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!

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.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

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!