Some fun photos! Post to come tonight!

Claire meets a monkey




Claire at the swimming pool




Walking with Francis and his family



Claire's new bed from the market



Claire sleeping through The Mona Lisa

Off to Vist Obama's Grandma!

Well, today we are heading off to pay a visit to President Obama's grandmother! It's very exciting, as exuberance over Obama's victory lead to Claire being around. We are going to bring her a little gift of a set of teacups or plates. We'll take photos and post them once we're back. I know I keep saying that we'll post photos, but this time we really will. I wish Claire's little dresses were done so she could wear one to the visit, but that's okay. Next time. Claire is sitting on the couch with Yoshi, it's very cute.

Okay, that's about it for this morning. See you all soon!

Trainings and site visits and island property

So, I have some cute pics of Claire at the pool that I'll upload as well as some from site visits.

Yesterday I attended an all day training, which was interesting as I plan to do some trainings myself so I thought I'd check one out and see how things went. They went alright, I think the person presenting had people's attention for most of the time, and that at least some of what she said reached the intended audience. For me though, most of the training were about things that I already knew about, so it wasn't especially useful.

Okay, it's been several days since I started this post, and so I think it's about time I should finish.

The other day I had a great meeting with Yanis and Matt Berg, we have figured out the program for the programming and what will happen for the next bit. It's looking like I will be joined by a programmer from New York who will help Moses and Dickson with the coding and the software should be finished by the second at the latest. I realized however that we don't really need the software to move forward. We can move forward just using the paper forms and most of the people won't need any sort of action for 1 month after the form is filled out. this is great, and the next step for me (other than to continue working on my reports) is to meet with the heath facilitators who are in charge of the different health centers. then we can go over the different forms and get feedback on them.

So, let's see, Kaniko has left for the field this morning, but she is coming back for the weekend. Then she will be out of here for good, which is very sad as we have had a lot of fun hanging out with her these past few weeks. However, this means we are going to head upstairs and get to be in the big room with the balcony and such, this is good. But overall the sad wins, so now we are a little sad. Tonight though we will go to our weekly outing for dinner at Simba Club, so that should be fun.

Claire has discovered how to climb stairs, pictures soon. She also has her first birthday coming up and we're going to throw her a party! And all of us went off to the tailor last weekend and got measured for clothes. Katie got her first dress today and Claire has i think 6 in the works in different sizes. Katie took a photo of hers which I'm sure will be up soon and we'll have pics of Claire as soon as her dresses are done.

Other than that, we are really excited about heading off to Lamu and have decided that we are going to start saving for a down payment on a house there, this is very exciting stuff. The houses there are significantly cheaper than the US, it is a beautiful tropical paradise and we can move there when we retire and people will want to come and visit us there(making this the opposite of Arizona). The goal is to put the down the down payment in about 2 years.

check out awesome Lamu Houses here...

http://www.lamuislandproperty.com/

Okay, time for a guacamole break....

Now, with flavor crystals!

This one’s for you, Chuck! (Lynne, Claire, and the color orange!)




Mellow day today, with the small exception of having a book thrown at me while riding in the tuk tuk. The projectile turned out to be Kenya’s proposed new constitution, and was being given out as part of a voter education intitiative. I left it for Washington to read, as he can actually vote, and it would just be a souvenir for me. Back to mellow, Claire and I went to Michie’s house for a playdate with Shohei. They have a very nice home here in Kisumu, with a big yard and even a swing set. There was a huge shade tree that provided nearly the entire yard with shade. It was adorable watching the two kids play—they are both pretty little for real interactive play, but they were aware of each other. Shohei was so sad we were leaving that he cried when we left, so I think we will have to do it again very soon. In the course of conversation I asked Michie where she was from in Japan. She whispered “Kamamoto.” In my totally American way, I loudly repeated “Kamamoto?” The gasps from her Kenyan helpers were audible. Evidently, it means something incredibly crass in Kiswahili—the translation I gathered was “vagina in heat.”

Today the voice of my friend Tiffany came to mind. When we were in Seattle in May I had mentioned that I had a hard time making connections with friends knowing we would be leaving soon. As a person who had moved around a lot herself, she understood, and told me that you just gotta dive in and get to know people and not worry about the rest. I’m taking that advice, and it feels great!

