The Report Card Is In

Nope, not for me. When I was tromping through the bush on a praticularly muddy day last June, I met a young man named David. He was newly orphaned and part of the orphan program. We were doing home visits.

What we found at this home was a 16-year-old tending his own farm, going to school, and caring for his preteen sister. His English was better than mine. His corn was growing better than all the neighbors'. When he invited us into his two-room mud home, it was spotless. He explained that it was a school holiday and that was the only reason we had found him at home.

We were offered the one chair that he had at the little table that took up almost every inch of space in the larger of the two rooms. He told us that his little sister slept at the home of a neighbor, but he was still responsible for feeding her. That meant that neither of them ate much of the time.

David did not know how he was going to survive in the future. Only primary school is free in Kenya. He is a high schooler who needs school fees, a uniform, and books, all out of his own pockets. His current school year had been paid for. After that there was no money coming in. He would have to quit, though he really did not want to.

I asked him what he wanted to be. A doctor, he told me.

As I hiked away from David's mud home after leaving him with a bag of powdered vitamin supplements to add to his porridge (when he had any) I thought to myself that if this kid wanted to be a doctor, then a doctor he should be.

He lives on his own, caring for and feeding his younger sister and farms to bring in their only food, all while going to school when most others would have given up long ago. He was obviously as smart as a whip, but beyond that he had that intangible something that great people are made of.

I had realized a ways into my East Africa trip that the needs there were great, and the best I could do with my meager funds was find one situation where I could make a large impact.

After I got home, I wrote the check to get David through the next year of high school. My sister did the same for David's sister, Rose. This means they have all of the books, school supplies, and school fees that they need, and no longer go barefoot.

My friend Davis who is living at the seminary until March is helping to organize all this. He went to David's school to find him the first time to tell him about the funding. Davis said that kid was so overwhelmed he was shaking and coudn't speak. It was during that visit Davis saw the deplorable conditions of David's school and yanked him out of there. Four kids to a desk, sixty to a classroom.

He now attends a much nicer school that is geared toward the sciences (perfect for someone wanting to go into medicine) that even has a chemistry lab and keeps very close tabs on the progress of the students. They moved David back down a grade level because they felt there were a lot of holes in his knowledge base from the sub-par schools he had been attending to that point despite being such a good student.

The report card for his first semester in the new school arrived in the mail two days ago. He is ready to move up to the next grade level after Christmas! He got very good grades in all his science classes, a C in English (the kid is probably bored to death - I told you his English is better than mine) and his best grade of all was in agriculture. Little wonder - the kid runs his own subsistence farm!

I have to admit, receiving somone else's report card was a little strange for me. It felt pretty darn adult to be looking over someone else's grades to give them my stamp of approval.

Enclosed with David's grades was a letter from his little sister Rose to my sister and her family who are paying for her schooling. She mostly thanked them for the money and detailed what it had been spent on. But there was one line in particular that to me said it all.

"Thank you for helping me to be proud of myself."

Their mother died in 2005. I find myself thinking about her often, that hopefully she has some peace, wherever she is, that her children are being looked after.

Leaving on a jet plane...

When leaving Kenya, I first took a bus all the way back to Nairobi. It was only seven hours and the road was mostly paved, so it was pretty much a cake walk.

I stayed overnight in Nairobi with the family of a good friend at school (my brother from another mother as he likes to say) that somehow managed to spoil me rotten in the less than 24 hours I was there. His brother took me to dinner with a bunch of his friends who were all grad students at Columbia doing their summer internships in Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia.

Nothing like an evening around some of the brightest people from your country to make you feel like an idiot and an underachiever. No, I didn’t ride around with AK47s to spread the message of reproductive health to the contested region of Somalia or infiltrate Uganda’s most infamous refugee camp. I hung out at a hospital and sold paperbacks on a street corner.

The bus back across the border into Tanzania was once again less than a good time. At least I'd become savy enough to actually acknowledge the guy hitting on me at the bus station at 5:30 in the morning just enough for him to happily volunteer to figure out which of the nine million buses I was supposed to be boarding (in the dark, among a couple hundred people crowded onto one sidewalk with all their luggage) and get my now impossibly heavy bag laden with gifts for home loaded into the undercarriage.

