Work Hard, Play Hard, Sleep Hard

Sarah writes about our game drives -

Our drivers, Young Moses and Jonathan, have seen us safely through the dirt paths that pass for roads in the Mara. Both are Maasai, both have an endless supply of goodwill, and both are friends of John Sankok. They are also very supportive of our work at the clinic, and try make our days more enjoyable. After taking us back to the Mara camp one day this week, when we were all very tired from a full day of work, Jonathan told us to sleep hard. If you work hard, it would stand to reason that you should sleep hard, too.

This week hasn't been all work and sleep, though. We have had the chance to play hard and go on what you'd call a safari, but are known here as "game drives." They have nothing in common with a cattle drive, but you do drive out to see the game.

Giraffe herd with distant rain

Sunday afternoon we drove out, passing herds of Thomson gazelles, zebras, and wildebeests before finding a group of giraffes. After that, we were lucky to see several lions, a large group of hippos in some foul-looking water, and many beautiful birds.

The other drive was early Wednesday morning when we woke before the dawn, driving out for a short trip as the sun rose over the Mara and the animals were busy getting breakfast before the heat of the day. The team saw all but one of the "big five" animals -- elephant, lion, cape buffalo, leopard, and rhino -- with rhino being the lone hold-out.

The circle of life

We have one more day of game drive on Monday, when we'll be out all day, and John assures us we'll be in an area where we should see rhino, in addition to the massive wildebeest crossing of the Mara river, known as the migration.

With just two days left on the trip before we head to the airport on Tuesday, I find it hard to believe how quickly the time has flown by. When people we've met have asked when we'll be back, I don't know exactly what to say. I've blown through most of my vacation days with this trip, but I'd happily do it again next year if we could make it work. There's so much to be done, and so much more to see. And Rich has a never-ending supply of ideas for the Kenyans: new things the women at the craft and textile workshop of Amani ya Juu could make to sell, a new factory for standardized hammers and long-handled shovels, or star tours of the Mara where we can see millions of stars and the Milky Way far more clearly than we ever can in the light-polluted US. We're still trying to figure out if we can make it to the Kenya Museum and their exhibit of the Leakey's amazing discoveries of early-humans. Maybe on the way to the airport. Or maybe on the next trip.

I said before that I'm bringing home the red dirt of Kenya in my shoes. But I also have the black dirt of the Rift Valley that we dug through to build the waste incinerator. And the memories of all those we have met. We may not see the fossilized footprints of early humans, but I have the imprints of many new friends in me.

The elephant herd made us late for breakfast

Water, Water Everywhere

Sarah writes about Monday, Sept. 6-

Back at home, water flows freely from the tap, and one of the world's largest sources of freshwater is a few scant miles from my door. In Kenya, water is their most precious resource. At Kimuri School, they had two tanks for water collection, but it wasn't enough for them. When washing the windows, for instance, we waited until we had water the color of chocolate before changing it to conserve it.

Talek Clinic Welcoming committee

When we left Kikuyu on Saturday morning, we drove more than five hours to the Masai Mara, the region where John Sankok's clinics are, traveling through miles and miles of high desert in the great Rift Valley. Sunday we attended church in a Masai community in the morning before seeing John's first clinic. It is fairly small, with just a few rooms, but the time since my in-laws last visit has seen much improvement. The generosity of many groups has ensured that every one of John's clinics has a robust water-harvesting system, gathering every drop of water that falls on a clinic's roof and diverting it to one or more large collection tanks.

Clinic director Juma explains the Talek clinic water harvesting

These improvements have been a huge benefit for the clinics and the communities they serve, meaning they can start their day with clean floors and treatment rooms, and they even have gravity-fed sinks near the pit toilets.

Those pit toilets are a huge improvement over what they could have, but I wasn't anxious to use them, so after breakfast I'd avoid drinking, slowly dehydrating myself until lunch. Lunch would be limited water, too, and then at dinner I'd pound down at least a liter to try to rehydrate. Here I was in a land where we'd passed women and girls carrying cans of water for miles, and I was playing games to keep from having to use the facilities they find a huge improvement. Pretty embarrassing.

Monday we went to the Talek clinic, one of the oldest in John's system, where we saw many more improvements. The clinics were the beneficiaries of the first Gulf War, with 150 surplus solar power batteries that made their way from Iraq to the US and then to Kenya. As a result, every clinic has at least a small solar array with a few batteries that power everything from refrigeration for vaccines and other medicines to a water well to the computer in John's office. And the number of clinics has expanded, too, with the total now at nine, plus seven mobile units that we will see later in the week. In addition to expanding the reach of the community health clinics, John has been appointed the Director of Community Health Partners with more than 70 employees serving the communities around Kenya.

John at the Talek clinic

After a tour of the Talek clinic, the team set to work getting ready to paint the clinic. Talek is much larger than the one we visited Sunday, with separate four-bed wards for men and women, two treatment rooms, a lab and pharmacy, and a counseling room that is dedicated to working with those receiving AIDS tests and treatment. We had to remove many posters that had been pasted to the walls, and with limited water to do so -- even with a well and the water-harvesting system, we didn't want to waste any of John's precious water -- it was a project to remove them. Painting started later in the day, but building of the waste incinerators was delayed. The fire-bricks needed for construction, along with the plans, were "on their way coming," a Kenya phrase that means things are coming sometime, but don't hold your breath waiting.

