I think the only appropriate way to start this blog entry is with my run in with a public transportation vehicle. Literally, it ran into me.

                I was riding my bike to town, something I do at least once a week and it was about 11 am. I was on the main road maybe 2/3 of the way into the 5Km ride to town. I’m riding along the side of the road just like I always do, just like all the Kenyan bike riders always do, when I hear a familiar yet alarmingly different noise behind me. I’m used to the cars passing by at 40 or 50 miles an hour a few feet from my handle bars; that’s just how it is, there are no bike paths in rural Kenya. So the loud ‘hum’ I hear over the sound of my ipod doesn’t really startle me… until I notice that the hum is right behind me and that its turned into the sound of wheels sliding over pavement and gravel rather than rolling.

                In the second or fraction thereof, that I had to get a spare thought in before I got hit I thought: “I’m about to be hit by a car.” Groundbreaking, deep stuff, I know. But, that’s what I thought. I literally only had time to think about the fact that I was about to be hit. I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t feel it, I could just hear the sound of the wheels screeching towards me and knew I was going to get hit. That should say something about the amazing capacity of the human brain to process information.

                I had the vague sensation of moving really fast and the next thing I knew I was on the ground. I never lost consciousness, it just happened that fast. I was sitting there in the dirt with my hand on the ground and the wheel of the vehicle next to me. My ipod was still playing in my ears (“Mr. Know it All” by Kelly Clarkson) and I thought, “I just got hit by a car.” Nothing happened for what felt like a really long time but I’m sure was only a few seconds. I just sat there staring at the dirt not moving a single inch. I don’t even think I was breathing, I was just sitting there kinda leaning over, half supported by the tire of the car that had just hit me and thinking about the fact that nothing really hurt. I had the vague sensation of pain on my left hand, but other than that I felt nothing at all. It wasn’t even the normal sensation of knowing where your limbs are, the spatial awareness of one’s body parts that we call proprioception. I honest to God didn’t feel anything and I was terrified to move, scared that if I moved I might actually realize how hurt I was.

                Like I said, I sat there for what felt like forever before anything happened. Then everyone that was in the vehicle that hit me (maybe 6 or 7 people) climbed out and somebody put their hands under my arm pits to lift me up. I remember saying “wait” I think because I was so in shock, still processing how I wasn’t hurting. But on the second attempt I let them lift me to my feet and they sat me in the front of the vehicle. I asked for my purse and they gave it to me as a couple guys tried to shove my bike in the back of the vehicle. It wouldn’t fit so they put it in another small vehicle (called a tuk-tuk, a glorified motorized tricycle with a passenger cab) and I told them to take it to the clinic where I work since people actually know where that is.

                Somehow my helmet got off my head, I still don’t remember if I took it off or someone helped me, and as we pulled away on our way to the hospital I finally had the presence of mind to look down at myself and cry. I was covered in dust, my left wrist was bloody but nothing more than an abrasion and I couldn’t see blood coming from anywhere else. I still wasn’t hurting anywhere though and that worried me. As I cried silently I took my ear buds out of my ears, turned off my ipod and put it in my purse. Then I got out my phone and called the Peace Corps medical office and told them I’d been in an accident. I’ll tell ya one thing; the PC medical office might suck at sending me seasonal allergy meds when I ask for them, but you call them and open with “I got hit by a car” and those folks are on the ball.

                Long story shortened a bit: I cried, ended up in the ER of the large hospital in town and basically told I was fine sans any examination. Literally the guy looked at me, asked what had happened and said I was fine. I imagined the procedure in an ER in America if a “bicycle versus car” came in and sort of wanted to laugh… but I was still pretty shaken up and could not, for the life of me, get the tears to stop. They sat me on a bench and I waited for 45 minutes to have them pour sterile saline and iodine on the cut on my wrist and they said I was good to go. I insisted on an X-ray just to be safe and they kinda rolled their eyes at me. I mean, I really was just fine but who sends someone whose just been hit by a car home with no questions about loss of consciousness, dizziness or palpating the abdomen for sneaky internal injuries?

                I was pretty sure (98.2%) that my wrist was NOT broken but for the cost of an x-ray (about $3.25) was it really worth the small chance that it was actually broken and by not having it set properly I ended up with chronic pain or reduced range of motion, possibly preventing me from becoming a super-star trauma surgeon…? No; just give me the damn x-ray. So, eventually (after 2 straight days of the electricity in town being out and them not being about to run the x-ray machines) they did give it to me and, as I was hoping and expecting, there was no break.