I was better armed with an attitude not to mess with when arriving at the border crossing the second time around. There was a tiny little Japanese girl on my bus who was completely discombobulated and still sleeping off her jet lag. I saw a staff member from our bus leading her OFF OF THE MAIN STREET and followed many paces behind to save her if necessary. He led her to a cell phone shop and told her that the bus company needed her passport number recorded there.

At a cell phone shop? I don’t think so! As soon as she handed over her pass port (they actually had a ledger to enter in people’s passport numbers to make it look professional) they told her she needed to pay them 500 shillings. Um, and what would that be for? Minutes on her phone?

I stepped in, started yelling like I knew what I was talking about, and ripped the passport out of the guy’s hand. The four men started yelling at me about the bus company needing the info and how we weren’t going to be allowed across the border now (yeah, because that’s why the 50 other people on our bus kept on walking straight down the main road to the visa office where they paused for 30 seconds before being sent across the border).

I grabbed my tiny friend by the arm and dragged her and her passport away before they really got angry. After three months, I felt like I’d gotten pretty smart at these games! Everybody is running a racket on the side. I’m sure these guys gave the man from our bus a nice cut for every mzungu he lured to his shop and tricked into giving them a pile of money.

After sprinting off of my last African bus with glee, I took a 40 minute taxi ride to the Arusha airport and enjoyed a gorgeous view of the base of Mt Kilimanjaro the whole way. It was overcast. Again. Well, at least I’ve seen the base twice and can tell that the sucker is huge judging by the width!

After an excruciating eight hours at the Arusha airport waiting for my flight (looking at the clock at least twice a minute for several hours), I was finally able to board my plane for Amsterdam.

And then we sat at the gate. And then we sat some more. Finally an announcement from the cabin: there was not enough jet fuel in the entire country of Tanzania to get us all the way to Amsterdam, so we’d be spending an hour and a half on the tarmac in Cairo to get the necessary fuel.

Now we still had to stop in Dar es Salaam before we left Tanzania, so there literally was not enough fuel in the entire country to get us all the way to Amsterdam. I thought it a fitting end to my trip. No electricity, no food, no medication, and nothing on time. Why on earth would I assume that the country would be able to make planes work?

After sweltering in Cairo at three in the morning (the lights looked really pretty from the sky - I actually want to go there now) and a sprint (literally) through the Amsterdam airport (I had been told back in Arusha that I would miss my connection to MSP by minutes and decided to test that theory), I was on my way home. I was soooo antsy on the flight, and I am never like that. I have never been so ready to be home.

After an uneventful trip through customs, my dad was standing there waiting for me right where he promised he’d be.

I was a little sad that it was an icky, rainy day because I thought that they sky should burst into sunlight with the Hallelujah Chorus being sung in the background. I insisted that I be taken straight to El Loro for a cheese quesadilla on the way home. If other people had a problem with the fact that I had been wearing the same underwear for three days, that was their problem. My food dreams were coming to and end right then and there.

And honestly, I slipped right back into regular life like I’d never left. I had no return adjustment issues whatsoever. Many people when returning from developing countries have trouble with American excess. Well I’ve always had trouble with American excess. I think now I actually feel better about what little role I play in it. When I got home, all I wanted was some eyeliner and a cheese quesadilla and had both without any guilt. I work hard for what I have and I don’t live extravagantly or spend wastefully.

And things there aren’t all bad. Even though people live with less, many of them are happy and successful in their own right. The culture is rich, their faith is strong, and darnit, they know how to throw one good party.

Kenyans don’t need a different shirt for every day of the week or indoor plumbing to feel that they have made it. If they can educate themselves and their children and afford a reasonable amount of medical care when necessary, they are satisfied. They have something intangible that Americans have trouble capturing and encorporating into their own lives.

Though there are many (too many) I came across who come nowhere near that level of self-sufficiency, my image of Africa has been changed from one of abject poverty to one of life. There is plenty of death and struggle to go along with it, but people there live at a level that we Americans, with all of our stuff, will never be able to achieve.

