Bad Air, Baboons and Barak Obama

The word malaria comes from the Italian “mala aria” which means “bad air” because many years ago the Italians started to notice that people who lived around smelly swamps and sewage ditches used to get this mysterious disease. It turned out that the real reason for the disease was not the bad smell, but that standing water is a breeding ground for mosquitoes carrying malaria.

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.

How are you, I am fine!

Last night, Sid and I cooked our very first meal without electricity or running water, (outside of camping trips of course)! We made decent Mexican food, considering the circumstances– tortillas made from scratch from flour and water, rice, vegetables, and guacamole made out of one of the amazing avocados that you can buy here for only 7 cents each, all made by lantern and candle light.

And today our kitchen has running water! I called the plumber, who came over and determined that the reason that we didn’t have running water to the kitchen sink was because nobody ever connected the pipes to the tank. Imagine that. So for less than $100 in parts and $7 in labor (before you judge – I was actually overly nice and paid a lot more for labor than they probably would have gotten anywhere else) problem solved! Well, except for the fact that now the second bathroom (not ours – the one our roommates share) seems to be down to nothing but a trickle, when yesterday it was flowing fine…

But we’re not worried. The plumber is coming back tomorrow to figure out why the bathroom always smells like something died in there, so we’ll have him fix it then. And also on the home improvement front, a guy showed up out of the blue today with a table for us to put the stove on in the kitchen. Apparently, the table was ordered months ago and the guy just disappeared. But now he’s back and claims that he will return next week to build us some shelves. (I can’t believe I moved thousands of miles from my house in Lawrenceville and am still dealing with contractors.)

Sid and I are settling in here and enjoying getting to know the area. Last Sunday morning, all of the women that work here – Margaux, Anushka, Veronica and I took an early morning hike up to a place called Sangalo Rock, where we found an unexpected guide in a young girl from one of the nearby farms who decided to accompany us. She didn’t speak any English, but we were glad to have her with us because not only did she help us to find the way, she even pointed out a bunch of monkeys sitting on a rock! She put us to shame as she scrambled up the rocks barefoot and as gracefully as the monkeys we were photographing, while we huffed and puffed behind her. She even climbed straight up a couple of vertical rock faces and pulled off some moves (barefoot!) that would have definitely impressed my rock climbing class instructors last spring!



This weekend, Sid and I went to Kisumu, the third largest city in Kenya, with our friends Margaux and Jeff. Kisumu was really interesting because it is probably one of the most run-down cities I have ever seen. It was hit pretty hard by the post-election violence this past winter, so it’s hard to tell if it used to be different. We stayed in a very cute hotel that was nicely painted and had balconies overlooking Lake Victoria. But many of the other buildings on the block were just black shells that had been burned during the violence. The man at the front desk told Margaux that many of the hotel staff hid out in the hotel during the riots and begged the rioters on the street not to burn the building down. It’s hard to imagine what it was like during that time in Kenya, because everyone is so friendly and it seems so peaceful here. But seeing Kisumu, it was a little easier to imagine. Bungoma, the town where we live, didn’t have many problems during that time, but I have been told that One Acre Fund helped a few employees who are from the tribe that was being targeted get to Nairobi where they would be safer.

Overall, we had a lovely time in Kisumu. There is a nice area that has a swimming pool and we lounged by the pool all afternoon, drinking cold Coca-Colas - something that I never drank in the U.S., but that I crave here in Kenya. That evening, we went for a fabulous dinner at a place called the Green Garden. It had such good pizza and lovely ambiance that even though it was possibly the source of the worst food poisoning Margaux has ever had, we are determined to go back (and in the Green Garden’s defense, it could have been any number of things that made her sick, including the Kenya Cane (sugar cane alcohol) mixed with passion fruit juice that we drank before dinner…) Good pizza is so rare (non-existent) here that we really can’t pass up a place that serves it just because it made someone a little nauseous (violently ill).

Margaux was feeling better the next day, so we spent the entire morning at the “Nakumat” – a grocery store with a huge selection of food and other items (as opposed to our local grocery store “Ketias” in Bungoma that has a row of Indian spices, a row of questionable cooking oils, a row of flour and rice, and a few random bags of pasta). It was such a treat to buy things like cheese, cereal, balsamic vinegar and some cans of garbanzo beans. They even had a few American novels, and since I have already read all of the ones that I brought with me, I was able to stock up!

The other exciting thing we found in Kisumu were other “mazungus.” This is the Kiswahili word for “foreigner” and it is what adult Kenyans frequently yell at us as we walk by in Bungoma. The children all yell “How are you, I am fine!” because this is all the English that they have been taught. We rarely (never) see other mazungus in Bungoma, so we found that when we saw them in Kisumu, we were as fascinated by them as the Kenyans are by us! We would point and whisper about them, speculating about who they are and why they’re in Kenya. We were even tempted to yell “How are you, I am fine!” at them. We did have the courage to approach one mazungu, a fairly harmless looking woman with several small children who told us that she is living in Kisumu and directing a CDC research center that studies tropical diseases. We thought about asking her if she had any advice for our friend and co-worker Lukas, who was supposed to come to Kisumu with us, but backed out at the last minute due to a double case of malaria and typhoid.

But don’t worry about us – our health is fine, we have been taking our malaria meds, no food poisoning yet, and we are not going to let Lukas do any cooking for at least a few weeks…!

