Dirt, Bugs, Bites and Beads

            Several people have told me the formatting of the blog made it hard to read so, after literally  hours of trying to fix it from my end I ended up with this new, and really simple template. Hope this is easier on the eyes...
                                      Here’s a random cute pic to start off the entry…



Boo helping me study



And this is what the doctors do in the reception area of the clinic when there aren't a lot of patients...

 

The clinic staff shelling peanuts in the reception area of my clinic

 

                 So I made a list of New Year’s resolutions the first week of January and I’ve been trying to at least attempt to follow through on them. Mostly they’re the same ones I’ve been making for years; get in shape, eat better, study, make better relationship decisions (ie stay away from boys), be less dramatic. There were a couple more specific goals though. I want to get a 37 or better on my MCATs in May, which means my nose needs to spend a lot of time in a book over the next few months (for those of you not up on your MCAT scoring grid, a 37 would put me around the top 1% of testers which makes it a really lofty goal). I also want to get the “read” folder on my Kindle to over a hundred books by the end of this year (currently at 59 so I’m thinking this one is in the bag). “Be happy for ____’s happiness” is another one. If you know me well enough (ie have heard me bitch about my previous relationship enough) you know who’s name goes in the blank. If not, let’s just say I’d like to be happy for an ex of mine who happens to now be shacking up with my arch-nemesis. I’m not yet “zen” or a big enough person to give a shit about her happiness- maybe in 2013.

Another resolution; finish writing a book by the end of this year. I’ve started writing a couple since I’ve gotten here. One is around 18,000 words and the other, newer one is around 12,000. Both have promising beginnings but my downfall has always been in the follow through. This resolution is probably the goal least likely to get completed. Admittedly, it’s a repeat offender having made numerous appearances on lists of ‘things to do’ over the years. I’ll try to keep you all updated on how the resolutions are coming…

In January I spent some time in the shamba (field) planting vegetables for the clinic. When the new addition to the clinic opens we will have in-patient care and would like to use the crops from the shamba to feed the in-patients and the staff. They also gave me a little plot of my own to try and grow some other vegetables. Right now I’m trying my hand at cucumber, carrots and pumpkin but I’m hoping to add more variety as time, space and motivation allows. The garden has a two-fold purpose. On one hand, I need stuff to do until the new addition opens. I have some other stuff going but a lot of it involves sitting in my house, which gets depressing after a while. So, the garden will get me outside, get my hands dirty and also cut down on my food costs since I’ll be growing some of my own veggies instead of buying them. Plus, I’ve always wanted to grow stuff. Mom and Dad (and the 30 x 6 ft strip of dirt in the backyard where grass used to be) can attest to my previously failed attempts at gardening.

The other goal of the garden is to try and get people to grow other kinds of vegetables. Even though there are a wide variety of crops that could be grown here, the Kenyans tend to eat the same five things over and over again. As a consequence they tend to grow those same few crops. This wouldn’t be a problem if they were getting sufficient nutrition from what they were eating. Unfortunately they aren’t and considering the fertility of the land here, that’s a real shame.

 Vitamin A deficiency is the number one cause of preventable blindness in Kenya, especially for children. This is the case in many other developing countries as well. In addition to causing blindness (especially loss of night vision) Vitamin A is important for boosting immune function and, as an added bonus, keeps your skin nice and healthy.   Due to wide-spread deficiency, Vitamin A is supplemented for all children under 5 (every 6 months) and pregnant women. However, since there aren’t magic supplement fairies that go to people’s houses to make sure they’re getting proper nutrition , this requires that the kids be brought to a health center at regular intervals which is hardly the case (even for people who live within a few kilometers of our clinic) and many kids don’t get these supplements. I have, on several occasions, met children in the village who were 2, 3, 4 or more years old and had never been to a health facility, didn’t have a single immunization and no birth certificate.

Really though, the supplementation shouldn’t even be necessary. Vegetables like sweet potatoes, carrots and pumpkin have lots of vitamin A and are easy to grow and prepare. And when I say “lots” of Vitamin A, I mean 1 cup of mashed sweet potatoes has 769% of your RDA (recommended daily allowance), 100 g of raw carrots have 334% and 1 cup of boiled pumpkin has 245%, making all three of them great sources of Vitamin A. So, what’s the problem?

As I said before, people here tend to eat the same five things every day. Here’s what a typical diet for a villager around me might look like:

Staple Foods (i.e. consumed on a daily basis)  

·         White bread or Mandazi (maa- n- da-zee) – fried doughnut like things only with less sugar

·         Chai – black tea, milk and sugar

·         Maize flour – very similar to corn flour. They use it to make ugali (oo-ga-lee) which is eaten at least once a day if not twice. If you want to know what ugali is like, take malt-o-meal and add about a third of the water you’re supposed to (no sugar) then heat and stir…

·         Sweet bananas – tiny little things I never believed would taste different than normal sized bananas but actually do…

·         Kale – they call it skuma wiki (skoo-ma week-ee) and they prepare by finely chopping the leaves, boiling, draining, and frying with a small amount of onion and tomato.

·         Other native green leafy vegetables – some of these are actually my favorites both taste wise and from a nutritional standpoint. They tend to be high in calcium, iron and folic acid (like green leafies back home) and their biggest downfall is that they are traditionally prepared in the same way as skuma wiki, so some of their nutritional value is lost through boiling and the frying adds unnecessary fats.

