In which I eat camel and ostrich and crocodile!

So! Wednesday . After the morning safari drive we had breakfast at the camp and piled back in the trucks to go back to the airstrip. Our plane was supposed to take off at 10:15 so we got there around 10…since there wasn’t exactly any security to go through…but the plane didn’t arrive until around 11. We had an uneventful 45-minute flight to Nairobi, then we had lunch out and took the busses to a conference center where we spent the afternoon hanging out and swimming in the rather cold pool. We had pizza for dinner again that night. It was not very good. But that’s ok because as soon as I get into NYC my Daddy is taking me to the best pizza in the cityyyyyyyyyy!

Thursday we split into 2 groups and one went to this very western shopping plaza while the other went first to this plaza in a very Indian area of Nairobi and got some Indian-style shirts at a store Chrissy likes, and found a jewelry store with a lot of gorgeous stuff for (according to American standards) crazily good prices. Then we joined the rest of the group at the other shopping center and spent the afternoon eating and doing more shopping there. There was a LOT of shopping done on this trip I tell you. After that shopping, we went back to the conference center, packed up our bags, and loaded them in the busses, then went to the same giraffe museum or whatever you want to call it, that we went to last time I was here. You climb up a staircase to a platform and they give you pellets and the giraffes come up and eat out of your hand or your mouth if you choose. I decided not to pay the $10 to go in since I’d already been there, so a bunch of us just sat around outside and listened to one of the bus drivers tell us a bunch of stuff we’d already learned on the safari…about the animals we saw on the safari. Oh well. :-P

Then we went to ANOTHER shop called Kazuri (“-zuri” meaning “beautiful” and “ka” being the prefix denoting small in an affectionate way) where they make clay beads and therefore lots of bracelets and necklaces, and some pottery. So we spent a while wandering around that shop, and then piled BACK in the busses to head for Carnivore!! What is Carnivore? It’s just the most brilliant idea ever. It used to be more brilliant than it currently is but the government has restricted a lot of stuff to make it less exciting but still awesome. It’s a restaurant that serves basically only meat. Waiters come around with giant chunks of meat on swords, put the sword tip in your plate, and ask you if you want crocodile or camel or whatever. You used to be able to eat all sort of bush meat like zebra and gazelle, but hunting and eating those animals isn’t allowed anymore. So we were given chicken breast, chicken wings, turkey, pork sausage, pork non-sausage, spare ribs, leg of lamb, lamb chops, spicy lamb sausage, beef, ox testicle, camel, ostrich meatballs, and crocodile.

The chicken was the best and most well-cooked chicken ever. The spicy lamb sausage tasted like the smell of cow so I didn’t eat much of that. The crocodile tasted like the smell of fish so I didn’t eat that either. The camel was REALLY good but a little tough. The ox testicle had no flavor and the texture of tofu. Gross.

You must understand…I had been waiting to go to Carnivore since I first heard about it the first time I came to Kenya in 2005. It was mentioned that some people wanted to go while we were there but on both trips there was either no time, not enough money left in the budget, or both, so it never happened. But it FINALLY happened! So this was quite the awesome experience for me. J I loved it.

After carnivore we took the team to the airport. We got there around 10..their flight left at like 2:15…so they were a bit early. When we got there someone was using what looked like a steam carpet cleaner to clean the sidewalk outside the entrance. Huh? The giant group of 36 people and their suitcases came up to the door, which has a x-ray machine for the luggage juuuust inside it, and a guy told them they couldn’t go in because they were cleaning. They would have to wait. Danny goes “there are 36 of them.” The guy goes “…oh. Ok. Well you have to stay over there” and points to a corner. Fine. So they one-by-one said goodbye to me and the Basses, it was like a receiving line at a wedding, and went inside. Then we went hooooome and went to bed.

Friday we slept in a little and Chrissy and I spent the entire afternoon sorting through all the medications that are sitting in a few different storage areas in the office building in the compound, and counting out thousands and thousands of multivitamins. That’s mostly it.

Saturday is today! We spent most of the day doing laundry and packing/preparing for tomorrow’s trip up to the middle of nowhere. I didn’t know this until yesterday but apparently the Australia team has been in Kenya for a week, working with some other people doing some other stuff…I don’t know what.
So we drove a half hour to the place they’ve been staying and met them and talked about logistics for a while. They are a group of 7. Two of them are 50s-60s-ish women, one is a pediatrician and the other is a retired nurse, The rest are all 20s-ish. Two of the girls have some medical experience, one doesn’t, and the two guys don’t. So we should have enough people to do everything we need to do…I was scared at first because someone said nobody on that team was medical at all and I was like ummmm HOW are we going to run this clinic with the 2 Kenyan doctors we’re bringing treating patients, Chrissy and me in the pharmacy, and nobody available to do triage or vitals or assist the doctors? But it’s all ok now.

