safari!

Thank goodness I felt well enough finally to go on the safari.  I would have been crushed if I had to miss that opportunity.  Anyone remember that scene in Jurassic Park where they come across that vast field filled with huge, lumbering brontosauri (is that a word) and other cool dinos running around.  It’s pretty much like that.  Seeing giraffe or elephants that close up is incredible. 

We went to two different game parks, Tsavo and Amboseli.  I recognized Tsavo from a really terrible 1990-something Val Kilmer, Michael Douglas movie about man eating lions. Ghost and the Darkness is a supposed-to-be-scary-but-really-is-comical adaptation of the story.  In the 1898, during the building of a railway these two lions killed a bunch of workers in Tsavo.  Theories about why these two lions started hunting men vary but they managed to kill 135ish people before they were eventually taken down. Now you can go visit them at the Field Museum in Chicago.  When I heard we were going to Tsavo, I made some of the girls watch the movie with me right before we left.  (I don’t know why I find it so amusing to scare yourself before a trip like this.  I watched The Descent the night before I went caving too, makes it more interesting.)  

We got up early and piled in our safari cars to head to Tsavo.  When we got in the park we did a short game drive. It was the middle of the day so we weren’t expecting to see much but it was a really overcast day so the animals were actually out and about.  The drivers in the park all have radios and talk to each other when they find something cool. Someone had somehow spotted a lion in a bush and we rushed there to find it too.  We could only see its face and some movement in the shadows at first.  We stayed for a while hoping it would come out but eventually decided to just come back in the evening. 

We headed for the lodge. We were told we were camping but when we checked in we quickly realized this was not like any camping we had done before.  The permanent tent structures had electricity and hot water and comfy beds and each one had its own patio and pool!  Yeah, this is camping.  We ate a delicious lunch full of fresh veggies and yummy soup.  For the first time in a long time there wasn’t anything fried on my plate.  We got to rest a little bit before heading out for the second game drive.  As soon as we got in the car the drivers starting booking it.  I knew we were in search of something but they wouldn’t tell us what.  We came up to a place where a ton of other safari vans were.  Everyone was looking in one direction but it took us a while to find out what they were looking at.  When we were getting ready for the safari I thought, no way would we see a cheetah. Lions, probably, cheetah, no way.  But there it was.  Hanging out in the grass.  We watched it sit there for a while then walk away into the trees and out of sight.  Of course a cheetah sighting just wasn’t good enough for one night so we drive back to the spot we saw the lion in the brush earlier. It had come out and was lazily hanging out in the grass.  I just wanted to get out and scratch its belly.  We say and watched it roll around for a while but had to get out of the park by 6 so we drive back to the lodge. 

The next morning I woke up and saw some shadows out on the field behind our tent.  Went out and just hanging out, eating breakfast we a herd of elephants.  Can’t really beat waking up next to a herd of elephants.  We made the long drive to Amboseli.  Same deal as Tsavo, morning drive through the park to get to the lodge.  Ambosli was completely different than Tsavo.  Tsavo had a lot more forest and brushland and while we saw a lot of animals, we saw them in small groups, and much closer to our vehicles.  Amboseli had immense open areas and much larger herds of animals.

Our lodging in Amboseli was not quite the luxury it was in Tsavo.  No private pool.  Shucks.  But the food was again fantastic.  We went on a drive in the evening as well.  Again, part way through the drivers picked up speed and in the distance I could see a dozen or so other safari vans.  When we got there I could not for the life of me figure out what everyone was looking at.  All I saw was this huge grassland.  A few minutes later I saw a head pop out of the grass. Then another. Then another.  Eventually we saw eight female lions walking along and playing in the grass!

Back at the lodge that night we watched a Masai dance around a fire and turned in early for a long ride home the next day.  It was one of the coolest weekends I've ever had.  There are a few photos below but you can see more here.

kuzungukazunguka

Say that ten times fast.  It's my new favorite Swahili word.  This language has an incredible ability to confuse  me constantly and and amaze me at the same time.  Kuzunguka is a verb meaning to walk around.  Nothing quite so special there.  Ninapenda kuzunguka barabara wa Old Town = I like to walk around the streets of Old Town.  But when you start to double up on words in this language meanings start to shift.  Joto, for example, means hot.  Jotojoto can mean really, really hot, or warmish.  (Doesn’t make sense to me either. But it’s all about context.)