Semi-Staple Foods (consumed once, twice, possibly three times per week):

·         Black beans

·         Whole maize (similar to corn but tougher and (guessing based on texture here) with a higher starch content)

·         Potatoes, sweet or regular

·         Eggs – may be eaten more often if they own chickens or have easy access and moderate income

·         Milk – may be drunk more often if they have easy access and moderate income

·         Other tropical fruits (oranges, mangoes, papaya, very rarely pineapple (they are expensive))

·         Sugar cane

·         Porridge (usually exclusively fed to small children)

·         Green bananas – peeled, boiled and fried with onion and tomato (seeing a pattern here…?)

Rarely Eaten Foods (A few times a month and/or at special occasions)

·         Meat – usually goat, chicken or beef. People raise livestock here but it is the “middle-class” villagers who can afford to eat their animals. I would say most families in the village, especially very poor families, have meat only a few times a month.

·         Dried fish – either tilapia or omena (o-men-ah, small minnow-looking fish) that are sun dried and transported from Lake Victoria. Omena are reasonably cheap and eaten more often than other meats.

·         Sweets – suckers and bubble gum are available at most little shops and given to kids as a reward or on special occasions

So, the goal of my garden is to introduce the community to different vegetables and subsequently show them ways to prepare them. To do that second part I want to get a community resource center started. It would be a space for educational materials (textbooks, etcetera) that everyone could benefit from, plus a place where we can hold meetings for youth groups, cooking classes, etcetera.

Here’s a few pictures of the shamba around the clinic and some of my own little plot that they gave me to grow my “other” vegetables. Since writing the first part of this post I’ve found seeds for watermelon, cantaloupe, baby spinach, mixed baby greens and broccoli.  The carrots, cucumber and pumpkin have also started to sprout and it’s a little ridiculous how excited I am about that fact. At least for now, I’m loving being a farmer.



The field behind the clinic where we planted a TON of kale and I got more dirt under my finger nails than I was aware they could hold,



My little shamba. It's about half way dug out, the far end will be a melon patch when I find the time and energy to hoe-out the rest of the space!



The only downside to the location of my shamba is its proximity to that fence you see in the picture. There’s a path on the other side of that fence which a lot of people walk down and, even though I’ve been out there for over 2 weeks straight now, every single day, people still stop and stare at the white woman working in the field. Some people applaud me (literally) and think its really cool that I’m doing the same things they do, that I’m making an effort to really experience their life. Others ask me why I don’t find a boyfriend to do the digging for me. The people in this second group are all men and they all annoy the hell out of me. One guy (who has defended himself as a proponent of gender equality on numerous occasions) went so far as to tell me that my body is going to get “hard” if I keep working and a young women like me should have a soft body and should do work in the home to keep it that way. I am getting extremely good at smiling and nodding cordially while secretly wanting to punch someone in the face. Perhaps I should consider a career in politics.

The fact of the matter is I enjoy the work. I like getting all dirty and sweaty. I love falling into bed at the end of the day and sleeping like a log. Plus, having a Kenyan do it for me would I mean I would have to pay them money I really don’t have or I would have to date them, something I am wholeheartedly uninterested in. The reasoning there is a whole other issue I might get into at a later date.

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On to a more depressing story… I think I might have talked about jiggers before, so if you’re a frequent viewer and you know about them, skip the rest of this paragraph… Jiggers are tiny little bugs that are related to fleas. They live in the dirt and when you walk barefoot they can ‘jump’ onto your feet, burrow under your skin (they especially like the nail beds) and lay their eggs. The jigger stays burrowed and grows as they produce more and more eggs and eventually the sack bursts and the eggs are released into the dirt where the cycle can start over. This process leaves open wounds all over the feet of an effected individual. In severe cases the jiggers can infest the hands, knees and even genitals. If they are not treated the person will become disabled as their toe nails fall off and the toes eventually atrophy and fall off. Painful sores on the feet keep the person from walking so they end up crawling around the house, which is how the jiggers end up on the knees, elbows, genitals (from sitting on the floor with inadequate clothing). The saddest part of the whole thing is that the treatment is cheap and easy; you dunk your feet (or whatever other part is affected) into a bucket of water mixed with about 15 cents worth of liquid medicine (a cleanser very similar to bleach). In 20 minutes the jiggers are killed and after a few days they fall out of the skin. The wounds begin to heal like any other and in a couple weeks the wounds are healed.

So, this brings me to my story… a couple weeks ago I went on an “outreach” day into the village to treat jiggers. We’d done a similar trip the week before waaaaay in the interior (well over an hour of walking away from town) and treated twenty or so people over the course of an entire day. Here are pictures of the first family of kids we treated. We found the 3 sisters home alone in the middle of the day; their parents had gone off to try and find or beg for food.

It's not at all unusual to find a 9 or 10 year old taking care of their younger siblings.



My friend Ignatius washing the feet of the girls in a basin of medicine.



One of my favorite pictures from my time in Kenya so far.



We also sprayed the houses of the people with moderate cases to try and stop the buggers from re-infesting. This day, however, we made the short trip to the school I taught at and treated over 60 kids in a couple hours.



A bunch of the school kids waiting or being treated in the front yard of the school.



Most of the cases were pretty mild, a few on the toes, maybe one on the heel or the ball of the foot, but nothing we hadn’t seen before. Then the teacher’s showed me the feet and hands of a pair of brothers. The pictures are below.

You can see the sores where the jiggers burrow in, lay their eggs and then eventually burst out of, leaving a painful open sore.