By day's end, the women's ward was painted, most walls were cleaned and ready for paint, and four bulletin boards were installed so they could use them for posters, instead of gluing them to the walls again. The bricks were reportedly nearby, but John told us to go; his team would wait and unload them when they arrived.

We won't know until tomorrow when the bricks actually showed up (assuming they do), but we headed back to our safari camp for hot showers. As I waited for the shower to heat up, and water spiraled down the drain, I worried briefly about that water, wishing for a way to capture it. But then I stepped into the spray and stayed for what was no doubt too long.

Walls being cleaned, floors being repaired, and patients waiting to be seen. The clinic is a busy place.

TIA - This Is Africa

Sarah writes about Tuesday, Aug. 31 -

If you've seen the movie Blood Diamond, you may recall the characters talking about things going wrong and saying it's just TIA. This is Africa. If you go to Africa thinking things will work like they do in the US, you'll be sadly disappointed. My introduction to Africa was a classic TIA moment. We were delayed in leaving the airplane because there was no electricity to the jetway. The flight attendant said to us, "Things always work in Africa, except when they don't." They finally got things working enough so we could exit the plane, so we journeyed through the still-dark jetway and into the brightness of the airport. Today we had our own TIA moment: After two days of enjoying Wi-Fi at the hostel we're staying at, the internet service provider is working, except when it's not, which was all day Tuesday and most of Wednesday. The ISP had some problems with a cable, so the nearby university, the hospital, and we were in the dark. Hence the delay in getting this post up.

Tuesday was a tourism day, with a trip to a tea plantation.

Kiambethu Tea Farm

Kenya is the world's biggest exporter of tea. China is the biggest producer, but their huge population consumes much of the production. Kenya does its share of consuming, but the population is a fraction of the 1.3+ billion in China. The drive to the tea country in the highlands of the Rift Valley was an hour of nausea-inducing bouncing -- you might say an hour of darkness -- making me grateful for the motion-sickness pills Rich had picked up just before we headed to the airport in Rochester, and for the rest of the group for letting me sit in the front of the van.

At the plantation, it was an emergence into the light where we had a delightful cup of tea and a tour, where we learned about the processes for picking, cutting, and drying tea, and then how it makes the way to market.

Lunch at Kiambethu Farm

Afterwards, we enjoyed an ultimate locavore meal, where everything we ate was produced on the farm, from beef to vegetables to the ice cream for dessert. That type of self-sufficiency, where you are responsible for everything, is both appealing and incredibly frightening. Of course, the life of most Kenyans would be greatly improved if they could be more self-sufficient. According to National Geographic, on average they have to spend 70 percent of their income on the basic necessities of food, shelter, and clothing.

Would they be better off if they could be more self sufficient? What would make the average Kenyan's life move into the light? Is it more of the sort of thing we're doing? Or are we helping them to be less independent by helping, giving them the idea that some Americans will show up to take care of things? And is it my western ideals that says they are in the darkness in the first place?

Feeding the Colobus monkeys.

This is Africa, and I do believe we're doing good works while we have a good time. It seems in the end that things do work all the time, even if it seems that they aren't. TIA.

Click here to see more pictures.

Colorado

Note: The internet service to Kikuyu Hospital and University was not working from Monday afternoon until Wednesday evening.

Sarah writes about Monday, Aug. 30 -
Red dirt is found throughout the world: in Colorado, the very name of which means "red earth"; in parts of India, as I discovered last year; and as I knew academically, but now know as a concrete fact, in Kenya.

Kimuri School.

Laterite, the name of that iron-rich dirt that covers the Great Rift Valley and everything around it, is prized for the richness it provides the soil, helping to make Kenya an exporter of flowers, and it gives fish tanks the nutrients needed to keep natural plants, as opposed to those of the plastic variety, thriving.
After a weekend that lived up to the "voluntourism" catch-phrase of this vacation, with shopping for more shoes for the students at Kimuri School, souvenir shopping at an outdoor bazaar, and community building with the church secretary and her family, today the team experienced that red earth in many ways in and around the school.
In the morning, the group split up, with Eleanor, Kathy, Joyce, Gretchen, and Rich working indoors with groups of children for drawing, coloring, a story, singing games such as "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" and "Hokey Pokey," and a dental hygiene lesson.

Children drawing their pictures.

Kendra, Mary, and I played active games outdoors, including soccer, wonderball, relay and running games, and Fruit Basket Upset, plus a hand-washing lesson.

Each pane had to be individually measured and cut.

The 38 broken windows were being replaced by Brad, Chuck, Dick, and Tina, with help from some of the local men. In the afternoon, Rich and I started cleaning one of the classrooms.

Getting ready to play fruit basket upset.

We sat in red dirt for some of the games. Red dirt covered the soccer ball. Rich and I swept up piles of red dirt from the classrooms. The buildings are frequently built of bricks made from the red dirt. Even the window repairers had to clean the red dirt out before re-glazing the windows.

By day's end, the color tinged my shoes and pants and the children's new shoes. After sweeping the walls and floors of the class room, Rich and I had dirt streaks making tracks on our faces. Tracks of Kenya.

After just one work day, I was tired, but already deeply invested in this trip. When I leave in two weeks, the laterite may wash off, but I hope to carry red earth of Kenya with me forever.

You can see more pictures from Monday by clicking here.