When you double zunguka things morph a little bit more.  Kuzungukazunguka doesn’t mean to walk around and around.  Now it means something much more special.  It means to wander with a purpose.  When I first heard that definition, I thought it didn’t make any sense. To wander, to me, seems aimless, mindless.  To feel lost, either in space or in your mind.  How could that be purposeful? 

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, that wandering is kind of what we’re all doing here.  There is no manual for how to live your life.  Some might cite a big old book or two but I’d say the interpretation is a little too wide for that to count.  So we wander.  We navigate this life the best we know how.  We make plans. Sometimes we stick to them, most of the time something inevitably puts us off course, leaving us to find our own way back.  I definitely feel like a wanderer most of the time.  But I like that. Truth is, sometimes, as much as I feel like I don’t know how to get there, I feel that I have a purpose, and am more or less on that path. 

I woke up yesterday and for the first time in weeks felt better.  I had completely forgotten what that felt like.  I started a post right after my first hospital visit but didn’t get around to finishing in time for my next hospital visit.  This whole experience went from kind of funny to really annoying to pretty scary and back again. 

If there is one event that has happened so far that I regret not having my camera it was during my little visit to the Mombasa Hospital.  The photos would have been hilarious.  Through all the pain I was in and the tears from that there was a lot laughter about the ridiculousness that was going on. 

I went to bed with stomach pain.  Not nausea, not gross travelers-illness type symptoms.  Just a lot of pain.  When I went to bed I thought I had a little heartburn from the platefuls of fried food that had just been consumed so I popped a Pepcid and tried to go to bed.   Enter six hours of continued severe pain.  Still trying to convince myself it was just a little upset stomach I took some pepto, I drank some water, I walked around a little.  Nothing worked.  I feel asleep occasionally and would wake up in crazy, wild, delirious fever ridden dreams.  By 5am I decided that this just wasn’t normal.  This was not heartburn, this was not something to be remedied by some pepto.  I went into Katies room and through some sobs woke her up and asked her to go to the hospital with me.  I wanted someone there to watch my back with meds and needles and the like.  We took a terribly overpriced tuk tuk and checked in, got some grief for not knowing my address here.  My professor has been running the program out of this house for 10 years and even she doesn’t know the address.  There is no address. 

I got triaged right away.  Got weighed on a scale that was in kilograms, tried not to do the math in my head (again, fried food left and right here people), had a mercury thermometer stuck under my armpit for the first time since I was about 9 (didn’t even know how to do that math in my head) and got shuffled right into one of the doctor’s offices. Told the man what was going on and what I had taken.  They laid me down on a table and he pushed on my stomach.  Through some tears told him, yup that’s where it hurts. 

They wanted to start an IV and take some blood.  Katie had my back through the whole thing.  But we both missed the fact that when the doctor come over to start my IV (because there is no way the bumbling nurse could have done it) he wasn’t wearing any gloves.  At least the needle was new.  There was a cap on the IV that they didn’t screw on tightly enough.  When it started gushing blood the nurse came over and yelled at me for messing it up. Great. This is where it all gets a little fuzzy for me. They pushed some pain meds so I was a little groggy the rest of the visit.  But not groggy enough

Let me tell you, there is no way to tell who is who at this hospital.  Everyone, from doctors to nurses to the person cleaning out the bathroom wears the same style and length white coat.  People kept popping in and out of the room, looking at me and walking out. All I really know is I never saw the doctor again. They told me they were running blood tests. I was getting moved from room to room every half hour or so.  Someone would come up to me and point down the hallway and tell us to go there.  Sure make the girl hopped up on pain meds and still writing in pain walk down the hallway a bunch of times.  After repeated inquiries into the results of my blood tests I was finally told they were ready and for me to go sit in the waiting room. 

Another half hour later I was ushered into the same doctors office I started in, but this time with another doctor. (I’m making that assumtion here but really it could have been anyone.)  She looked at me and said, “So, you’re feeling better.”  Um, no, actually I feel exactly the same. I most certainly do not feel better and if anyone would have checked in on me instead of just shuffling me around you might know that.  She told me my bloodwork (which was scribbled on a notepad in front of her) showed a bacterial infection. Sure enough that is exactly what the bloodwork said, but I could not figure out how this bacterial infection was manifesting and severe pain and not some of the other symptoms one might associate with a stomach bug.  When I told them I wanted a copy of the lab results she looked at me like I was insane and said she’d have to have someone type them up and that might take a while.  Heaven forbid lab results get typed up.  You just handed me a typed up receipt for this hospital bill, I know there are computers in this place somewhere.  I can wait.   While I was waiting they pushed some more pain meds, told me they might make me a little dizzy, and then told me to walk down the hallway to wait.  Awesome. 

