And recently, I became a breeding ground for malaria.
It started with a bit of nausea, then progressed to a night of puking, followed by two days of fever and general miserable flu-like symptoms. Luckily, before we came to Kenya, we attended a training session by an amazing travel doctor named Dr. Mark Wise. The one thing that we remembered from the training was that Dr. Wise said, “If you feel like you have the flu, assume you have malaria. If you feel like you have a cold, assume you have malaria. If you’re nauseous and throwing up, assume you have malaria. If you’re lying in the middle of the road bleeding and with broken bones, assume that you’ve been hit by a bus, and that you also have malaria.” Malaria is so prevalent here that it just makes sense to default to it whenever you’re not feeling well. So Sid and I went around the corner to the Mt. Elgon medical clinic, I had a simple blood test and it was confirmed! Malaria kills 2 million people each year, which is an incredible tragedy, because it’s amazingly easy to treat. Three days of pills (thanks, Novartis!) and I was pretty much fine. The sad reason that so many people (often children) die is that the test and treatment together cost $15 (hmmm…no thanks to Novartis after all), which is what many Kenyans make in a week. That, and the fact that for many people in rural areas (like our farmers), accessing medical treatment can be nearly impossible. (To get to some of our more remote sites, we have to take a matatu (Kenya’s version of public busses), then a ride on the back of a motorbike or bicycle (called a boda-boda) and then a several kilometer walk. It can easily cost more than100 shillings (what many make in a day) and take hours.)
But now I am recovered, and we had a great day earlier this month when Obama won the election! We woke up at 3 in the morning to start watching the results come in on the BBC. By 7am we were all crammed into the living room – 9 expat staff, Kosmos the night guard, Felix the day guard, Mary our housekeeper and Manu and Delvin, Mary’s two kids, all cheering when the west coast polls finally closed and Obama won! People here are so excited. Even now, a few weeks later, they still come over and shake my hand and thank me for my country’s excellent decision! Apparently, there were 15 babies born in the hospital in Kisumu on election day and 14 of them were named Barak or Michelle Obama. (Including boy and girl twins!) Of course, I had to learn to say “Natoka kwakina Barak Obama” which means “I come from the home of Barak Obama” in Kiswahili.
Last weekend I had what was definitely my favorite day in Kenya so far. The whole group of us – 8 total – took a trip to Nakuru, a city about 6 hours from where we live. On Saturday morning we woke up early and headed outside of the city for a hike into a the Menengai Crater – a giant mile or so wide gorge in the earth. There is a path winding down the side of the crater, which was a little strenuous because of the steep grade and slippery footing. But complaining was out of the question, particularly when we saw several people - including children and old women - passing us on their way up the hill carrying giant, heavy piles of sticks on their heads! Our trip up turned into even more of an adventure when Sid suggested that maybe we didn’t need to follow the path back up the hill and as a “team building” activity, we should just climb directly up the side of the crater, on a steep incline past grazing cows and through thick brush. About an hour later, after many slips and scrapes, a few bloody shins, one asthma/panic attack, and lots of encouragement from all, we made it triumphantly to the top of the crater. It was definitely team building!
Our reward for our hard work was a leisurely lunch at a nice hotel and then a trip into Nakuru National Park for a game drive in the afternoon. In the middle of the park is a giant lake that attracts thousands of pink flamingoes that live all along the shores. It also attracts all sorts of other wildlife, so the 2 hour drive around the lake on a remote dirt road is basically like a drive through the zoo, only about a million times more fabulous. In addition to the flamingoes (sometimes so many in places that the lake looked like was glowing pink) we saw: a leopard, zebras crossing the road, a hippopotamus (we didn’t get too close since hippos kill more people in Africa than any animal other than mosquitoes, and two run-ins with African killers in the same month was out of the question) rhinoceroses (rhinoceri?), water buffalo, giraffes (my favorite because they remind me of Sid!), a lot of baboons (including some in very compromising positions…nature at work!), some other type of monkeys, hyenas, and quite a few gazelle-like animals. It was the most amazing place I have ever been, by far, in my life. We would drive for a quarter of a mile down the road and some new and amazing animal would cross the road in front of our car, or just be grazing by the side of the road.
We arrived at our guest house just as it started to get dark, settled in and then decided to take a drive down the road to a really posh hotel for dinner, a huge treat on our NGO salaries. When we arrived we discovered a dinner buffet, complete with an entire table of delicious fresh salads (lettuce is almost non-existent in Bungoma, as are vegetables other than tomatoes, cucumbers and carrots) a cheese table with real bread and some kind of amazing creamy cheese (again – non-existent in Bungoma) and all sorts of roasted meats for the non-vegetarians. An hour later, full of two glasses of chilled white wine, two giant salads and half the cheese plate, I declared it my favorite Kenyan day. It only got better when a lovely Kenyan man came by with a guitar to serenade our table. We requested the “Barak Obama” song, which is a song that they play in all the clubs in Kenya. There are very few words except “Barak…Obama…Barak…Obama…” sung to a reggae beat. It’s very easy to sing along with, which of course we did, to the amusement of the other mazungu diners who were just in Kenya staying at the fancy hotel on holiday and probably had never heard the song before. After dinner, we retired to the bar, bringing our guitar man with us. We sat around the fire drinking wine and cocktails and singing along to our friend’s surprisingly extensive repertoire of American folk songs. It was a delightful day.
