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.