This picture does a good job showing how the toenails in particular are a favorite area for the jiggers and how their infestation can disfigure the toes.

These were the only kids who had jiggers on their hands and it wasn’t just one or two, it was enough that it was probably affecting their ability to write and do other activities requiring fine-motor skills. We treated the boys' feet like all the others and I had the idea to treat their hands by putting them in gloves and filling the gloves with medication. They looked a little goofy but it got the job done.

So, we treated these two boys and the rest of the kids at the school and then we went to the house where the brother’s lived so we could spray since they obviously had a bad infestation.

The house, a four walled mud hut with a roof of dried banana leaves and maize stalks, was on the way back to the clinic, a house I’d actually been to before. We called “hodi” as we walked up, which  is basically like “anybody home?” and an obviously old voice cracked “karibu” from inside, which means welcome. The five of us piled into this tiny room, maybe 13 x 15 feet and exchanged the necessary greetings with the old woman who turned out to be the grandmother of the boys.  We told her that we’d seen the two boys at the school and asked if we could spray around the inside and outside of the house. As this conversation was going on I was looking around the tiny house wondering if one could inherently ‘know’ there were a shit-ton of bugs here just by looking. Really, you can’t; the house looked like any other mud-walled-hut I’ve seen a hundred times in the village. However, as I was eyeing the cracks and crevices of the floor from afar, I noticed a little kid sitting in the bedroom. The ill-fitting wooden door was barely half open but I could see the little boy sitting on the floor through the space where the door ‘hinged’ with the wall.

He was cross-legged on the floor, picking absently at his bare feet. I nudged Jen (one of the community health workers for the area) and pointed to the kid in the room. She peered in at him for a moment before going into the room and scooping him up off the floor. She lifted him easily, carrying him away from her body with outstretched arms like you would a filthy animal.  She crossed the living room and brought him outside. She tried to get him to stand but he refused to put his weight on his feet and let his legs buckle and his butt fall to the grass when she finally let him go. He tucked his legs up again and slumped forward, his head hanging droopily over his feet. If he had been a depressing sight inside, seeing him in the harsh light of the day was enough to bring tears to your eyes. The pictures below are of this little boy and they are disturbing.



Most little kids love having their pictures taken. This little boy would not look up from the ground and he wouldn't talk to me or any of the other community health workers, even to tell us his name and how old he was.





The worst case of jiggers I've ever seen in a small child.



There are no words that can describe the particular mix of emotions I felt sitting there with this child. The jiggers were so bad on his hands and feet that they were forcing some of his nails right out of their nail bad and they were in the process of falling off.  He wouldn’t stand because he couldn’t; he was in too much pain from the open sores all over the bottom of his feet. One of his fingers was shorter than the matching one on the other hand because the jiggers had literally eaten off the tip of his finger. I would have been surprised if this kid could hold a pencil or feed himself without considerable pain.

I was simultaneously heart-broken, angry and so, so frustrated. We sat him down on a tiny little bench and submerged his hands and feet in the water-medicine solution. I put gloves on and squatted down next to him, trying to pull off jiggers I could see and rub loose skin out of the way so the liquid could get better access at the bugs under the skin. The kid kept trying to yank his hands away because it hurt but it was important to make sure the medicine could work properly. I felt awful inflicting that pain on him and watching him squirm in pain made me even madder. I paced back and forth in the front yard fighting tears as his hands and feet continued to soak. Nothing is sadder than seeing a child in pain Nothing is more frustrating than knowing the prevention of that suffering is as easy as washing ones hands and feet. And, nothing is more maddening than hearing the caretaker of that child make excuses as to why he’s in that condition.

I have constant discussions here about family size, about why it’s important to reduce the average family size if Kenya ever wants to get itself out of “third-world” status. The Kenyans tell me that Americans don’t like children and that’s why we only average just over two per couple. They tell me that Kenyan people cherish and revere children, that they are a gift from God and that’s why they have so many. It’s really hard to see something like the boy with the debilitating jiggers and think that that qualifies as cherishing a child. Isn’t it better to have a few children and take care of them than have a baker’s dozen and leave them all suffering?

In that family’s case, the mother died about five years ago and the father abandoned the children (there are four of them). In fact, that father lives just down the street with a new family. For all intents and purposes his children died to him when their mother passed. Though I can understand a lot of things and my horizons have been broadened through my experiences, I will never understand how someone can walk away from their four small children and never look back. I cannot understand how he could live in the same village, undoubtedly knowing of their suffering and do nothing to help them.

The sad thing is this story is not a rare one. I am told that if a woman dies the chances that the father will stay with the children are slim to nil. In Kenyan society it is the man’s right to take a new wife and have a new family. If this sounds like I am laying blame solely on the men, I’m not. The women are just as much to blame for this practice as far as I am concerned. It is these new wives who, in many cases, insist that the man sever ties to the children he bore with his first wife. Instead, it seems to me that these women should insist that the man take care of all of his children. After all, isn’t that what she would want if she were to die?

