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!
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