The week after our Nakuru trip I started my new position, which is managing the Child Health Program at One Acre Fund. Previously, my main roles at the organization were communications with donors and grant writing, and creating and managing human resources policies for the Kenyan staff. I am still working on these projects, but have also taken on the Child Health program, sadly because the person who has been in the position for the last 4 months –my best friend in Kenya, Margaux- is leaving next week. The Child Health program is a small project that was created in addition to the main farming programs that are One Acre Fund’s focus. In this program, women living in One Acre Fund communities volunteer as “Light Mothers” who are advocates for children’s health. They attend monthly sessions where they are trained about the leading causes of child mortality in rural Kenya, such as malaria, child diarrhea, and malnutrition. The Light Mothers then return to their communities where they train the farmers about simple disease prevention methods, like using mosquito nets, water treatment, and proper nutrition. They also make home visits to talk with parents about child health issues and to check in to make sure that the children are not exhibiting any warning signs. Light Mothers also provide disease prevention tools such as mosquito nets and water treatment fluid at a reduced cost to One Acre Fund farmers, and collect data about deaths and births of children in their community in order to measure the program’s impact. I am so excited to be working on this program and with these inspiring women! They are all really excited and motivated to improve the health of their community, and it is wonderful that they are doing it for free, in addition to all the farm and house work that they have to do every day. Margaux has done an amazing job with the program and it is really saving children’s lives. In Kenya, 10% of children die before the age of 5. Among children where the Child Health program works, this number is about 2%. I feel really excited to continue this work.
And speaking of Margaux, as sad as I am that she is leaving, I’m trying to keep in mind how fortunate I was to have had such a good friend for my first 2 months in Kenya. She definitely made a very hard transition much easier and has been a huge support through all of the challenges of working and living in Kenya. Not to mention the bottles and bottles of wine we have drunk by candlelight (still no electricity!) while laughing and gossiping about all of the ridiculous things that tend to happen when you’re a mazungu woman living in a developing country. I will miss her so much.
But fortunately, Margaux is still in Africa for now, and we are in Uganda this weekend! Sid, Margaux and I decided to take a trip to visit Moises, our Spanish colleague who is launching One Acre Fund, Uganda, all by himself in a small town just a few hours over the border from where we are living in Kenya. Some of the other people that we work with dropped some not-so-subtle hints that Moises’s town, Pallisa, is in the middle of nowhere, and also a bit of a dump! (They were going to night clubs in Kisumu for the weekend and felt that they were planning the much more desirable trip.) But we needed a bit of a chill weekend, and we all agreed that Moises is one of the most calm, easy going, fun, entertaining and generally great people we’ve met in Kenya, so a bit of a dumpy town was not going to stop us! It turns out that Moises has been in Pallisa for three months and we are his first visitors from One Acre Fund!
Well, Pallisa, Uganda is definitely remote, and the town center itself is maybe not what you’d call “pretty.” It was a 60 km drive down a dirt road from anything else that even resembles another town. But the drive was beautiful, past small farms sprinkled with mud huts, flowers, and banana and mango trees. We were driving west toward a bright red sun and what was one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen. When we arrived in town we parked the car and called Moises, who rolled up on his bike a few minutes later. He took us to the market (there is no grocery store in Pallisa) where we strolled through stalls of beans, fruits and vegetables, picking out whatever looked good and designing our dinner as we went. We took home piles of tomatoes, zucchini and green peppers, which we grilled and stuffed, along with ripe avocadoes, into sandwiches made on the fresh baguettes I had baked in Bungoma earlier in the day and brought to Uganda in a pillowcase. Having a wonderful dinner in Moises’s gorgeous house (much nicer than where we live in Bungoma), a few bottles of wine and an evening three of my favorite people in Africa made me feel sorry for all the doubters who warned us away in favor of a Kenyan nightclub! (Margaux pointed out that we were so ready to get away and happy to have a relaxing weekend, that Pallisa might have been a bit of a dump, but we could have actually gone to the dump and we still would have had a lovely time.)
We had a leisurely Saturday doing whatever we felt like…Sid and Moises went for a bike ride in the morning, then we all hung around drinking coffee, took another trip to the market for dinner supplies, had a soda in a beautiful hotel garden while sitting under a mango tree and watching a chameleon change from brown to green as it climbed the bush next to us. We went home for a siesta in the afternoon (Moises is Spanish after all!), some reading on the porch, and then a walk through the lovely villages outside of town, where we collected quite an entourage of “Mazungu!” yelling children and invitations from men lounging in circles around shared pots of traditional homebrew that is drunk through 3 foot straws. We declined the invitations and headed home for another fabulous dinner of pasta with sautéed eggplant and tomatoes, wine and fruit salad with fresh pineapple, avocado, mango and banana.
Life in Africa has definitely been challenging…There are plenty of frustrations, of course…But having this weekend away and talking to Moises, who has been with One Acre Fund for over 2 years and who has maintained a great perspective on the experience, was really good for us. Sid and I realized how lucky we are to be here and to be having this adventure. We both love the work that we are doing and our opportunities to interact with the Kenyan staff. I am so excited to start training our light mothers and working with them in the field. And Sid is enjoying mentoring a young and promising Kenyan boy who he hired to take over some of the day to day computer maintenance. Sid has also taken on a new project trialing a seed and fertilizer sales project that allows him a lot of time to be out in the field and interacting with farmers. These exchanges with our staff and farmers are definitely the best parts of our jobs. Having a little time to step back and look at our lives, we realized that even the seemingly insignificant experiences – driving down a dirt road towards an African sunset, bargaining with strong-willed mamas for our dinner in a colorful market, saying hello to a fascinated child who has literally never seen a white person before – are small moments that will stay with us forever and that we wouldn’t miss for anything. The challenges and frustrations of our jobs, the lack of separation from work, the lack of electricity in our house can easily disappear when we are working on projects that are meaningful to us and when we are really enjoying the experience of living in Africa.