                Alright, enough preaching on that depressing and oh-so-frustrating topic! Here are a couple pictures I have to share are of my own recent experience with bugs. After waking up with increasingly itchy for two weeks straight I finally took a picture (I don’t have anything bigger than a face mirror) of my back one night after getting out of the “shower” and this is what I saw…

First I laughed at the fact that I looked like I had chicken pox and then I promptly started researching how to kill bed bugs. I went to the chemist (drug store) and bought 75 cents worth of poison which I mixed with water (per instructions that were, thank God, in English) and proceeded to spray everything in my room that could have possibly come in contact with my bedding. There is nothing quite so depressing as having to de-bed-bug a Carebear and a stuffed lion. I lined them up against the side of the bed like a firing squad, apologized and doused them liberally with stinky poison. In fear of night time retaliation I have not yet invited them back to bed and they currently glare at me from their perches atop my still full suitcases.

Finally, I’ve told many of you that I’ve been making jewelry and I wanted to share with you a few pictures of some of the things I’ve made. Thanks to everyone who has sent me magazines, you’ve helped make some of these! If anyone is interested in purchasing anything, let me know :-)

These are the paper beads made from magazine!



A necklace (or wrap it on the wrist a few times for a bracelet) and earring set.

    

    This is just a few of the pieces I have made and if people are interested I can post more pictures in future entries. Alright, until next time, love you all!

The Holidays, My New Flat-mate and Other Random Stuff

                Happy New Year to everyone! Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s holiday. Life here has been somewhat boring as of late. Or I guess as boring as it ever gets when you’re living in a third world country…
       Sorry in advance for the photos this week being so teeny-tiny. For whatever reason the interface to upload is being painfully slow and refuses to upload anything over 60 kB... therefore, thumbnail sized photos. Hopefully it will get its act together before my next blog and I can re-post some of the pictures in sizes that can be viewed without the aid of a high powered microscope.

    My Christmas was fantastic. I spent the holiday at my friend Hannah’s house just under 2 hours to the North of me. It was the first Christmas party I’ve ever really helped organize and I think it went pretty well. We cooked for 12 people on 2 burners (one a gas stove and the other a charcoal one) and managed to (a) not burn anything (b) not serve anything cold (c) have enough food for everyone but not so much that we wasted (no fridge for leftovers…) and (d) not kill each other or anyone else. This last fact is the most impressive for me as I tend to be… shall we say, perfectionistic (you could also say, controlling, impatient, psychotic, or a slew of any other synonyms for bitchy), when it comes to planning and executing things like cooking Christmas dinner for more people than can be counted on one hand. At one point I did have to tell someone that I loved them but they needed to get the hell out of the kitchen if they weren’t going to help. Luckily they understood and left before there was any bloodshed.

         Speaking of which, we did slaughter a chicken for Christmas. Hannah killed it (knife to throat while standing of the wings and feet), another volunteer plucked all the feathers (dunk in boiling water then tediously pull every single feather out) and I “butchered” it. That word is in quotes because I had no idea what I was doing… and I did it with my dissection kit. Yes, I brought a dissection kit with me to Kenya and yes, I used it to butcher a chicken for Christmas dinner. I know I’m weird, hopefully someday I’ll actually get paid to work and have some money in the bank and then we can just call me ‘eccentric’ instead. Anyhow, I was really excited about the prospect of practicing my scalpel skills and it was admittedly fun taking apart the chicken… for the first half hour… then I was just annoyed. By the time I got all the meat off the bones and the rest separated for making stock I didn’t even feel like playing with the heart, which is usually my favorite part. Plus, no one seemed as enthused about the anatomy lesson I was dying to give as I’d originally hoped. 

Me with a chicken leg, mid butchering



                       Nonetheless, the point remains, Christmas dinner went off without a hitch, which is seriously saying something when you consider what we were working with. Hannah and I bought all the food beforehand and carried it in backpacks a few miles around town and then for 45 minutes on a matatu (public transportation vehicles here… think soccer mom minivan with 18 people shoved inside). We also walked 3 miles to town the morning before and bought 4 dozen eggs, which I carried the 3 miles back to her house in a cardboard box alternating between carrying it in my arms and balancing it on my head. Arrived home with all 48 eggs intact, thank you very much!

                Other than eating a ton of good food, the Christmas holiday was also wonderful because I got to spend a few days being an American, with other Americans, pretending we weren’t tens of thousands of miles away from home during the holidays. It’s really hard to explain just how needed that time with the other volunteers is to you. I don’t know if you can fully understand how lonely it is at site sometimes. It’s that whole “I’m standing in a room full of people but I feel all alone” thing. I see people every day (whether I want to or not and some days I really don’t want to) but I very rarely actually get to be myself. I’m a buttoned-up, skirt wearing, woman be-friending (most of my friends back home are men), culturally appropriate version of myself which can wear really thin. To have a few days to go and talk about stuff we never get to talk about at site, like how much we miss American food (mine: sushi, tofu, good cheese, candy without gelatin in it, Jack Daniels) TV, family gatherings, the weather, normal dating, sex (sorry Dad, Grandma,Grandpa… just pretend you didn’t read that last one), stupid pop culture crap, music, our cars… I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Having other people who can empathize with you is indescribably important over here.

                All in all, I have to say that my first Peace Corps Christmas was one of the best holidays I’ve had. It’s amazing how fast the other volunteers have become my family here. So, even though I missed all of you, I wasn’t lonely or sad on Christmas, I was spending it with my new family here.



The boys had a slightly different interpretation of what an ugly Christmas sweater was...



Some of the group with kids from near Hannah's house





                New Year’s was another story. I was supposed to go to another volunteer party near Lake Victoria… but I woke up the morning of to travel and felt like absolute hell. I really wanted to go so I stuck out packing and getting ready for about a half hour until I started puking, then decided a 4-5 hour matatu ride followed by an hour and a half on a ferry seemed like a bad idea. So, I spent New Year’s Eve at site, by myself, feeling like crap. Luckily I had Boo to keep me company and wasn’t actually too upset about missing the festivities.