I made it home with a bunch of meds that I had to google because I’d never heard of and I spent the next few days in slightly less pain than I had been in, then spent a few days actually feeling pretty good, then started to feel terrible again.  Within a week of the first hospital trip I was getting talked back into going again.  I was insistent on not going back to the first place so my Kenyan professor took me to the other private hospital so he could do the talking to move things along. 

Again, got triaged right away and was seen by a doctor not too long after that.  I brought along my blood work from the week before and they repeated the same tests.  I was then put back out into the waiting room.  At first this system of getting shuffled around and put back out in a waiting room seemed terribly inefficient to me but then I started to realize that it makes a sense.  I’m not so sick that I need to be in a hospital bed hooked up to anything.  I’m going to feel just as terrible whether I am sitting in a bed or sitting in the waiting room so they may as well free up that bed for someone else to use. 

When the results came back I was saw that they were even worse than the first week indicating that the antibiotics they put me on initially were not the right ones.  She was going to put me on something more broad spectrum and hope that that cleared it up.  It was a lot of waiting around there but I felt well taken of and had some hope when I left that I would start to feel better soon.

Within a few days of that I did start to feel a little better and then I crashed again.  I started to feel really groggy and exhausted and achy.  I went to bed early one night and woke up from crazy-delirious dreams, drenched in sweat and shaking with a 102.5 degree fever.  Thought I was going to die. Called my mother. She told me I wasn’t going to die.  It’s funny how much of a baby I turn into when I’m sick.  I love infectious diseases.  I’m fascinated by the body’s reaction to disease. But when something is ravaging my own body I’m terrified.  The next day my fever was gone but I felt exhausted.  Two more nights of waking up with fevers and just feeling generally terrible.  Every bit of knowledge I had about infectious diseases was screaming at me tell me I had malaria but I was sure the doctors at both hospital visits said I didn’t.  But the stomach pain had subsided and these were entirely new symptoms.  I went back to my lab results and turns out they didn’t run a malaria test the second time I went to the hospital. Idiots.  So I decided that since most of the malaria here is P. falciparum, and that is treated with the same meds I was using to try to prevent it, I would just treat myself.  Sure enough, 48 hours after I started treatment, I felt 100% better.  Now I can’t say for sure because I refused to set foot in another hospital for all of this but I’m pretty darn sure I was right about that. 

I do hope this is it for illnesses for me for the remainder of this trip.  I don’t know that I have the energy for all of that again and I’ve been missing my workouts too much lately.  Back to running again tomorrow!

on getting fat

There is no way I’m returning to the states the same size as when I came here.  Now you may have been reading in the last few posts I’ve been doing a lot of running and swimming so you may be thinking I’ll be lookin good.  So not the case here. There is another problem.  The food! This stuff is going to get me into some serious trouble.  Breakfast is fine, there is delicious fresh fruit all around and yummy tea. But the rest of the day. Oh boy. First of all there is just no chance of being vegetarian here.  Maybe if you had more control over making your own food and doing your own grocery shopping, but when going out to eat and eating the meals they make us at the house, there is just no way.  Which is fine.  I’m mostly veggie at home mostly for environmental reasons and I’m fairly certain the meat we’re eating is not coming from a factory farm and hasn’t been pumped full of all the horrible stuff I’d like to avoid.  So I’m fine with eating like a T-rex for the summer.  But then you throw in all the other stuff and that is where the waistline starts expanding.  There is always something fried.  Always. Samosas, chapatis, chips, crisps, fried bread, fried veggies, fried, fired, fried.  And it just tastes so damn good that you can’t just have one. You need three samosas.  Then there is always some huge mass of some starch or carb or what-have-you. White rice. Lots of white rice. Bread (which is of course a separate part of the meal from the fried bread should that be there too) Potatoes (even though there may be fried potatoes in front of you as well.  And there are almost no veggies. Unless they have been fried into a samosa or are in some creamy, buttery, coconutty, curryish sauce.  Again, delicious. Again, terrible for me. All the running and swimming cannot possibly keep up with the fried goodness and the white rice that is present at Every. Single. Friggin. Meal. All of us girls are in the same boat and are all insisting that we not gain weight but somehow I just feel like our fate is sealed. I’ll be getting fat in Africa.



my first runners high

My foot has healed enough for me to get shoes on comfortably again.  A couple of the people in our group had gone running earlier in the week so I decided to go check out the route.  I was feeling really great when I left and tried to remember how I feel when I do yoga, that joyful peacefulness and the focus on the breath.  I just decided I was going to enjoy the run.