The Medical Scene

Here is a semi-comprehensive list of the crazy, fascinating medical situations I saw/watched during my days at the Maseno hospital (most of which are never encountered by real doctors throughout their careers in the developed world - woot for being well-versed in tropical medicine!):

1. A three-year old the size of a baby, pooping worms. They were upwards of 6-8 inches long and white!

2. The induction of a woman well over nine months pregnant with her eighth child by sticking a catheter up her into her uterus and tying the other end of it to her thigh to keep it taut to force her muscles to dilate.

3. A little boy (named Washington - I blew up a balloon for him and took him for a walk around the hospital yard to celebrate my 4th of July in patriotic style) with an abscess that took over his entire foot and oozed puss in amounts I before hand didn’t think possible. The Kenyan doctor shoved gauze pretty much inside his foot as his form of “bandaging.”

4. A lady with shingles all across her abdomen - she looked like she was going to pass out from the pain every time she moved. She also had HIV/AIDS, just like pretty much every other woman there.

5. A guy with tetanus. We had to keep him in a dark corner room with the door shut at all times because light and stimulation made him go CRAZY. We couldn’t have him thrashing around and freaking out with all the swelling going on around his brain.

6. A woman and her 15-year-old son, Jennifer and Daniel, with jiggers on their feet so bad they couldn’t walk.

Both mother and son were developmentally disabled, something common within our orphan program (which also dealt with single-parent homes unable to keep the kids fed). Women with disabilities are used for sex and often have children they cannot care for, many times with disabilities themselves.

Daniel's toes rotting off.

Both of them were rail thin, and Jennifer particularly was severely malnourished and was in the hospital as much for that as for her jiggers. Once we stopped the jiggers from spreading (that does not equal healed) and Jennifer had gained enough strength, they got to go home. Daniel ran to the jeep he was so happy to be getting out of that place where everyone poked his feet all the time.

7. A young man with rheumatic heart disease caused by a rheumatic fever. This was my very first day going on rounds, and I was shocked when the med students let me go right on up to him and listen to his chest like I actually belonged there (a feeling I started to get used to as I did indeed have an all-access pass to the hospital). He had two different murmurs going at the same time in different valves. It would take valve replacements for him to live - something that doesn’t happen in rural Kenya and probably not in Nairobi unless you’ve got the big bucks. He was sent home to die.

8. Rampant TB. Oh man, if I test negative the next time I have to get a TB test, I will be beyond shocked.

All it takes to have TB in your system is to breathe in one single TB spore. Where I was, especially in the women’s ward, everybody was coughing and hacking all the time and about 95% of them had TB. It is something that goes along with and is made much worse by AIDS. Just because I will probably be testing positive for TB from now on doesn’t mean it’s active. The odds are actually slim that it would be active, but for me not to have it in my system would be a shocker.

9. A chest X-ray that was so bad it made every doctor, including the Kenyans, give a great big stunned “Holy Shit” every time they held it up to a window to check it out.

Normal chest X-rays are supposed to be a healthy black. This one was almost completely white with little flecks of black in it. White = TB, and this lady was told immediately that she had HIV before they even had a chance to test her. TB that bad has to have something else helping it along.

10. Thrush. A lot of it. It’s a yeast infection of the mouth and any person (they were always women) who came in with it was automatically given and HIV test (which was always positive). Thrush is another condition that goes hand in hand with HIV/AIDS.

11. A hemorrhagic fever (similar to Ebola). This two-year-old little girl, Rose, came in practically dead. She had a raging fever and was pretty much non-responsive at that point. She hadn’t eaten in a long time and I doubt her mother was able to get much water past her lips.

They knew it had to be a hemorrhagic fever because they took a blood draw from her back and it never clotted. The tiny spot where the needle went through her skin bled for days. Dr. Hardison and the Kenyan doctors poured over old volumes on tropical fevers but she died before they ever got close to figuring out what was wrong. One of the Kenyans really thought it was black fever but Hardison said it absolutely wansn’t. Like so many others, we’ll never know.

12. Three different kinds of meningitis. I think there are only four, so that’s almost a complete set.

On my last day there, I saw the woman who was the worst off of them all. One of the most obvious signs of meningitis is a stiff neck. This lady was writhing in her bed, making sounds I have only otherwise heard come out of animals, with her jaw clenched, head jutting forward, and neck so stiff I had no idea how she could breathe.