                Boo, by the way, is my new kitten. She was living on Hannah’s farm (her mom was killed somehow) and I fell in love with her over Christmas and decided to bring her home. Oh, I forgot to add into the Christmas party story that I had to, on Christmas, go get a rabies shot because Boo accidentally bit my thumb. I say accidentally because it really wasn’t her fault; I was a dumbass and fed her fish out of a margarine lid I was holding in my hand… after having broken the dried fish up with my fingers.. ie, my thumb smelled like food and was within range to be mistaken for a fish. Given my aversion to needles and the fact that it was Christmas, I was not a happy camper about it (many tears were shed at the hospital). It does go to show how in love I was with the cat though, as I still wanted to take her home with me.

One of Boo's favorite sleeping spots.

                Boo is adjusting well to her life in my tiny house. I’m not sure how old she is but 6-8 weeks seems like a solid guess. Accordingly, she has 2 modes right now. She is either running around my house like a psycho with Puss-n-Boots eyes and her fur puffed out attacking everything she can reach, or she is asleep. There is no middle ground, which means I alternate between thinking she is a complete pain in the ass (I’ve begun referring to her as ‘sumbua’ [sue-m-boo-ah] at these times, it means ‘bother’ in Swahili) and thinking she is the cutest friggen thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve also “litter box” trained her. There is no litter here so she has a box with newspaper in it (as a consequence Boo is actually forcing me to pay attention to current events since I have to buy a paper a couple times a week now). I’m pretty sure she’s a genius because she figured it out in one try and hasn’t pooped or peed anywhere else since the first time she peed on the floor and I said ‘no’, put her in the litter box and put the tissue I used to wipe the pee up in there with her. She also understands “no” already and comes when I call her. Plus, she was passed around over Christmas between a dozen drunk and rowdy people in the midst of three constantly fighting puppies and never once spazzed out, scratched, hissed at or bit anyone except me and my food-smelling-thumb. I have extremely high hopes for her. I’m thinking the next order of business is to train her as a ninja attack kitten to hunt and eliminate the bugs in my house.

                Cat lady jokes aside (and I know some of you are making them), she is a really nice distraction from the sometimes mundane day-to-day drudgery of my life at site. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have conversations with her sometimes. To her credit she always looks at me like what I’m saying is really important, which is more than some of my ex-boyfriends have been able to manage.  I also woke up the other morning to me spooning my Carebear and my Carebear spooning Boo who was curled around one of the Carebear’s fuzzy pink feet.  I was laying there and couldn’t decide if my life was awesome and right out of a kitten calendar or really, really, painfully pathetic. Maybe a little bit of both but I lean towards the kitten calendar. My best friend at site is a one and a half pound kitten with probable bi-polar disorder, so sue me.

                Let’s see… what else… like I said, not a whole lot is new around here. The new addition to the clinic still hasn’t opened. They said hopefully by then end of this month but let’s just say I’m not holding my breath on that one. So, for the time being I’m working on making some sample pieces of jewelry to see if there’s a viable market for it either here or in the states. Consequently, I spend a lot of time sitting alone in my house listening to music and making beads/jewelry. I’m really looking forward to the day I can start teaching other people how to make the pieces, though I’m sure that endeavor will come with a whole new set of challenges. People in the village and around work are already asking me to make pieces for them, which is great except that everybody wants it for free. That wouldn’t be a problem except that I make nothing here and the materials for the jewelry are coming out of my monthly living allowance. That and they don’t seem to understand that hours of hand beading go into each piece, it’s not like I have a troupe of little elves that come make stuff while I’m sleeping.  Though I bet I could hire some village kids for near nothing… kidding, I wouldn’t do that, though really, truly, I easily could.

Other random things:

On conquering childhood failures –

Since I learned to ride a bike, waaaay back in the day of matching fruit of the loom sweat suits in jewel colors and unitards with dyed jean overalls over them, I saw some kid ride his bike down the street with no hands. Of course it looked awesome and I immediately wanted to do it too. I tried for years but never succeeded. Hell, before coming to Kenya I’d ridden a bike maybe once since I got my first car when I was 16. Needless to say I forgot about my quest… that is until I saw a teenage Kenyan boy riding down the street pedaling away, hands resting idly by his side. My passion was renewed and I’ve been trying to ride no handed for the last couple weeks. Well, ladies and gentleman, today I succeeded. Almost two decades later I can finally say I can ride a bike with no hands! That little victory made me giggle the rest of the way home. Sometimes it really is the small things in life.

                On my messy house –

For years my mother (and sometimes father) and I have been at odds over the condition of my various living spaces. When I was a child it usually turned into tears and/or screaming arguments about me making my bed or cleaning up my dishes. The teenage years were even worse. Mom let me have more space, telling me that as long as I kept my door closed and she couldn’t see the mess, she would try not to nag me about it all the time. That space turned into weeks and months going by without my room being cleaned. There were times I would literally have to leap from open spot to open spot on the floor because I had so many clothes, books, shoes, art project of the moment, etcetera scattered about. I loathed making my bed and only did it when I knew company might be coming over and might want to see my room. I have always (and to the chagrin of my waist-line probably will always be) a midnight snacker. That habit turned into a lot of empty cereal bowls being left in my room, and half empty water bottles. I used to joke that I was just getting ready for the alien invasion like the little girl in ‘Signs’; if those suckers wandered into my bedroom I'd have a convienient supply of stagnant water to splash their way. Once, in a rare thorough cleaning, I found a spoon that had been under the bed so long it had turned into a science experiment; there was a thick layer of fuzzy greenish substance growing on it.

