July 17, 2007

Last week was a fairly productive week at the clinic. I finally made some progress on a couple of the projects I have been working on, so hopefully I will have finished them before I leave. One thing that I am trying to initiate is a kids’ club for the HIV-positive children who visit the clinic. They are in and out of the clinic a lot, and often get sick, so I thought that it would be good for a bunch of them to get together for something a bit more positive and fun and go on small outings and field trips. I am trying to coordinate it with a pediatrician who seems quite interested in the idea, so hopefully we can find some funding and recruit some patients. I spent another afternoon on the pediatrics ward in the hospital, but this time more to spend some time with the kids than to do anything medical. I brought some crayons and paper and they had so much fun. There was this really sweet little girl who had her eye surgically removed, and was feeling kind of down, but she was easily distracted by the colouring. The kids only spoke Swahili, which was too bad for me because they were talking away to me and asking me questions, but I obviously couldn’t respond very well.

I had an amazing weekend in Masai Mara (it’s the northern continuation of the Serengeti). We were picked up on Friday morning and then drove for about 6 hours on the WORST road I have ever seen. For the most part we weren’t even on the road because there were so many potholes the size of kiddy pools. Instead, most of the cars drive on the dust shoulder. The drive was really interesting though because we passed through a lot of small towns that are pretty run down, and obviously quite different from Nairobi. During the second half of the drive we passed a bunch of Masai (a Kenyan tribe) villages. I had no idea that so many of them still lived so traditionally. I would look out the window and see a man wrapped in traditional cloth, with a handmade weapon, walking across a huge space of empty land with his herd of cattle. The men have earlobes that are stretched so that you could almost fit a hand in the hole- apparently they start to stretch them out as a sign of becoming a man. It is worth doing a quick google search to see what I am talking about. We also passed by some of their villages. They still live in mud huts, and sleep on the ground. The whole thing looked like a photo shoot from National Geographics.

We made it to the park in time for an evening drive, during which we saw some animals, and then we spent the night camping at our site. Our tent was a piece of crap, but it did the job. The campsite was right beside the park (which isn’t fenced) so there is always a risk of animals strolling on to the campsite. Luckily we had some Masai men as guards. One of them told us a story at the camp fire about how he has had to kill lions to protect his cattle. I felt pretty safe with them at the camp site, but when you wake up in the middle of the night and see the silhouette of a man with a spear, it can be a bit startling.

The rest of the safari was great- we saw the sun rise over the savannah, lots of animals (giraffe, elephants, lions, hyenas, impalas, hippos, buffalo, wildebeests, zebras etc.) , and I even got a video of a lion eating a zebra. It was nice to spend a few days outside of the city to see another part of Kenya, and actually be able to breathe!