My $3.25 X-ray.. thankfully break free

                I took away a few things from this experience I would like to share with you. Both of them are going to seem really cliché and for that, I apologize. Nonetheless, the points remain valid so listen up:

1)      Wear your helmet. Below is a picture of the windshield of the car that hit me. Those cracks are from where my helmet impacted the windshield. Can you imagine what would have happened to my head? Not only would they have had to cut off some of my beautiful, long hair to sew up the laceration on the back of my skull, I probably would still be in the hospital with traumatic brain injury or I would be dead.  Not to mention the fact that I’m in the middle of Africa. There’s a hospital in town but there’s no neurosurgery department, no CT scan, no one who is even remotely qualified, nor equipped, to do anything for a traumatic brain injury.

I apologized to the driver for breaking his windshield...
 the sarcasm might have been lost on him.

         Believe me, I hate wearing my helmet just as much as the next guy and I know every excuse because I’ve used it at one point or another. The fact of the matter is safety devices are there for a reason; because they work. So wear your helmet, buckle your safety belt, wear the dorky looking goggles in science class when you’re working with chemicals. Believe me, nothing looks as foolish as ending up majorly injured because you didn’t use a safety device.

         Looking at the picture of the car windshield still makes me shudder. My stupid, white helmet that I feel so dumb wearing was the likely difference between intensive care and walking away with a sprained wrist and a bruised butt.

2)      Life is unpredictable. I woke up in the morning and did everything I normally did, only on that day, I happened to occupy the same space as a car wanted to occupy on my way to town. I could have died. That sounds melodramatic and maybe it is but it’s also true. Had I swerved right I might have been pushed into traffic instead of onto the shoulder of the road. Had I not been wearing my helmet I could (and probably would) have cracked open my skull. I could have been hit by a larger vehicle and slid under the car rather than being pushed forward by it. The driver could have never seen me at all and therefore never attempted to slow down and I could have been hit twice or three times as hard. Any number of small changes could have resulted in my death… or never having been hit at all.

       The point is, when I woke up that morning I never imagined that I might die a few hours later. I thought about all the grudges I’d held, the people I’d never told I’d forgiven, the people that might not know how much I loved, missed and appreciated them. I thought about my friend’s babies I’d never meet and that my parents would have to hear over the phone that their daughter was lying in a morgue somewhere in Africa.

         I sat in the ER of the local hospital and couldn’t stop crying because all these things kept running through my head. I missed home more desperately than I have in months. I wanted someone to hug me and say “I’m glad you didn’t die” but all I got was a waiting room full of strangers speaking a foreign language and looking at me strangely.

 I also realized that there was no brilliant “life flashing before your eyes” moment like in ‘Armageddon’ when Bruce Willis blows himself up. Maybe that only comes when you die saving the planet. All I know is that if I’d hit my head and never woken up I’d have never had the chance to think of all the things I’d done in my life. Looking back is for people who are alive to do so. So, look back now, while you have the chance and fix the things that need fixing. Tell your parents you appreciate everything they’ve done for you. Apologize for every mean thing you ever did to your sister and tell her how proud of her you are. Tell that friend that you’ve lost contact with for whatever reason that you still think about them all the time. What would you regret having not done if you died today? Go do it. Carpe diem my friends, carpe diem.

Like I said, I know those things are cliché… but hey, they’re cliché for a reason and it never hurts to be reminded, right? It’s been a couple weeks since I got hit now and I’m mostly all healed up. My wrist is still achy if I use it too much and the bruises on my left butt cheek are still a lovely shade of yellowish grey. More damaging than the physical injuries is my aversion to riding my bike to town.

Eight days after I got hit I climbed back in the saddle, so to speak, and rode to town. It was awful. Every time I heard a car coming down the road behind me my heart raced, I held my breath, gripped the handlebars with white-knuckle ferocity and braced to be hit. I told myself the chances of being hit again were slim, like the people who get attacked by a shark or struck by lightning; once it happens once it seems incredibly rare that the same freak event would happen to the same person again. Of course the flip side of that is what are the chances you’d get hit twice by a car and walk away with only minor injuries both times? Either way, riding my bike to town was a horrible experience and that has made me more mad than anything else.