So what’s going to happen is we are taking all our food and water with us. We have 2 land cruisers, a trailer, and a Toyota Prado, and 15 people (7 people on their team, Me, Danny, Chrissy, James, Jeff,2 drivers and a cook) We will be sleeping in tents (not anything like the last tent I slept in, which had a built in shower and toilet) and we will have a “bush toilet” which will be a tent with a seat in it, over a hole that will be dug just for the occasion. We will drive several hours to some place I don’t remember the name of, and pick up two armed guards with big guns. They will stick the ends of their guns out the windows of the cars so that anyone we drive by knows we have guns and won’t try to rob us. Then we’ll get to Laisamis and say hi to some people and go to an even more remote place called Logologo, or something. We will do one day of clinic there and then come back to Laisamis and do 3 more days of clinic, then come home.

At least that’s the plan. But this is Africa so anything could happen.
I will most likely NOT have any internet or phone until July 2^nd because there is no electricity with which to charge things and also no service out in the middle of nowhere.

Chrissy said Sombo was more westernized than this area. Clothing is considered optional among many of them. I asked Chrissy if we could wear shorts, since the locals don’t even wear clothes, and she said no, because the church people we’re working with are just as conservative as the rest of Kenya. Darnit.

So…I really have no idea what to expect…I guess you will find out about it when I get back! J

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.

In which I stand for 10 hours straight, and 150 people get free medical treatment

This is going to be a CRAZY week.

So the team from Chicago(ish) was supposed to arrive at 3am Monday morning…but there was apparently a volcano in Eritrea that erupted and did the “there’s a lot of ash in the sky” thing, so they couldn’t fly out and instead they arrived at 1:30 Tuesday morning…got back to their housing at 3:30…slept until 6am…so I can ONLY imagine what they felt like running this crazy clinic all day today.

Monday we went to the church to set up the clinic in the morning…there are 2 40-ft shipping containers that will become the permanent clinic once they cut all the holes out for doors and windows and put in supports for walls and all the welding that goes with that. Because there was a 3-week delay getting the permit to set up the “building” there, and a 1-week delay moving the containers, they weren’t ready. They still aren’t ready. So we had to completely change our plan for the layout but it’s working out well. We’re using 1 of the existing offices as our pharmacy (the room is FILLED with drugs, and it’s a little cramped in there but we’re dealing) and 2 of the offices as storage. There’s a small tent we set up with a bunch of chairs under it, for waiting. Then they enter the big-top tent for registration, and get their blood pressure, temperature, weight, etc. taken, then they see a doctor. There are 4 small tents with sheets clothespinned around them where the doctors are, there’s 5 or 6 of them. After they see the doctor their prescription gets brought to the pharmacy while the patients talk with a spiritual counselor. That gives the pharmacy time to fill the prescriptions, and then they head out with their free drugs.

So Monday we figured all that out and unloaded all the drugs and small tables into the pharmacy. Tuesday the team was supposed to be there but they weren’t, so we set up all the drugs in the pharmacy and set up the tents and were going to do an orientation, but we put that off until today.
We left and went to get more of the DELICIOUS pizza…and we did. Then I sat at home in the candlelight writing the number 1-325 on registration forms and 1-550 on contact cards. I was intending to do it in the light but I had no choice this time. :-P

Today I got there around 8:15 and traffic made the US team late..they got there around 8:45. So…despite the fact that some of the church’s volunteers were there I set up chairs and tables …basically by myself…until they arrived. They are huge. 36 people. I don’t think I realized how many people 36 is because when I pictured them I think I pictured like 20. Some of them are nurses, a couple are doctors, and some are not medical and did mostly spiritual counseling stuff. When we started this morning there was nobody or very few people there for the first hour(which was god because we got to a late start) so the ENTIRE team went in small groups into the nearby Mukuru slum to see it/hand out fliers about the clinic. It was a really good experience for them, however it left very few people to run the clinic…so I got through doing the vitals on 45 patients before they got back. It was sort of fun, in a non-fun way…because I like being busy and feeling a little rushed, but it’s stressful.
So once the team got back I let some of the nurses take over vitals and went to the pharmacy, which was backed up because there were 4 doctors working and 2 people in there. I love being in the pharmacy because it’s exactly that kind of environment I like…there’s always something to do, you’re rushing a little to get through the pile of prescriptions that just keep on coming, you’re surrounded by all the drugs but it’s like an adventure trying to find the one you actually need. Thankfully Chrissy always knows where everything is as well as the answer to all my questions about dosage and what not.

I felt really bad for her, because she was getting 50000 questions about eeeeverything. Everyone needed to know where something was, and QUICKLY. So she was running around like a crazy person for a good part of the afternoon.