The suggested route goes through a small garden area and then down a road that is mostly government buildings so there is hardly any traffic. After the long stretch of road  It goes all the way out to the water and past a golf course and some really beautiful new apartment buildings and then along the coast again.  I'll try to take my camera with me someday but its not quite the same as feeling that salty air on your face as you look over this coast.

In a previous post I wrote about how much I dislike running.  That I know its good for me and I know I need to do cardio, but that I have never felt joy from a run.  Today something completely changed.  After a few miles the road curved and this amazing ocean view opened up.  I stopped briefly to just stare at the water.  I felt amazing.  And for once I actually wanted to keep running.  I wanted to see how far the road went.  I wanted to see the rest of the coast.  And the huge ships coming into the shipyard.  And the lighthouse all the way around the bend.  When I finally realized that it was getting late and I needed to turn around and get back before it got dark, I still felt good enough to be running.  And I felt even better when I got back to the house and climbed up the three flights of stairs to our apartment.  I was ready for another. 

I still don’t run fast or very far, but now when I run, I’m happy. 

rainbows!

This has happened multiple times already.  I need to find a vantage point where I can shoot both sides of these rainbows at the same time. Its pretty sweet to stand on our roof and feel the sun on my back while I'm also being rained on.  Man, I live here.

what happens when you don’t have google at your fingertips

We went swimming today in the bay again.  After hearing about sea urchins I have been swimming in my keens.  They are a little heavy but today I realized they are worth it.  A few of the girls stepped on some getting out of the water, one of them got it pretty bad. They hobbled back to the house and we discussed how to get the spines out.  The following is what happens when you don’t have the power of google. 

Suggestion one

Source: Man on the road on the walk back to our house.

Go home, and boil some oil. It needs to be very hot. You need to boil it. Then you put your foot in it. 

Feeling: Um, well, I’d like to not deep fry your foot, so maybe we won’t do that. 

Suggestion two

Source: Me

I’ve done foot surgery twice already this week (other splinters and rocks from swimming) I can sterilize some tweezers and give it a go. 

Reaction: We tried, turns out as much as these spikes look like they’d just pull out, they don’t.  They crumble. There is just not tweezing these suckers out. 

Suggestion three:

Source: Call Ann (our professor)

Pee on it immediately!

Reaction: Well, it was about four hours ago now so I’m pretty sure we missed the “immediately” window a while ago, and I’m also thinking that’s for jellyfish and has something to do with ammonia and a sting of some kind, not sea urchins the just stab you (man I wish we could google, I don't really know if I know what I'm talking about). Hang up. 

Suggestion four:

Source: Unknown person at the Mombasa hospital (after getting transferred 7 times. PS the exchanges between Briget and the people on the other line were priceless as she tried to explain what she was talking about)

Come in to the emergency room now.

Reaction: Damn. Not convinced this is emergency room worthy. Let’s call Rocky. Rocky knows everything.

Suggestion five:

Source: Rocky

Come down to the street corner, there is a man making cassava chips, he will help you. 

Reaction: Street corner? Random man? Maybe the burning oil thing is half legit. Went to the street corner, came back with super hot oil that unknown numbers of cassava chips had been cooked it.  Seemed super sketch and still not quite sure what the hot oil was going to do but sure why not. 

Suggestion six:

Source: Same man on the street as suggestion one who I ran into with my pot of hot oil.

Addition: After you put the hot oil on it, put your feet over some red hot coals for a while. 

Reaction: More burning flesh? 

We got back, heated up the oil some more and I proceeded to apply the oil to the feet of the girls.  It didn’t really seem to do anything but they claimed they felt better. 

Suggestion seven

Source: Google

Someone with a wireless modem in the apartment finally came out with a computer to Google this.  Turns out the oil thing is half legit.  It helps the break up the spikes and helps your body work them out a little faster.  But apparently the real trick is to soak your feet in vinegar. The ehow said something about the calcium/carbon composition of the spikes breaking apart in the vinegar and the remnants just come out. What would we do without you Google?  Now where can we get vinegar in Mombasa…?

photo from foot surgery preparation from earlier in the week

walkin around

Still just exploring our neighborhood.  We live in Old Town which is where the old Portuguese fort is located.  I'll post something about that sometime soon too.  This place feels a lot like Havana. Its funny what colonialism will do to places thousands of miles away from eachother.