Any time you tried to move any piece of her body, she sounded like a wounded animal. All she could do was grunt. I couldn’t imagine the pain. Dr. Hardison stuck a tongue depressor between her teeth to try and pry her jaw open so he could take a look at her throat and mouth. The poor woman snapped the frigging tongue depressor in half with her teeth. Those things are wood. We tortured her only long enough to dig the bigger shards of wood out of her mouth so she wouldn’t swallow them and slice her throat open on the way down. If she lived it would be an absolute miracle.

13. And last but not least, a lady who was on death’s door, the most stereotypical emaciated image of AIDS I saw during my three months, and pregnant.

Her sister brought her in because she was almost dead and wanted to find out if there was anything else to do for her. Her eyes were completely sunken into her head and her face was all cheekbones and no flesh. I’m thin folks, and I looked downright husky next to this woman.

During her initial exam, Dr. Hardison was pressing on her belly as doctors always do and gave an astounded “there’s a baby in there!” It takes a lot for someone who works in that hospital to sound surprised (see #9). They knew she was at least 20 weeks because they could feel the baby up by her belly button when they pressed. After a sonogram on our portable kit, the head measurements showed the baby to be at 7 months gestation. 7 months.

Her belly was concave, she was so thin. They fact that there could be a baby inside of her that far along may be the single most incomprehensible thing I saw during those months. Considering the fact that she didn’t have the strength to chew food, I have no idea how she could have possibly mustered the strength required to give birth. I assume that both mother and child are gone now.

The common thread through most of these situations?

AIDS, AIDS, and more AIDS.

It was less prevalent among the men and (thank God) the children, but almost every single woman who came through our doors was infected. Women have a higher likelihood of being infected because they are a receptor during sex. That combined with a culture where women are seen as sexual objects with no rights over their own bodies and married men tend not to be faithful equals a disaster for those unfortunate enough to be born female.

The Kakamega Rainforest

The next morning we ate breakfast at the Vike (more toast!) and headed out for the rainforest. The lady at the front dest set us up with a cab driver to take us there. We thought he was completely ripping us off with the price he was charging, until we were a half hour down the dirt road (my head hadn't hit the ceiling that much since I'd been in Tanzania) with no end in sight.

When we finally got to the park headquarters, we were matched up with a guide named Humphrey who took us on a nice little walk through the woods.

This nice little walk turned out to be five hours long. We got to see a lot of really exotic butterflies and birds and many species of monkeys different from the same old, same old we saw every day around Maseno.

Now I am a true Minnesotan, and I spent a good chunk of my childhood wandering around the woods at my cabin. I love the woods more than just about anything, but oh my goodness Chris loved it more.

The kid is from LA and apparently he hasn't seen many trees before. Or birds. Or butterflies. I'll give him the monkeys, but I don't know how one person could take 45 pictures of every bird they saw for five hours just because they had a shiney blue spot on their wing or a speckled tail. Somebody please show the kid a blue jay or a cardinal so he knows that he doesn't need to go all the way to Africa in the future to see pretty birds.

Toward the end, Humphrey had us climb up one of the bigger hills (small mountain in my opinion) for a view of the rainforest canopy. I get hardcore elevation sickness, and seeing as we were at 4,000 feet and had been walking and sweating and sweating and walking for hours already, I parked myself next to the trail when we were almost to the top and told Humphrey I would enjoy the view from there.

Humphrey was a bit taken aback that I didn't want to go to the top and kept insisting it was so close (this from a man who did the whole hike in rubber boots that were way too big for him and with no water) until I firmly assured him that I didn't care what the top looked like. My view was plenty good from where I was at.


When my counterparts came back down, Humphrey led us into a cave in the side of the little mountain. It was man-made from a time when they used to mine something there. All we had was a little pen-light attached to somebody's keys, but I was really excited about the prospect of getting to explore a cave so we went for it.

The bottom of it was even and had a lot of standing water. We were somehow able to make it all the way in without falling and hurting ourselves. At the end, Humphrey flashed our tiny light upward and I saw rows upon rows of beedy little eyes staring back at me.

"ARE THOSE BATS????????"

"Yep."

"DO THEY BITE??????????"