At one point someone came into the pharmacy and asked for iodine, gauze, and shears. I knew that meant there was a wound somewhere, so I asked about it, and found out a guy was there with a huge leg wound. I went to see but it was still wrapped up, so I told the nurse I’d be back in 5 minutes to see it. Now I’m going to tell you about the wound so if you don’t want to read about it, skip to the next paragraph. When I got back the bandage was off…he had gotten into a motorcycle accident on May 29^th and had a huge laceration down the middle of his shin that had been stitched, but the stitches were still in. They were supposed to come out about a week ago. Below the laceration was a huge infected wound that was like a 2-inch diameter circle of black and yellow. So they removed the stitches and cleaned him up and later I saw people carrying him away- they were bringing him to a hospital- he needs surgery to debride it.

I overheard a conversation that leads me to believe he will be having that surgery taken care of by us. I don’t know if “us” is the Chicago team, the general clinics-that-the-Basses-have budget, or what, but he’s getting that surgery. Which is good because an infection like that untreated would have cost him his leg or life if untreated. I saw THE coolest thing ever while they were cleaning his wound…it’s this spray can of saline…instead of pouring it out of a bottle, or poking a hole in the bottle and squeezing for some pressure, there’s actually a pressurized can of saline, that squirts it out like spray-on sunscreen, only a thicker spray. Pretty awesome.

So basically I spent the whole day spinning around in circles in the pharmacy, after a morning of vitals. We finished around 4:30 and cleaned up and had dinner started (eating, that is) by 5:30. At 6 the church had its regular Wednesday night prayer meetings, and the pastor of the team spoke for a little bit. The senior pastor of the Imara campus informed us at that meeting that 22 people made decisions to follow Christ today, which was pretty awesome. J We treated about 150 patients, I believe. Everyone got multivitamins and de-worming medications plus whatever the doctor prescribed. The only complication with that is that you’re not supposed to take Levamisole, the de-worming med, if you’re pregnant. One patient had “note: 5 months pregnant” on her sheet so of course she didn’t get it. But I was about to give it to another woman and realized she was probably pregnant and put it back. After that I realized the doctors weren’t even necessarily aware that we were de-worming everyone and not asking/writing about pregnancy…so then I started asking everyone if they were pregnant (well…not men) and prayed we hadn’t given any to pregnant people before. I don’t know what the negative effects are but I’m praying they’re not happening.

I was talking to Chrissy in the middle of the day, and we were saying how AWESOME a safari is going to be after this…not just because a safari is awesome, but the relaxing vacation aspect of it is going to be THAT much more awesome because this week before it is craaaaaaazy busy.

It’s really nice, and it’s my first time, doing a free medical clinic in Kenya….WITHOUT jet lag. I like it. But the ligaments and muscles behind me knees are rather sore from standing all day. Oh well.

In which I go to business school and eat a surprisingly delicious pizza

Thursday! What did I do on Thursday? I spent Thursday with a guy named Robert who runs the Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) department of Zinduka. They have a bunch of different things they do…there are a bunch of kids they’re keeping track of…making sure they go to school and stay in school (getting them uniforms, paying school fees…and getting “sanitary napkins” for the girls, otherwise they often just stay home for a week every month when they’re having their periods…you can imagine how detrimental that is to their education) They donate a lot of food to the kids and try to arrange sponsorship for them, as well as some semblance of a stable environment…whether its finding families to house them or living in a sort-of-compound with a community worker as the “mom” of the place.

Robert has a degree in social work, and he does some counseling with the kids, but Thursday they were all in school so we went to visit a couple different places in a slum area of or called Kiambui, and deliver rice and flour. We took a matatu and then a bus to the edge of the slum, then one of the orphans who was about 15 came and got us and took us to the house of the community worker. She lives in a house that’s part of a circle of houses that has a yard with chicken coops, and kids running around. She does some taking care of the older kids, but they don’t live with her. So she and Robert talked in Swahili for a while, while I took pictures of the kids outside. Then he gave her a few kilos of rice and we left. The next place we stopped was the house of a woman named Josephine. We gave her this wrapped present for her daughter who wasn’t there, then sat and chatted for a while and drank coke, which I didn’t really want but you can’t refuse gestures of hospitality. Robert doesn’t like soda so he was given uji (porridge) and then they tried to give ME uji and I was like ummm no…a 500ml coke was enough. (Because you can refuse if you’ve already accepted something with much less offense…plus we had just had a conversation about being forced to eat and drink things you don’t want). So theeeeen we went to a third house where a kid had recently been in an accident, bringing a rather large amount of rice and flour, but the mom and the kid weren’t home (I guess he was feeling well enough to leave the house?) so we left the rice and such with the little sisters and headed out.