Well, the point of this little story is to say that I am no different here. However, I do curse my messiness at times. For instance, when it’s 3 in the morning and Boo has found yet another piece of paper to chase noisily around my room. Or when my little neighbor kids (4,6 and 10) come to visit and cannot help but touch everything they see. And I do mean everything. They want to know what my flashlight is. They want to look through every single photograph and book I have out. They want to play with my camera and my phone and my batteries and my ear buds and my bottle of glue and my shoes and my cup of pens and pencils and my box of colored pencils of which they want to test out every color on scraps of paper. They pick up my nail polish and start painting their fingers. They dig through my beads and inevitably spill them everywhere.

So, mom, be assured, when I have children of my own (and I can’t just lock them out of my house like I do with the neighbor kids when I’m not in the mood to have their adorable yet infuriating little paws all over everything) my house will be markedly more clean. Though, I’ll probably still have a room that is a disaster area at all times. A place I can lock the kids out of. A place I can go and revel in the glorious disarray.

                On Being a D-List Celebrity:

Remember when you were a kid and you thought how awesome it would be to be famous someday? Or maybe that was just me when I was young. I thought it would be great to get to live the glamorous life, to dress up in fancy clothes whenever I wanted, for people to recognize you on the street and want to greet you, maybe have their picture taken with you. Little did I know that by moving to Kenya I would get to experience a little bit of what I imagine life to be like for celebrities.

I can’t leave my house without someone going out of their way to greet me. I can’t leave my house without being judged for what I’m wearing and how I look that day. If I don’t leave my house people speculate that I’m sick or something is wrong with me. If I am seen with a man he is automatically assumed that he is my beau. Little children scream random greetings at me from blocks away. Everyone wants their picture taken. Men are constantly telling me they’ve fallen in love with me at first sight and want to marry me. Literally lost count of the number of serious marriage proposals I’ve had in the last 5 months. Everything I do is interesting and worth watching, even if what I’m doing is a mundane task like washing my clothes or walking down the street. People stop and stare at me when I walk by them or worse yet, when they walk by my house and see me in the yard doing anything.

So yea, being a white person in Kenya (at least in rural Kenya, Nairobi and Mombasa aren’t too bad) makes you an automatic D-list celebrity. And let me just tell you, I take back ever wanting to be the least bit famous. I miss being able to take a walk and not get stared at. I miss being anonymous, average, not-worth-noticing and it is one of the things I most look forward to upon returning home.

 On Peace Corps Being Like Dorm Life (or what I imagine it to be like since I never actually lived in a dorm...)

 

There was a fuel shortage in Kakamega (my town) about 6 weeks ago. Or course, this is when my propane tank, the only way I have of cooking food, ended up running out of fuel. So, yea, I ended up without a heat source for a little while. Then, I went to training and bought a pitcher that boils water using electricity. I considered this problem solved though the Kenyans think I’m insane. Little do they realize I have had a lot of experience hanging out with guys whose idea of ‘cooking’ is making ramen noodles. Do you have any idea how many things a person can do with ramen noodles? I'm relatively sure there is actually an entire cok book dedicated to ramen noodles, perhaps it is something I shoudl invest in... So, anyway, I eat variations of ramen noodles every single day. It's been 6-ish weeks and I've yet to get bored.

I also have a tiny refrigerator which makes the whole ‘no cooking’ thing easier since I can refrigerate fruits, vegetables, pasta salads and hard-boiled eggs (if you leave them sitting in hot water long enough they eventually hard “boil”). But, the tiny fridge means that it’s a constant struggle to fit everything in there. I jocky things around trying to decide what is most important to be cold that day… and then the electricity goes out and it doesn’t matter anyway because after a few hours everything is room temperature again. This leads to lots of “smell testing” to determine if things are going to kill me when I eat them. So far, so good.

I also feel like the miniscule amount of space I have here resembles dorm life. In reference to my story about my messy house, it would be a lot easier to keep the kids out of stuff if I had space to set things aside. As it is, my coffee table doubles as my work space which doubles as my kitchen table which doubles as my footrest  which doubles as my desk. The only thing I don’t do on my coffee table is sleep (mostly because there is no room, I don’t think my mattress is actually any more comfortable).

Anyway, all that adds up to me feeling like I’m living in a dorm sometimes. I am 25 years old but I feel like a college freshman all over again. Hell, I just ate cheese flavored Dorito-like chips for breakfast. Case and point.

Alright friends, until next time (when hopefully I can upload some normal sized images) love you all!

Over Six Months In...

                Well, I've officially been away from home for over 6 months now. The time feels particularly long with the Holiday season slowly rolling by and me missing everything familiar about home. The time has also gone by quickly though and that gives me hope for the next 20 months continuing to fly by.

                Those of you who are reading this and know me know I have a tattoo on the inside of my right wrist. Those of you who know me really well know that tattoo reads “serenity”. Those of you who know me better than I know myself some days know that the tattoo is a bit of an ironic homage to my father and, because we are so much the same, to myself as well.