"Yep."

I love all animals and wildlife. I can catch a snake with my bare hands with the best of them and trap spiders and let them outside rather than stepping on them. The bats were actually really cool to look at, with about a hundred of them all hanging upside down in neat rows right there in front of us, their eyes reflecting the light we were shining at them.

But the more we moved the light around, the more they started getting out of their little rows and flying around.

Now, all I could think was that I had not successfully survived nearly three months on my own in East Africa, including a Kenyan border crossing, only to get bitten by a bat with rabies right at the end. The moment Katie reached for her camera, I was outta there. I'd be angry if I was woken up by flashing lights in the middle of a good night's sleep. I didn't want to wait around to see how 100 bats would feel about it.

The going (without a light) was much harder than the coming. My shoes and pants were absolutely soaked by the time I made it out and my hands were covered with a slimey white substance from trying to guide myself along the cave wall. But rabies free I remained!

Our cabbie picked us up at our arranged time and took us back to Kakamega where we decided to be brave and take matatus home. Several flapping chickens and a police interogation later (I was terrified of the police and really got scared when this one came tapping on my window and started asking my name and other information) our series of matatus brought us back to Maseno and I took one good long shower.

A Journey to Kakamega

The one example of a man wearing pale pink trousers I was able to capture on film. This guy sold ground nuts and other goodies at the Kisumu bus station to people waiting for their buses to leave. Men round these parts seem to think it is their color.


Toward the end of our stay, my two med student friends and myself headed out for an overnight in Kakamega.

The city of Kakamega is a less than two hour bus ride away from Kisumu and is in close proximity to the Kakamega Rainforest.

The bus fare was only 100 shillings (about $1.50) and judging by Chris and Katie's Lonely Planet guides, there were quite a few guest houses (meaning hotels) within the city for good prices. Each of us had been wanting to explore a bit beyond our little area but were short on money since we were all close to going home, so this seemed like an excellent option.

We boarded a real live bus (rather than one of the cracked-out minivans) and suffered through a slow uphill chug to Kakamega with 30 people overloaded in and forced to stand in the aisle. Whenever we passed a police checkpoint, they would all crouch down to their knees, falling all over each other, so the police wouldn't notice how far over capacity we were and force people off. They had already paid their fare so the heck with dignity - they weren't getting tossed for anyone.

Someone tell Greyhound about the Kenyan rip off of their good name. The Kisumu bus station was a place I visited every Sunday to find a matatu back to Maseno after feeding the street boys. It was much less like my personal version of hell on earth than the Dar bus station.


When we got to Kakamega, we literally pulled out the map of the city in the Lonely Planet guide(those things really are worth the money) and started walking toward the guest houses. We got a little lost when going for the first one but did find the second one at the edge of town and decided to call the Vike (vee-kay) our home for the night.

The Vike was a mighty nice operation for this part of the country. It had (gasp!) multiple floors and showers in the rooms that didn't involve buckets. We had come fully prepared for the three of us to share a room in order to save money, but when we found out it was only 400 shillings per room (about five dollars) we got two. Both rooms connected to the balcony where we could take in this breath-taking view of Kakamega. It's fascinating to me that one of Kenya's largest regional cities with relative prosperity could have such a bombed-out Sarajevo look to it (minus the bombs). Despite the view, we were in the lap of luxury with our amazing find of a guest house.

We spent the evening in the restaurant downstairs eating large amounts of food while sitting on a leather couch and watching tv. It was the night of the World Cup finals, so we were particulary thrilled to have found a place where we'd be able to watch it.

After Chris and Katie ate huge chicken dinners and I relished in my toast and porridge, we parked ourselves on that couch for another three hours so as not to lose our spot for the game. The problem was that the couch was almost directly under the tv, so watching it was like staring straight up at the ceiling. Yet we persevered, and had someplace comfy to sit to take in the game when the time finally came.

The place was packed by the opening face off (Wait, do you call it that in soccer? I have to use every hockey term and concept in the book to be able to understand this sport!) and the mood was actually very tense. Since the three of us had been almost giddy after a decent meal and our version of a night out on the town, we shut up real quick because we didn't want to get jumped for cheering for the wrong team. Chris had been all gung-ho for Italy, but whispered his cheers and looked over his should after doing so to make sure he hadn't set off any locals.