PS in the morning we were supposed to leave 2 hours earlier than we actually did because we were waiting for tea. I’m pretty sure it’s physically impossible for some Kenyans to do anything before they have tea. Every day they ask me if I’ve “taken tea” before we go and if the answer is no, there’s no hesitation in recommending we wait until I’ve done so. I tell them “no, I’m okay” and they’re incredulous. Haha. But this morning we were waiting for tea, which I usually out around 9, but the person who usually makes it was not in the office that day. So Robert had to go and cover the reception desk so the receptionist could make it. Then we had to drink it leisurely, and theeen we went. I had time to do a Sudoku, a crossword, and a “codeword” (like a crossword where ever space is numbered and they tell you 2 letters and you have to figure out the rest, which number corresponds to which letter) before we actually got up and left. :P

Friday I was with Costa again , and another Zinduka worker named Ann, for a business/marketing class for a bunch of ladies at a church that was quite a ride away. We took a matatu and a looong bus ride across town (traffic, and all) and then took pikipikis/bodabodas/motorbikes/whatever you want to call them for like 3 mintues down the garbage-y, rocky, bumpy slum roads to the church. There were about 10 ladies there waiting for us (Nobody told me what time to arrive at the church. I assumed it was 8:30 like all the other days. At 8:15 Costa called Cathy asking where I was, I was supposed to be there at 7:30. (this coming from the woman who showed up at 11:15 last time she wanted me somewhere at 7:30) I got there around 8:30 but we didn’t leave til 10. )
So they have a little handbook and they meet every week to learn about business/marketing/etc. because most of them have small businesses (and are HIV+). We did this exercise where they broke into small groups and had to make restaurants catering to tourists, and then I (the tourist, of course) had to go around and try out their restaurants and critique them. I cannot critique. So I left the critiquing to the teachers and the daughter of one of the women and told each of the groups, at the end, what good ideas they had had, so they could all learn from each others’ good ideas. :-P After all, I don’t claim to know anything about marketing.

I had an interesting conversation with the daughter, whose name is Agnus. She was home from school because they told all the students to go home until they sorted out the matter of the principal…since the students had all gone on strike because of her. Apparently she has been giving out ridiculous punishments and the girls (it’s an all-girls boarding high school) had enough so they went on strike and marched to the district…something or other’s office to demand a different principal. She made a rule that they were not allowed to use the bathroom from the beginning to the end of the day (aka 5am until 4pm) and when they did, their punishment was to stay in the bathroom all day. These are not your idea of a bathroom. This is a very hot area, and a we-dug-a-hole-and-put-a-small-room-around-it pit latrine, no flushing. ALL DAY. Or making them wash the bathrooms for like 200 girls for a week, for minor offenses, etc. She asked me if students in the US ever went on strike. HA!

Saturday we called “lazy Saturday” and it was just that. I woke up around noon and we spent the whole day, besides the short time when we cooked dinner/made chapati, doing a lot of nothing. Then we lost electricity for a while in the evening and since there’s nothing to do at night with no light and when the TV doesn’t work, we went to bed.

Today we had church – I went to the first service in the main church and then the 2^nd youth (young adult) service and spent the third service in the same small group I randomly joined last week (that’s what happens when you live with people super-involved in the church…you go to 3 services) and then they had out some games and puzzles, so I joined a group of people putting together a 300-piece Taj Mahal…I’m pretty sure there were fewer than 300 pieces though. And at least one of the 4 other people doing that puzzle had no idea what they were doing, because I took apart a lot of pieces that were quite obviously NOT supposed to go together. :-P

After church went out to lunch for pizza with Cathy and Sammy’s best couple- the best man and maid of honor (matron of honor?) at their wedding. It’s encouraged in the church for engaged couples to have a “best couple”- a married couple that they’re already friends with who sort of mentors them- instead of just having each pick their best friend as their best man/maid of honor. They have 3 kids- 6 and 4-y.o. boys and a 4-week old baby girl. The kids are adooorable- they speak really good English in the cutest little accents, and the older boy is such a funny kid- “Papa! Papa! Oh no! Oh no! You need to add fuel, it’s only one dash away from the E!” It’s probably funnier to hear him say it. :-P
So we went to this pizza place, and it was really good…we got this pizza that was absurd but delicious…it had onions, chicken, corn, and a swirl of barbecue sauce on it. It was incredibly good, I was shocked. :-D
And nooow we’re back to being lazy around the house.

Tomorrow the Chicago team arrives and on Tuesday we start setup for the clinic, which goes Wed-Sun, I can’t wait!
I am going with Cathy to meet Danny at the Imara campus at 10am tomorrow…on my schedule that Zinduka gave me it tells me that Monday is the day for “Sitting in main office and reflecting on lessons learned”. When I read that to Cathy and Sam they burst out laughing. We decided I could reflect elsewhere, so I’m not going into the Zinduka office. Ha.