As far as work goes…other than the hourly interruptions by plumbers and carpenters, work is going well. Here is my first One Acre Fund newsletter. I will be interviewing and photographing one farmer each month for this newsletter that is sent out to OAF donors… http://www.oneacrefund.org/MonthlyProfiles/2008September.htm

Home Sweet Home

Well, Sid and I made it safely to Bungoma, our home for the next year! We ended up spending a few unexpected days in Nairobi because the airline lost our luggage and we had to wait for it. This was fine for me because I had packed a lot of back up clothes and toiletries in my carry on bag, because this is not the first time the airline has lost my luggage. For Sid, this was a bit more of a challenge because all he had in his carry-on was…books. Luckily, you can get just about anything you need in Nairobi, so we were able to buy him an extra shirt! We found a grocery store on the first day and were happy to discover it to be almost as well stocked as “Giant Eagle” at home. I was especially thrilled to find an entire wine section and a couple of different types of cheese available.

After a fairly uneventful bus ride to Bungoma we arrived on Wednesday night and were welcomed with dinner by our new co-workers and roommates. The next morning we got up at 5:30 so we could go out to the field and see what a typical day at the farms is like. One Acre Fund farmers’ primary crop is maize (corn) and the maize harvest just ended a few weeks ago. The farmers had dried the maize, removed it from the cobs and bagged it in 90kg bags. For every 1/2 acre of maize they plant as a One Acre Fund farmer, they are expected to pay the organization back with 3 bags of maize. OAF then sells the maize to make back the money that they invested. The farmers can sell the rest of the maize for profit, or choose to keep it to feed their families. On the day we were out at the farms, the Kenyan staff was doing “quality checks”. Essentially, they take a few samples from each bag and check them to make sure the maize isn’t rotted, discolored or otherwise unable to be sold.

We walked around to about 8 different farms, chatting with the farmers and tasting guava picked from a farmer’s tree while the staff checked the maize. The farmers that OAF works with are all very poor and many of the homes that we were invited into were no more than a few small, dark rooms with concrete or dirt floors. In contrast, the land around the farms was amazingly beautiful. We are in the short rain season so everything is green and lush, with fruit trees and flowers growing everywhere. The farms were built on a slight slope, so the views of the hills and valleys around us went on for miles.



After about half a day in the field, we went into Kakamega, the nearby town, and had a typical Kenyan lunch of beans, greens and ugali (a kind of tasteless cornmeal patty that the Kenyans eat everyday because they say it makes them strong!). Lunch for Sid and I was about 60 Kenyan shillings, which is a little less that a US dollar.

On Friday we had meetings all day about the projects that we’ll be taking over at OAF (which I’ll write about another time because I’ve been working on them nonstop for the past few days and need a break!)

On Saturday, Sid and I finally had a chance to explore the town where we live and check out the grocery store-slash-hardware store-slash-clothing and shoe shop-slash-office supply store-slash-kitchen supplier-slash-bike shop (all in one store, of course…) and buy some things for our house. A few words about our house:



The good news is that we share it with two really lovely women who I have already bonded with. The other good news is that we have lights, a very nice refrigerator and even a toaster…

The slightly less good news is that we don’t actually have any electricity to power these things…

It’s not as big of a deal as it sounds because we live on a compound that has about 3 other houses with other expat OAF staff living in them and they all have electricity. So we mainly spend our time there during the day and are able to power all of our stuff – computers, lanterns, cell phones, etc – when we are there. We can even shower there, as they have hot water most of the time and actual water pressure. Our house, on the other hand, has cold water that barely trickles. So depending on the time of day and how hot and sweaty I am, I will either choose to trek up the hill (we are also a little farther down the path from the other houses…) carrying my things for a hot shower (in the morning, when it’s still cold out) or I will stay in my own house, fill a bucket with cold water and dump cups of it over my head (after I’ve been out in the field and am really hot and sweaty and can stand the cold water).



The compound is nice – there is a giant garden that I’m looking forward to planting in, as soon as I can find Cosmos, the night guard-slash-gardener (he didn’t have enough to do as a night guard – it’s very safe here – so he needed a hobby) to ask him where I can plant. Besides the expats, there are a few other people living here as well, including Mary, the housekeeper who also cooks 3 times per week, and her two children Manu (age 4) and Delvin (age 10) who are going to become computer experts from watching over our shoulders all the time while we are working (Also, Sid plans to spend some time teaching Delvin some computer skills.) There is also Mama Rebecca, who is maybe related to the landlord (I haven’t quite worked this out yet), who is very sweet, speaks great English and invited me over to practice Swahili whenever I can.

The bad news is that many of the people on the compound have a lot of chickens…and more importantly roosters…that crow outside of our window (literally, right outside – there is a big pile of concrete that for the first 3 days I thought was chicken feed because they all seem to congregate around it) every morning at 5 am. And there are two dogs that howl every night so dramatically and mournfully that it’s completely over the top and makes us laugh every time we hear it.

We also have a cat, which is nice, whose name is unfortunately Rabies. But apparently Rabies has been given a rabies shot and therefore doesn’t actually have rabies. And for about 2 days we had a new kitten who wandered in and we very prematurely named Mama Watoto, but then wandered out again and we fear she’s been eaten, probably either by Rabies or the mournful dogs (but probably not by the chickens).

And in other good news, there aren’t that many bugs. Hard to believe, this being Africa (and considering the multiple ant incidents in India) but I have not seen any ants outside of the garden, only a few spiders, no cockroaches yet (thankfully!), and have been bitten maybe 6 times total by mosquitoes. We do sleep under a mosquito net, but (perhaps because we have no lights to attract them) there is usually only one straggler mosquito flying around the room. After killing it (and being told I have bad karma by Sid) things are usually fine (except, of course, for my karma).