I used to love riding my bike to town. I’d turn on my ipod to something upbeat, stick an earbud in one ear and lose myself in the rhythm of pedaling, the feel of the wind on my face. I don’t know if I’ll ever have that experience again. The last few times I’ve needed to go to town since then I’ve walked the 5 Km. I’m sure I’ll ride to town again but it’s going to take me awhile to do so without it being an emotionally draining experience.

All right, onto other things!

Because it wouldn’t be a blog entry without a picture of Boo, here’s a couple cute ones…

Posing for a cute kitten calendar

A very dead kitchen sponge, the shrapnel
of which is spread all over my living room.

Her new favorite toys are my kitchen sponges which she steals and then rips to shreds. I guess I can’t be too upset, they’re cheap toys… I just wish she could keep the one and stop trying to climb in my dish bucket to steal the new ones. She’s getting bigger by the day and her spazzy rampages through the house are slightly more destructive each time. Her newest nickname is “tiny psychopath”. I’ve also discovered she will eat a surprising variety of foods. I pretty much let her try anything she wants because cat food here is SUPER expensive on my budget. So far Boo likes: raw carrots, hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, pasta, rice, mangoes, apples, oatmeal, curry, cheese, peanut butter, popcorn, bread, sweet potatoes, black beans and bananas. Oh, and she loves to eat bugs but not before she tortures them for a few hours before she finally kills them. Truly a tiny little psychopath…

Carrots

The dry season is finally coming to a close (hadn’t rained since November) and I could not be happier about it. I live right off a dirt road and the dust was starting to get a little bit ridiculous. Plus, hauling over 50 gallons of water 80 yards to my shamba (garden) every day was getting real old real fast. My little neighbor kids love helping me, which is fantastic… except their idea of appropriate watering technique is a little different than mine. One plant gets a half a gallon and the next gets half a cup. Plus, they can only carry half a gallon at a time (I bought a special tiny bucket for the smallest kid who’s four-years-old) and supervising their watering is almost more trouble than its worth. So, as I said, I’m happy the rains have returned; it saves me from having to water my garden every afternoon and the plants get way more water than they would through hand-watering.

My cucumber plants have started to flower!

Baby mixed greens. They've turned out
to be the hardest to grow, only 1 in 16
grew on the first try... second planting
is just starting to sprout, hoping they
do better otherwise I'm going to have
a VERY smalll salad!

Here’s a few pictures of some of the crops in my shamba. Most of them are growing pretty well. I’m discovering the bugs like to eat certain things and those will need to be sprayed if they’re going to survive. So far I’ve got cucumber, spinach, carrots, broccoli, pumpkin, string beans, snap peas and mixed baby greens planted and growing. My sprained wrist is preventing me from digging out the rest of the ground for the melon patch. Hoping another week of healing will be sufficient to let me dig again. We’ll see.

Baby Spinach - the thing I'm probably MOST excited about
having here.. helloooooo spinach salad!!!

Pumpkin - planted near the fence so it can
 grow up and save on space

What else am I working on? Well, I’m still making jewelry (I’m bringing stuff home with me when I visit in May and you best believe I expect you to buy some!) and getting myself set-up and organized to get the group started. I’m trying to make enough money to cover start-up costs right now for both the women’s group and my other major project, a community resource center.

While it’s nice for me that I live really close to a major town with universities, cyber cafes, a library, places where almost any information you could want is accessible, for about 90% of the people in my community those resources are not realistic. Many of them can’t afford the transport cost to town or are physically not able to walk the 5 plus Km. The kids under 13 or so aren’t really old enough to go to town themselves and wouldn’t have the money to pay for use of the resources even if they did. Additionally, many people don’t even know where to go to get information even if they had the time and means to get it.

Taking all these factors into consideration, I decided to start a community resource center at the clinic. It will basically be a little library except all the materials will stay in the room rather than being able to be “checked-out”. The clinic gave me a room and I got the go-ahead from community elders and the appropriate government offices a couple weeks ago. Right now I’m working on getting the room cleaned up, painted and furnished.