Today is June 12! That means exactly one month from today I will be home. J But not before I miss my Emmy’s 24^th birthday, and Fathers’ day. :-/

In which I "cleverly" avoid agreeing to a drunken marriage proposal

Right. So. Monday.
The fun advanture that happened was several very drunk men who tried to either make friends with me, or propose marriage. There was one guy who told me to go to Kansas and ask for his sister Lucy. I tried to tell him that the US was very big and I don’t know everyone there, especially not in Kansas, but he was too drunk to get it. He tried to get my phone number but I told him (truthfully) that I didn’t know my number (I have intentionally NOT memorized it) and that I don’t give it to people I don’t know. He said bye like 5 times but kept coming back to shake my hand and remind me to tell everyone at home that he met a Mkamba (tribe) named…I forget what his name was. So sorry Mr. Mkamba. :-P
Drunk guy numbers 2 and 3 just said hi and mumbled something in Swahili before walking on.
Drunk guy number 4 was an adventure. His name, I later found out, is Chacha. He began by telling me that he loved me. Asked him how he could love me if he just met me, and didn’t know me. He said “I saw you and I loved you”. He then told me he wanted to be in the Guinness book of World Records for being the first black man to marry a mzungu…I told him that had already been done. So he said he wanted to make history for his village. He told me he wanted to buy me and take me home…I told him in the US you don’t buy women. He kept forgetting my name and called me Caroline and a couple other names. The VCT counselors and I were all sitting around on stools outside the tent, just having a good time playing with his head. I told him that if he got sober and didn’t drink any alcohol for one year I would allow him to ask me to marry him, but I wouldn’t even consider it if he was drunk (mind you this was like 3pm). He wanted my phone number so he could send me a message, but I told him to just write his message in the dust and I would get it. None of this seemed off to him. :-P So June 6^th, 2012, I highly doubt, but I guess there’s an infinitesimally small chance, that a sober Chacha will be waiting for me to ask me to marry him. Unfortunately for him, I have no plans to be in Kenya at that point. Especially because when he came by later smoking he said “but smoking is okay?” I said no. He got tested and hoped that a negative HIV test would convince me, but I stood my ground. Aren’t you proud of me Daddy? Besides…he didn’t ask your permission first. ;-)

So that was Monday. Tuesday I went with a woman named Costa who works with Zinduka’s savings and loans programs. They have a total of about 90 people in the program. They meet every 2 weeks in small groups and I think monthly as a whole group. They get mentored and counseled and they get food from the program. Costa facilitates their bi-monthly meetings in which they put a set amount of svings into the "pot" every 2 weeks. They then take out a loan from the pot, and pay it back a couple of weeks later with 10% interest. They’re paying interest to the r future self, because they take another loan from that pot, but it’s bigger because they’ve added to the pot. It basically forces them to be financially responsible, and save their money, and they have a buffer, because if anyone ever has an unexpected financial crisis the group can help them out (since they are meeting together and usually live close to each other, they are usually also good friends.)

I went to one at the church and one in the Mukuru slum. Mukuru was interesting to walk through, as slums always are. It’s always fascinating me to see what is going on on the side of the road. Every time I’m in a car or walking quickly I wish I could don a disguise of black skin and leisurely stroll down the street and see what people are doing, what they’re selling, and peep down side streets without causing a scene. Along the side of the road there was a channel that had not-that-dirty looking water flowing down amidst garbage. It flowed into a river that also didn’t look that dirty. But as we got deeper into the slum that water got thicker and darker until we got to the little alleyway we met in, and it was just lack sludge that wasn’t moving except that it was bubbling. You can imagine what that smelled like. We sat for a couple minutes in someone’s living room while we waited for all the group members to arrive. The living room area of the house (which was one room, divided into sleeping and sitting rooms by a curtain) was about 5ft long and 10ft wide. The whole house was probably 15x10ft. A family with children lived there…and all there was room for was a narrow 1.5ft wide coffee table. One light bulb hung from the ceiling in the middle.
We soon went outside and sat on a couple of benches around a table with the ladies, who settled their accounts and chatted for a little with Costa, who gave them tips for better keeping accounts and running their little pot, and some other stuff that I didn’t understand. Then we headed out. By that time the kids had gotten out of school so there was lots of shouting and pointing, of course.