It turned out to be a fun game, unfortunately including the head-butt heard round the world. Since watching the World Cup had been a big part of my African experience, this was the perfect way to take in the final in style.

Here is a view of some of the amenities of the Vike guest house. Take a good look at the shower head in relation to the toilet!

What I got to see every day in Maseno...

***All photos were taken during a ten-minute span during which I had the opportunity to take many, many more.

The Skinny Little Runner Boys Build a House

Toward the tail end of my stay in Kenya, a group came to stay at the seminary and do three weeks of volunteer work. They actually came through Youth Encounter, the organization my mother works for, so I knew that I would be there at the same time as them before I even left the U.S.

I have to tell you that I was a little bit apprehensive about this group for one good reason. They were an all male high school cross country team from Illinois.

We all remember those high school days, so I'm sure you can understand my concerns. Fortunately, my fears were completely unwarranted because they were a group of all around great kids.

Here is a glimpse of what we at the seminrary dubbed "The Skinny Little Runner Boys" did on their second full day in Maseno.

Pastor Tom, who was spending his sabbatical at the seminary, paid for a widow he encountered to have a new house built. I wish I had a picture of it, but her previous mud house was laying in a pile of chunks on the ground. Hard rains will do that to the best of well-built mud houses and Kenya has both a short and long rainy season.

The widow and her three children were very poorly off. They had no family and at that point were receiving no support from anyone else in the community.

Rural Kenyan houses are built out of sticks and mud. The sticks make up the frame, and then several layers of earth mixed with water to the right consistency are slathered on to make the walls. There are several layers done at different times so thay they can dry properly. The final layer is made up of cow dung. It's the protective layer so just think of it as siding. (and yes, you slap that on with your bare hands as well)

These skinny boys from Illinois worked their tails off all day to first haul water in buckets from a creek (up a rocky hill, mind you) to fill up three oil drums before they could even start with the house. Then they had to attack the woman's yard with hoes and pickaxes to dig up enough dirt to mix with the water.



Travis, the father of two of the boys, showed them alllll up by taking several buckets up the hill on his head, Kenyan woman style, after receiving a demonstration from one of the mamas.


This wasn't exactly the soft black soil we're used to in the Midwest. It took some muscle.


The best part was when we got to "mix" the mud. After the front yard was completely torn up into loose dirt, the water was poured over it and we all had to jump in and stomp our hearts out. When that announcement was made, the boys all stared at each other and then at the dirt with utter disdain. They could haul water in huge buckets until they couldn't feel their arms anymore, but they didn't want to get dirty.

Me on the other hand - I was a sand box kid. I liked digging for worms and part of the appeal of playing catcher was that I had an excuse to get really dirty.

I had my shoes off and went flying into the dirt heap before any of the Runner Boys had time to start nominating each other for duty. It went well past mid calf and was gloriously cold and slimey.

The boys were not about to stand on the sidelines after I went jumping in with gusto, and I soon had an entire cross country team stomping around with me. If anyone has ever seen the grape-stomping episode of I Love Lucy, it worked the same way, only much harder due to the thickness of our stomping medium. Before long my calves were absolutely burning and I was quite sure I'd had my cardio in for at least a week.

By the time the mixing was completed, the women's group from the local parish had shown up to help with the actual mudding. For the next several hours, armfull after armfull of mud was thrown on the inner and outer walls and smoothed over. There were a few dozen people working on this one little house and it was great fun to watch.

The bright blue is their women's group uniform.

It got mighty crowded on the inside with all the sets of hands that showed up to help - a good problem. The woman who the house was being built for had done the previous layers on her own, including hauling the upwards of 30 required buckets of water from the creek, a task that had the boys absolutely drained and in physical pain after their first trip up the hill.

The best part of this was that by showing up, the women's group was in a way adopting this woman and her family, telling her she had their support. For someone with three small children and only the maize she grows in her yard for food, community support is what will make or break her. She should be ok now that the parish is aware of her situation and has already made an effort to take her under their wings.


And for the record, these Skinny Little Runner Boys went for a five mile run promptly after finishing up this day of hard labor.