The first thing was cleaning out the room (it was an exam room that was turned into a storage room), scraping off the old posters and re-painting the walls white. There were cracks between the top of the wall and the trim along the ceiling so they bought some plaster. After waiting for over a week for the fundi (they call any kind of carpenter, repairman, mechanic a “fundi” [foo-n-dee]) that they told me was going to do the painting and plastering I got fed up and decided to do it myself. The staff was aghast, “surely you don’t know how to do those things, you better wait for the fundi” but I proceeded anyway. At that point I had my friend coming in two days to help me paint a mural and the white coat needed to be done first. I was sick of waiting for whatever fundi they had supposedly found (and were going to pay) to do something I knew I was completely capable of doing myself. So, I marched into the room and surveyed my equipment.



Before: Part of the world map will extend onto the
left part of this wall

The plaster was a bag of powder that you mix with water. Ooookay, I’d never actually mixed plaster before, but how hard could it really be? I went home and got an old peanut butter jar, a plastic spoon and picked up a few sticks on my way back to the clinic. I mixed the plaster, climbed on top of a stool, perched myself on my tip-toes and used a stick and the spoon to smear plaster into the cracks. I had an amazed audience for about the first twenty minutes; people were skeptical of my skills.

  


Where my future "desk" will be. The space will double
as my office so I can act as a librarian of sorts. The wall on
the right will have the nutrition art work... and of course
the bike won't be there.

Eventually the fundi showed up (he gawked at me too for a few minutes until he’d convinced himself I actually knew what I was doing) and started mixing the paint and preparing the walls. He started painting while I finished plastering and then I helped him paint. The whole afternoon the clinic staff kept wandering in to see our progress. My favorite part was the women and their reaction to me painting. Though the Kenyans like to tell me they have gender equality here, the fact is the gender roles are still very traditional and there is a clear divide between “women’s work” and “men’s work”. I was so totally doing men’s work. They stood there and had a conversation about how they never imagined that they would be able to paint their houses but now that they’d watched me do it and I’d assured them that it really wasn’t that hard and I could show them, they wanted to try it themselves. It’s really rewarding for me to hear the women talk like that.

  


Before: The "World Map" wall

Long story short, we painted (though the second coat still isn’t finished on 3 of the 4 walls) for the afternoon then the fundi left and I continued to paint until 8:30pm. A few days later my friend Hannah came to help me paint a mural on the wall.  We took my $3 world map and used it as a template to create a map the size of the wall. Using a ruler we measured and multiplied everything by five to keep the proportions correct.

  

The door leading into the center
and my little neighbor Kababa

I’ve said, in previous blogs, that I really believe I’m learning as much about myself in being here as I am about other people and this was just another example. I knew I had the tendency to be anal retentive (what, me, noooo) but holy crap. Hannah started with Australia and I started with South America and we worked towards each other. I was taking about four times as long because I was measuring everything while Hannah was free-handing most of it. I didn’t think a lot of it at the time, Hannah is a much better artist than I am, she actually paints pictures that actually resemble human beings.

Don't let the ruler fool you,
Hannah is only pretending to measure!

Anyway, we put some music on and drew away. Two hours later Hannah was on Africa and I was still finishing the middle Americas. Then we took a step back and looked at the map and realized Africa was about 2 inches from South America when it should have been about 20… oops. Hannah’s lack of measuring made her faster than me, but it also made her proportions waaaay off. So, I ended up going back and redrawing basically everything she’d drawn. My anal retention sort of comes in handy some times. On the other hand, I finally finished the drawing portion today... it took a solid 20 hours of work to finish just drawing the map. Adding to that the tracing in black paint, then at least 2 coats of color on each country (they are color coded based on HIV/AIDS prevalence) and the ocean and labeling the countries and adding a scale and a key.… well let’s just say I have a project for a couple weeks.  And that only covers one and a half walls.

One of the other walls will have art work based on nutrition education. I’ll post pictures from that when I get going on it. For now, I've included some before pictures of the room and a few of the progress made so far. I will definitely post more as I complete more of the map!


I'll leave you with some pictures of the work in progress... Until next time,  all my love from Africa!

Me on my super awesome ladder. They had to take it apart to
 get it through the door frame
and then reassemble it on the other side.

Saved the super annoying small countries in Europe for the end... Did a fist pump
 (directly into the ceiling since I was still standing on the ladder...) when I
 finally finished outlining the last country

Oh look, there I am!

Progress as of right now!