Today is Wednesday. I spent the day with the Family Matters program. Family Matters apparently began in the US, but I’ve never heard about it until today. The instructors do this every day, two sessions each day, but each class meets once a day once a week for 5 weeks. At the end they get a certificate and the incentive to come is in this case chai and mandazi (worth it!) though sometimes they get free food or even cash for attending classes like this. Family Matters is a class for parents of 9-12 year old kids that teaches them how to talk to their kids about stuff, with a focus on sexual health, since sex is a really taboo topic in this culture (as in, even on the cable TV they mute the word “sex” and even the euphemism “sleeping with”). They target this age because stats say a significant number of kids are sexually active around the age of 13 so they want the parents to get to them before that. They also teach them how to in general improve their relationships with their kids in this very volatile time of life. So it’s a really great program. We were going to do 2 sessions but our second location is apparently currently being systematically torn down because the houses were built to close to the railway…so instead we just went to lunch. I had chicken but Linda and Joseph, the instructors, had whole tilapia. So after they finished eating we had a photo shoot with the fish’s head. See here for all those pictures:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10100111366766905.2535117.428882&l=0d217a8fa6

So that was today. Commuting to the church is interesting so let me tell you about that…

At 7:30 we leave the house. Lock the front door unlock the gate, lock the gate. Spend 5 minutes walking to the estate entrance past people giving me funny looks but at least not pointing and shouting. Then we cross a somewhat busy 2-lane road and walk for another 5 minutes to the main highway. At this point there are a million cars whizzing by, 3 lanes in each direction separated by a 20-ft wide median. There is no such thing as a traffic light or a crosswalk, so you just find a spot with a good view, and run across the highway whenever it looks like you’ll probably make it across alive. Then you take a minute to recover your heartbeat and do it across the other side. Then you wait a couple of minutes for a matatu that is going where you’re going. At this time of day basically all of them are going to the city center, and the church is on the way to the city center. So we hop on one where the far-collector guy isn’t being too eager (because it’s less likely that he’s drunk if you do that) and hop on…most of the time pushing other people out of the way so Cathy doesn’t get on a matatu that fills up before I get on..sometimes even after it starts moving. You hunch down and move into an empty seat, trying very hard not to touch the handrails because they’re so dirty and greasy they’re slippery. (yes I had to touch one to be able to tell you that…not that I touched it just for that purpose!) So you sit in a seat that’s probably torn and the foam is sticking out. If you’re unlucky you sit next to the door, and if they decided to let 14 people on the fare-collector/door-opener/passenger recruiter will squish you over and sit on the edge of your seat…or stand with his back to the door and just hover over you with a smirk on his face that says “ha. I’ve never been this close to a mzungu before” as you try to lean away….
Anyway. After a minute he goes around poking people on the shoulder and they hand him the fare. Depending on the matatu (it has nothing to do with where you’re going, and everything to do with what they feel like charging) It ranges from 10-50 shillings. If the guy doesn’t have change, you just don’t get any change. Tough luck. So when you get close to where you want to go you tell the door-opener and he bangs twice on the roof. This signals the driver to pull over, and you BOOK IT out of there because IF they come to a complete stop it will only be for a second or two so you’d better get out of there before he pulls away or you will go farther than you want. :-P
So we arrive basically right in front of the church. It’s about 8:05 on a light traffic day and as late as 8:30 if the traffic is bad. But it is always an adventure. Some of the matatus have been tricked out with black lights, new seats, interesting colored paint, or even sub woofers. Apparently this actually does succeed in attracting passengers. Aaaand that’s my commute!

I had a hamburger and the greasiest French fries ever for dinner tonight. It was wonderful. I have been craving fries for a while, and I haven’t had a burger in months. This one was actually pretty good…much better than the last one I had in…January. Bingo.

Tomorrow is “orphans and vulnerable children” day with Zinduka… apparently also Chacha came and asked for me yesterday, and he was sober. So…potentially one day down, who knows what he drank later in the day. :-P

In which I love this new church, and spend a day in the slum

I could/should have wrote this days ago but I’ve been busybusy and therefore tired at the end of the day and not feeling like thinking enough to type out a post.
BUT.
So…last you heard it was Thursday and I’d just arrived.

So Friday was a waste of time, basically…I went to the Zinduka office in the morning, got a tour and got introduced to all the people who work at the office, and then was told to wait for them to get my schedule for the week. An hour and a half later I got the schedule. For Friday it said “introduction”. Also the office closes at noon on Friday, so I took a nap with my head on the desk, wrote in my journal, and drank tea. When the office closed I went and sat in the church’s main office lobby and read the newspaper and did all the crosswords and sudokus in the paper. Then I sat in Cathy’s office and read about all the kings of Israel that did really stupid things that made God really angry until she finished working and we went home.
Here’s a side note for you: Sunday after church they had these small groups and I joined a random one and we were talking about the book of Hebrews, which talks a lot about Jesus’ sacrifice and how it restored people to God, and we were talking about the old way of doing that, was to make a animal sacrifice…and when priests tried to enter the temple, or make sacrifices without being clean, without preparing themselves, God sometimes struck them down. Like…if you went into the room where the Ark of the Covenant was when you weren’t supposed to, and without making all the sacrifices for your sin, you just died. And nowadays people do all sort of sacrilegious things, and people whose only thoughts are for their own fame and fortune preach about God and in general we approach God with a lot of disrespect and dishonesty…but nobody gets struck dead for it. What mercy is available to us now that Jesus is here…and we’ve taken it for granted, I think.
Which is also interesting in context of those kings of Israel. They did EXACTLY what God told them NOT to do and built alters to other gods in the middle of God’s temple…and God allowed other nations to come and take them over but as SOON AS they repented and started serving God again, he delivered them. SO MANY times. So even BEFORE Jesus he was being SO merciful to them, ya know? We always say “In the Old Testament God was wrathful and judgmental and in the New Testament God is forgiving and merciful because of Jesus…but truth is he was REALLY merciful even in the Old Testament.

