went in the land cruiser with the trailer with all our food and tents and such, and we went on our way. We stopped 2 minutes outside the town to get 2 giant bags of charcoal to cook over the whole week.
About a half hour outside Isiolo the pavement ends and it’s dirt roads the rest of the way.
So la de da, we drive through the barren dusty desert until we get to Laisamis. There we meet Pastor Elias, who did a masters in Texas and was gonna stay there but came back to Kenya to marry his fiancé but somehow that relationship ended and he felt called to the middle-of-nowhere-barren-wasteland…so that’s where he is now.
So we dropped off the armed guards and their AK-47s, and drove 50km through more barren wasteland. It took about 2 hours and we spent most of the time off the dirt road. It’s really pathetic when the road is so bad it’s actually a smoother ride when you drive off it…but so many people have done it that there’s always two or three alternative options alongside the road. Often though, those paths are in softer, dustier dirt so it gets these really huge ruts in it…and you kick up a LOT of dust. It was fun watching the dust hit the window and slide around.
We arrived in Log-Logo around 6:15, and got out of the air conditioning of the car into the not-too-bad-because-the-sun-was-almost-setting desert weather. We camped in a fenced-in yard where the local missionary pastor, Maria, lives. We met her and the brother of the church member from whom she rents a room, named Daniel. Chrissy and I wandered around the yard contemplating life in this place…what it might be like to grow up with none of the “comforts of home”…but not knowing what you’re missing…having to walk quite a distance and carry a heavy jug just to get water…to live in a dome-shaped hut made of branches and leaves, covered with bits of cloth and plastic bags to keep the sun from coming in the holes.
While we were doing this Danny and James and Elias and Maria went on a short drive to the network tree- the tree that you stand under or climb up to get cell phone service.
While they were gone (bad timing) the other two trucks arrived. Chrissy and Ben and I saw them from the yard, coming down the main road, but they didn’t know where to turn. We would have had someone meet them with the car but they were all making phone calls at the network tree. So we ran to the gate and shouted and waved our arms, hoping Chrissy’s red shirt and our shiny white skin would attract their attention, but in the growing dusk, it wasn’t happening. We watched them drive back and forth along the road looking for some indication of where to turn, and wondered what people did before there were cell phones!? Ben offered to run to the road and get them, so we said sure and off he went. A few minutes later the 2 land cruisers came down the right road, with Ben inside, and all piled out.
We emptied the trailer of camping equipment, the phone signal-searchers came back, Peter the cook set up a lantern, showed everyone how to pitch our tents, and started cooking dinner. We all scurried around setting up all the tents in 2 rows, and by the time we’d finished the drivers had set up our little seats and the tables we’d use for the clinic so we all sat around and chatted for a while while dinner was cooking.
A major topic of conversation was our toilet. Included in the trucks and tents and food package is a bush toilet- they dig a hole and put up a tent designed to be a toilet-tent and have a little plastic seat. But there was already a pit latrine so they didn’t dig one.
But after that night, they did.
Why?
Bats.
Ugh.
The existing pit latrine is of the design referred to as “long drop”- a really deep cave as the “pit” part…and there were bats living inside. And someone went in there and almost got “flapped in the butt” as we were calling it. So there was lots of freaking out and people saying they’d rather go without the latrine and from then on we referred to it…and every other latrine we encountered on that trip- as the bat cave.
Dinner was spaghetti and something that might have been trying to be sauce, or it might have been just trying to be tomato-y ground beef…needless to say I did NOT put it on top of the spaghetti…I ate the spaghetti plain and ate the ground beef on the side. :P
So it was about 10 by the time dinner was over, so we all just sort of went to bed in our tents. There were enough that I had one to myself, so I unrolled my little mat, put a sleeping bag on top, put a sheet on top of that (it’s the desert…sleeping bags are for cushioning, not sleeping inside, and then went to visit the bat cave before going to bed. I SAW THEM flying around down there…along with some cockroaches…but I got over it because you gotta do what you gotta do, you know?
It was pretty hot but just cool enough with the breeze to fall asleep with only minor tossing and turning. The only thing was in order to get the breeze you had to open the window flaps so there was just a screen. And no screen was fine enough for that dust. So we all woke up with a nice coating of dust to go with our “there-isn’t-enough-water-around-here-for-you-to-take-even-a-bucket-shower” sort of lifestyle. So SOME of us changed our clothes, we had breakfast of French toast, packed up all our tables and chairs into the trucks, and headed the 5 minute walk or 2 minute drive to an old airplane hangar (big three-walled corrugated tin structure at the end of a dirt path called an airstrip) to start setting up the clinic.
I didn’t even get to the clinic yet and it’s already two and a half pages long!
We set up some tents in the hangar to mark out the areas of registration, doctor’s area, spiritual counseling, and the pharmacy. We put up some sheets to give the doctor tent some privacy and set to unpacking boxes upon boxes upon boxes of drugs for the pharmacy. Chrissy has done the pharmacy like 25 times so she’s an expert by now, so it was actually a somewhat orderly process. By 9:15 we were ready to go! We prayed as a group then went to our stations and the madness started!
Actually, the first day wasn’t bad. News hadn’t spread terribly far so the patient flow was steady…we never stopped..but it wasn’t a madhouse. Registration was a little slow because all the patients-to-be were crowding with complete disregard for the imaginary lines we kept trying to set up. Other than that it was a great day, we saw about 200 patients and we kept our sanity. Success.
The Rendille/Samburu/Borana (they all dress the same and intermarry and live in that area, so identifying them is only possible if you know the languages)are beautiful people. I was constantly surprised by how beautiful the features of even the too-thin old ladies were, let alone the young women. The women wear a huge amount of gorgeous beads around their necks- sometimes 30-ish strings of beads, sometimes more like a disc of beads, and lots of bangles on their upper arms, wrists, ankles, and these beaded bands around their heads. We didn’t see a lot of men because they usually don’t like to associate themselves with women. The village elders decided they would be first in line, and once they were done most of the rest of the men stayed away. A few of them hung around the clinic all day trying to be important, it was cute. Danny took a picture with one of them and showed him the picture. The guy looks it and this huge grin comes across his face and he laughs and goes “mimi ni mzee!” which means “I’m an old man!” as if he hadn’t seen himself sine he wasn’t. It was adorable. :)
So somewhere around 4 we closed registration, and got the last patients through around 5, and were packed up and out of there around 5:45. The biggest difference in the setup of this clinic from the last one was that we had to break down and set up the whole thing every day- there’s nowhere safe to lock up the drugs besides in the cars so that’s what we did.
Well I made it to page 4 and the end of the first day, so this seems like a good stopping point to me. :)
More to come!