                When people ask what my tattoo means and I tell them “serenity” they ask if I’m a recovering alcoholic or they do the weird thing from some Seinfeld episode I never saw. Some people even ask if it’s a reference to the short lived TV show by Joss Whedon. It is inspired, not by these things, but by my father’s repetitive mumblings of the serenity prayer when I was a kid. I always thought it was particularly odd since he is one of the least serene people I know. Nonetheless, growing up my Dad always told me to have the courage to change the things I could, the serenity to except the things I couldn’t and the wisdom to know the difference. When I was 20 years old I was itching for my second tattoo and I eventually decided on the simple black kanji that is now inked on my right wrist, where I see it every single day.

                I said that it was an ironic homage to myself and my father because we are two of the most high-strung, quick tempered, non-serene people I know. We don’t know how not to get our way and we deal with incompetence and imperfection even less gracefully. So, I got “serenity” tattooed on my wrist, not because I am a recovering alcoholic, an avid TV fan of one sort or the other or a particularly serene person; I got it as a reminder to try and take it down a notch. The older I get, the calmer I get (and thank God so does Dad) and the more I realize that growing up really is summed up in that one short mantra.

                Be brave: Have the guts to stand up for what you know is right. “Be the change you wish to see in the world” and chose a genuine path of honesty and integrity over the people pleasing complacence that plagues our world. Don’t be courageous for egos sake but also don’t be a coward in reverence of the same thing.

                Be serene: Know that not everything is in your power to change or to control. Sometimes the best leaders are those that know when to hand over the reins, when to fold and when to all out admit they were wrong. Sometimes you have to step back and just let things happen as they will. Serenity is not complacence but tranquility in the face of a storm. It is taking a deep breath instead of screaming in someone’s face. Many times it is being the bigger person because someone else cannot be.

                Grow wise: I don’t know that anyone ever ‘becomes’ wise or is inherently so, no matter how old they might be. The key is learning from your mistakes and letting each experience prepare you more fully for the next one. Wisdom is not perfection, rather the admitted absence of it.

                Being here has really tested my serenity at times. My family sent me a package for Christmas that some things were taken out of. It really sucks and it’s really, really hard to not be upset about it. And I am upset about it, just not as much as I would have been a few years ago. The fact is we knew it was a risk sending anything worth even a few dollars in a package to Africa. People here are really poor and a ten dollar item could mean they can feed their family for a week. Still, it sucks. I was really looking forward to my package and, though it was still awesome to get, it was kind of a buzz-kill to discover that not everything was there. As my mom said, “guess there are thieves everywhere.” Isn’t that the truth.

                Growing up is also about knowing when to tackle a problem head on and when to stop, breathe, strategize and come at it from a different angle. I walk through the villages and see kids who are literally starving to death. They are skin and bones without shoes or whole articles of clothing. There are 5 year old working in the fields and it is the hardest thing in the world to not want to scream at the parents, to pick the kid up and take it home with you. “Why don’t you feed the kid? Why don’t you have less children? Why is he not in school, why have you not taken him to the clinic for the free immunizations?” I want to ask (scream) at the mothers. But, I don’t. I bite my tongue and shake my head and fight back tears of sadness, frustration and incredulous humility. Screaming at the mother might feel good for a minute, might make me feel like I’m doing but growing up, having wisdom in this situation, is knowing that screaming at the mother now would only shoot me in the foot. If I want to change anything, to really change anything, I need to be someone the community trusts. I need to observe and learn and only then can I begin to understand what I can do to help.

                My father asked me what it is I exactly do here. It’s a very good question. It’s a question I ask myself a lot. What the hell am I really accomplishing here? What am I even trying to accomplish. I explained it to my dad and to myself, like this:

                Peace Corps is a very different volunteer organization than most others. For one thing, we spend over 2 years here. Most of what we do is learn and only a small part is actual implementation. Maybe you think that sounds like a waste of time and money. Maybe you think your tax dollars would be better spent on giving money or supplies to Kenyans rather than supporting an American to live in their village for 2 years. Let me tell you something I’ve already learned here… Throwing money or things at these people isn’t solving their problems. In fact, in some ways it’s making them worse. They see white people now as donors, people who come to drop things off, people who don’t know anything about them but have deep pockets. That’s a really big challenge for someone like myself who actually does know about their culture, someone who speaks the language and (mostly) eats the food and who doesn’t have any money at all to give them.

                Large donors come here and give away things without doing any research, without doing any education or training and that, my friends, is the true waste of money. One aid project I’ve had direct experience with gave away hundreds of thousands of household water filtering units. No one uses them. I go into the villagers houses and see them collecting dust in a corner. These filters are a fantastic idea; they are cheap to upkeep (you just have to rinse out the filter!), easy to use and effective at making water safe for people to drink. Why don’t people use them? They are slow and they are different. We’re talking about people with little to no education who don’t understand why or how it works. Beyond that they don’t understand why they should filter there water at all, they’ve never done it before, why start now? I’ve heard of people taking them apart and using part of the filter as a club to beat their kids with. I had someone tell me the filter put drugs into the water and would cause infertility.

                The point of that story is that the filters, while in essence were a good idea, were a huge waste of money. The donor spent millions and accomplished next to nothing because they didn’t do the leg work first.  Peace Corps is about the leg work. We don’t have lots of money to throw at people or organizations. We are about making small, appreciable changes that can have a big effect in the long run. If I can find out why that mother is having so many children and why she can’t feed or clothe them and if I can do something to change that at the root level of the problem, that has the capacity to change everything.