Anyway. Saaaaturday we slept in and then made chapati dough (YEAH!!) then I went with Cathy to pick up her niece and nephew from her sister’s house, and bring them over to her brother’s house. Her brother’s house is really close to hers so we walked home. On the way we stopped at a fruit stand just inside the gate of the estate, and some random guy said hi and asked where I was from and what my name was, and tried talking to me but I couldn’t understand his English or Swahili very well…which is a common thing for people to do. What isn’t common is when we moved on to the vegetable stand 50 ft away, he followed us and just sort of stood next to me, trying to talk but not doing a very good job getting words out. So I realized he was drunk, and we told him to go away, and the 3 or 4 other people around us watching were just like …”dude…leave them alone, you’re embarrassing yourself”. So eventually the vegetable man finished chopping the cabbage and we left Mr. Drunk behind.
Then we got home and made CHAPATI S and they were DELICIOUS as usual.
Then we went to the airport to say bye to Sam’s mom, who was going to the US for 3 weeks to visit some family member who’s there. That was the first time I’ve been to that airport with no intention of flying out, which makes me officially a local, I’ve heard. :-P I met Sam’s dad who is also the senior pastor of the church, and his mom, and a couple other family members. We stayed for a while until they fiiinally had to go, then took literally 30 minutes to get out of the parking lot, even though it would have taken 10 steps to get from the parking spot to the gate. Apparently a lot of people want out of the airport lot at 9:30pm.

Suuuuunday we went to church at ICC, and I LOVE this church. I went to the youth service (youth here is the equivalent of “young adult” which was about 150 people. Everyone is so incredibly HAPPY to see each other and to be there, it reminded me of an extra large Chi Alpha. They were even serving tea and mandazi (fried dough things) which would have been icing on the cake if I hadn’t gotten on line too late to get any before they ran out. Oops. Sooo we had church and then I went over to the visitor table to say hi and they had tea and mandazi THERE so I did end up having some. :-D After church they had their small groups. They’ve all been going through this book that is a re-arrangement of the books of the New Testament into a different order…plus no chapter and verse numbers. So we had a discussion about Hebrews that was really good. Theeen we did a LOT of sitting around and talking to various people…the youth were having some sort of small group competition so there were a lot of games out, and I watched and kept score and was the official dictionary for a game of scrabble. I did not expect to find that game amongst non-native English speakers, but it will indicate to you how educated and westernized this area is that they actually played, and only one person made a habit of using only 3 and 4 letter words, and added “s” to the end of other people’s words.

I went home with friends of Cathy and Sam’s who live a couple of houses away because Cathy and Sam had a married couples’ class, so I spent the afternoon watching the Style network (cable TV..is that cheating …am I still allowed to call myself “on a missions trip”?) because it made me feel connected to home to know what Giuliana and Bill are doing with their lives. :-P

Monday was an adventure. I went with Zinduka people to do VCT just outside the Kware slums (Which is where we did the clinic both of the previous times I’ve been here). They basically set up 4 10ftx10ft tents with curtains down the middle to make 8 small rooms , with plastic stools. The front is covered by a “Free VCT” sign which sort of makes privacy but not really. Each counselor takes a room, and 2 people are on recruitment duty. They basically tell people “come here” and they come, then they say “go get tested” and sometimes they go, sometimes they don’t. Usually people need to be asked otherwise they will walk right by…but a lot of people will go in as soon as they’re asked…like they only need the tiniest bit of convincing to get tested.

I want to make this short so I will tell you the facts and keep the entertaining story until next time. :-D

So from my experiences through the day and asking the counselors I gathered the following information: The counselors have a 3-week training program before they can counsel. They do this free VCT every day. They choose one location and go there every day for a week, then move on. The counselors go in 2 shifts, one from 8-noon, one from 12-4…which is actually closer to 5:30 or whenever-they-feel-like-stopping (since the street becomes much more crowded around 5 as people get off work). The session takes about 10-15 minutes, they get counseled, informed about HIV, how to get it, prevent it, etc., then they get tested. There’s a standard 1^st test. If it’s positive they use another one to confirm, if that is positive they are positive. If the 2^nd is negative there’s a third test (They’re all different KINDS of tests, not just a repeat of the same one) that is the tiebreaker. Whichever it says is the answer. They do a questionnaire to find out if they’re an “at risk” person (prostitute, IV drug user, fisherman/truck driver[“a girl in every port” ya know?]) to see if they should have further follow-up at another facility. Then they go on their way!

So some funny things happened, involving a couple of drunk-but-not-disorderly guys, but I’m tired and we’ve passed 2 pages so you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow. :-D

I will also inform you about today's adventures.
Isn't the suspense killing you?
I didn't think so, you're more patient than that.

New Blog Post- In which I arrive at Zinduka and plan to like it very much

I think I’m gonna like it here. 
For starters, there’s a toilet. A real live I-get-to-sit-on-it toilet. :-P
Let me backtrack.
This morning we drove an hour through Nairobi…and were still within the city limits (thank you, traffic) and arrived at the church ICC (it is “International Christian Center”)(the West campus)They have 3 services on Sunday mornings, all in English, and in general the offices and attitudes are very modern. There is a second campus a 20 minute drive away (the Imara campus) All of the staff I saw in the office today except for 2 of the head pastors are in their 20s or early 30s. It looks like a very happy place with their nice clean white tile floor and everyone using Windows 7 on their laptops except for the guy with the 30-inch-screened mac and they’re all friendly and laughing.
Within the church grounds there’s offices, the sanctuary, some other buildings I don’t know the purpose of, and then Zinduka, which has a 40-ft converted container and some offices.
Side note: some people from another church in Nairobi wanted to see the sanctuary because they’re renovating theirs and they’re looking for ideas what other churches do. So we went into the sanctuary and Cathy showed them how they set up the chairs, and the balcony, etc and the stage was empty. The woman asked what kind of chairs they put on the podium. Cathy said there were none, the pastors sit on the ground level with the congregants. The woman was like “…ooooh. But you give them a table.” Cathy said “no…they just sit in the front row, with the rest of the people. We give them water bottles?” The woman was again like “…oh” Cathy explained they wanted to be as approachable as possible, and to show that they’re just another person and don’t want to seem like special holy men. This seemed like a new idea to the woman, which didn’t surprise me since I’ve seen pastors sitting on thrones on the stage in front of their church here. So I like this attitude of respect, but not elevation-to-the-level-of-king, for the pastor.
Zinduka is officially an NGO. (Zinduka-afrika.com)They work with HIV+ people to do counseling, there is a VCT center (“voluntary counseling and testing”- so called because there was such a stigma about the word “HIV” that people would refuse to be even tested because they didn’t want to be seen associating with the word. So VCT is like a “safe” way to call it, where people are willing to come and get tested and counseled without the cultural stigma. So they do that, and they have support groups for HIV+ people, mentoring and marketable skills training, and they make home visits.
Today we went into the church office and I met Cathy, who is maybe in her late 20s, and we had a meeting with her and one of the pastors to finish up all the details of my staying here as well as the clinic that’s coming up. We spent about 2 hours hashing out all the details of timing and meals and how many translators we would need , etc. Here’s the plan for the next 2 weeks, now that I actually have the information.
I am going to be commuting with Cathy to the church compound every morning, then working with Zinduka. I was told I’ll get a schedule tomorrow so I can see when I’ll be in the VCT place, when I’ll go on visits, etc. On June 13, a team of 36 people from Chicago arrives, and on the 14th, we start setting up for 4 days of free clinic at the Imara campus. So those days the bus bringing the Americans from their lodging to the Imara campus will pick me up, since Cathy lives quite close to the Imara campus. We’ll do the clinic from 9-5 Wednesday-Saturday, with sports ministry and crusades going on in the afternoons and evenings, respectively. Sunday the team will do stuff at the churches during the regular service and then Monday morning we go on safari.
So that’s the plan.
Cathy’s house, as I mentioned, has a toilet. And a shower.
It’s an actual free-standing house in a development. They call them “estates” here…this estate has an unlocked gate, and there’s a bunch of shops…general stores, butchery, fruit stands, …a field with a volleyball net, some random open grass, and then several “lanes” which is basically a side street with a gate with a guard at it. Each side street is lined with houses, each house has a small yard enclosed by a stone wall with a gate. So…there are a lot of gates. :-P
The house is one story, with a kitchen, living room, master and guest bedrooms, and bathroom…one of the most westernized houses in structure and décor I’ve seen. So like I said, I think I’m gonna like it here. 
We will usually pack a lunch of leftovers from dinner, but today Cathy and I went to eat at a little restaurant/café/whatever you want to call it that was a 5 minute walk from the church. I got to eat a chapati, so I was happy. :-p Then we stopped at a small supermarket to get breakfast foods because Cathy and her husband don’t eat breakfast. She asked, so I told her I’d been eating lots of Kenyan food, anything was okay, the only thing I’ve eaten here that I didn’t like was liver, and she said she ALSO doesn’t like it, it makes her want to gag. Awesome. I think we are going to get along quite well. 