                So what am I doing? I’m learning, I’m observing, I’m gathering information and finding out the “why”s behind the problems before I try to do anything about fixing them. Why does that mother have 9 kids? She’s been told that taking hormonal birth control causes infertility. How do I know that? Not because she told me (she in this case is a fictitious amalgamation of the average woman in the village) but because I listened to conversations women didn’t know I understood and because the teachers in my primary school, women who have gone to college told me the same thing; that using birth control will make you unable to have kids again.

                If I had come in guns blazing my first week at site and lectured women on how they should use birth control I would have been wasting my time. They know what it is; they are just misinformed about it. It’s not about telling them they should use it, it’s about telling them it’s safe to do so. Beyond that it’s about convincing their husbands of the same thing and showing them that it’s economically advisable to reduce family size. Husbands here still have all the power; it is not uncommon to hear about a man beating his wife bloody because he found out she is taking birth control. So, the point is, the story is much bigger than just supplying birth control, it’s about education and empowerment and that is what Peace Corps is all about.

                Peace Corps is teaching me about what my tattoo mean to me all over again. It reminds me to have the courage to try and change the way things are. To remember to have the serenity to know my limitations and to understand that some things are not within my power to change. It prompts me to think before I act, to be wise enough to tackle the projects I can be successful at, those that will make small but appreciable changes and will be sustainable rather than those that are big and flashy but will flounder and fail when I leave and will, in the long run, change nothing.

     

Pics, pics and more pics!

     If a picture is worth a thousand words, this blog entry, which is much overdue (my apologies) should be a long one. After many requests to see what my house looks like I'm finally posting some pictures. I kept putting it off, waiting for my house to be 'clean' and then I realized that may never happen. I'm messy by nature, put me in a small space and that only exacerbates the problem! Anyway, the first few pictures here are of my house and my 'compound'.

 

View of the sunset out my living room window

A view of my house from the front yard. The 2 windows in the picture are my room, the rest of the family house is behind and off to the right. The left window is my living room/kitchen/office and the right is my bedroom.

My nuclear war bunker. Ha, so after you walk through the door in the picture before, you take a left down this dark hallway and that's my  'front door' on the left. Aaand that's my sweet ride on the right side. It has a bell. And a shopping basket tied to the back of it for carting fruits and veggies home from town. Gives a whole new meaning to the term 'riding in style'

Welcome to my living/dining/sitting/ kitchen/office room. I do everything in here except sleep. Yes, Mom, it's messy... sorry, I'll clean before you come to visit, promise. On the left is my "kitchen" I have a little gas stove I cook on 2-3 times a day. My 'pantry' is the green shelf on the left. My coffee table has become a dumping ground, obviously, so I usually end up eating from my lap.

The other "half" of my multipurpose room. That furniture in the corner covered in stuff is my desk...

My bedroom.Yep, still half living out of suitcases... they're under all the clothes along the wall...

The other "half" of my bedroom. my "closet/dresser" and that on the left is my count-down chart. I 'x' off 1 day every night and it counts down all the way to the end of my service. Ha, it's taller than I am. I've got a lot of x's to go, but its a nice way to make the time left seem like a tangible entity rather than this colossal amount of time.

     Alright, so that's basically my house. Someday I'll have to take some pictures of my bathroom and "shower" situation so you can truly appreciate my daily life here. Now, I'm just posting some pictures I've had for awhile. First, these are from the school where I teach science to class seven students:

We have kids in classes (grades) 1 - 8. All the schools, public and private, have mandatory uniforms.

Some of my Class 7 kids in our classroom. I have about 75 kids total split into 2 classes.

Some of the younger kids. They LOVE having their picture taken.

Block of class rooms, each door leads to a classroom, a square concrete room with one blackboard and home-made desks that regularly fall apart. When it rains the water on the tin roof is so loud you can't teach. Their is no electricity at my school.

      So, I love my school and my kids most days. Some days they make me want to scream because, like all kids, they have the propensity to drive you nuts sometimes. One of the biggest problems we have in my community is kids dropping out of school after class 7 or 8 because they don't have the school fees for high school (public primary schools are 'free' but ALL secondary (grades 9-12) schools cost money to attend).   Most of these kids only chance to ever get out of the field and the tiny village they were born in is to attend secondary school.
      I have an idea to start a scholarship fund to send 1 kid per year to secondary school based on an essay or story writing contest. I've just started to think about it but I wanted to put some feelers out there and see if anyone would be willing to donate on a yearly or one time basis. An average school here costs between 200-300 US dollars per year. Eventually I'll be a grown up and have the money to sustain a fund on my own, but for now it would be through my friends and families donations that I would be able to carry out this plan. Even 10 or 20 dollars would be a huge help; its amazing how much so little can do here. As I said, its still in the very early stages, just an idea, but if you're interested, please shoot me an e-mail at "LindsayInKenya@gmail.com" and I will keep you updated.   Thank you in advance for your support.
       Okay, a few more pics...

I introduce you to 'baby Linds', 2 hours old in this picture. Yep, she's named after me :-)

A screaming 2 week old baby Linds with her mom Celestine. Linds is wearing the shirt I bought for 35 cents in the market!

                        Finally, I leave you with a few pretty pics of the flowers outside my clinic...

    Alright folks, that's all for now. Love you and miss you all a lot. Been thinking about home a lot lately with the holidays coming up! Here's wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving if I don't post again before then!