I’m so surprised by how much I enjoy living in a house with other people, as it was the one thing I was pissed about when we first got here. I love having meals with people, letting others entertain Claire and watch out for her, and just generally being in regular contact with people. Any nudge of depression that I was feeling in New York seems to be gone, and Casey and I have had next to no fights, so Africa seems to be agreeing with us quite nicely.

Tomorrow I’m going to try on my dresses that Lynne’s friend has made this week for me, and I’m quite excited! I may girl it up and buy some shoes to go with one of the dresses to wear out to Simba Club tomorrow night. For 500 shillings (equivalent to $6.25), you get a full buffet dinner with Indian, Chinese and Kenyan food along with some amazing fresh fruit (OMG I fricking love passion fruit!) and ice cream. Tonight though, we have prepared a Mexican feast of char-grilled chicken (kuku choma), chapatti (lovingly made by Janet, and serving as our tortilla substitute), Casey’s “love potion” guacamole, and freshly made pico de gallo.

Did I mention that we are going to take a trip to Lamu at the end of our time in Kenya? Lamu is an amazing place on the North coast of Kenya. It is a chain of islands that are foot and donkey traffic only—no motorized vehicles allowed! It is influenced by many cultures (Arabic, Swahili, Portuguese…the list goes on), that have blended it into a magical place where the infrastructure has remained relatively unchanged for the last 1200 years. The people are conservation-minded and have taken many steps to maintain the local ecosystem and support the local economy. I nearly forgot to mention that the other way people get around is by dhow—specialized sailboats made to carry fruit, spices and other things for trade. We will take one from the airport in Lamu to where we are staying in Shela. Ooh, I can’t wait—arriving by sea will be awesome!!

Okay, Claire is awake now and I need to go help Casey in the kitchen. Kwaheri, tuanane! (Goodbye, see you later!)

Happy Independance Day!!!!!

At long last, the NEW post has been released!!!!

Going for a walk with Francis' and Komolo to go look at the dams





I <3 This NGO, I want a t-shirt sooooo badly




Ooh, it's both exciting and shiny!!! And it has that new post smell..which is sort of gross...

So lets see, I think the last post was last week, so I'll try and remember things which you will all like and think are awesome. Last Sunday we rolled out to my friend Francis' place where his mom cooked us an awesome dinner, my other friend Samuel Komolo joined us too, they are both my colleagues at the Millennium Village Project and have helped me out a bunch. So we were headed to the place where he lives, which is a slum, on the way to the super-huge mall called MegaCity! It doesn't have the exclamation point, but I feel it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the place, besides it's called MegaCity, it feels like it SHOULD have an exclamation point. Oh yeah, so the place we were going by on the way was called something in Ki-Swahili which I don't remember, but it translates literally into English as "Hide Your Ass", which I think is awesome. I guess the origin was that some Mzungu originally named the place Pinocchio, but then it was converted and that's what they came up with. I love that I get to look at the Hide your Ass Community Center every time I go to MegaCity!. So, we got to his place and he took us around to look at the dams which work to protect much of the land from flooding in the rainy season. Apparently the swampland it has created is home to many Hippos (Kiboko in Ki-Swahili), they come out at night and menace the people and destroy crops and such, and if you meet a Hippo they are very good at charging straight forward but can't corner for crap, so you should run in not a straight line. So we had an awesome dinner and then headed for home.

Monday I headed back out to the field, and did some more interviews. The more I do the better I feel about them and the less I feel like I forget to ask. So far I have visited 7 of the 9 health facilities here and I hope to finish up the last 2 tomorrow. Not too much to report from the visits, though I have some photos I will post.

On Tuesday I had a great meeting with James at MVP, we went over the current plans for the program and he had some really great input. Sometimes it's really nice when you are so close to a project to get a little outside perspective. So we ended up expanding the program quite a bit and ditched the automated schedules for manual ones to begin with and then we can look at the data later to see if there are patterns. This gives the software much more flexibility.

We are also going to have the CHWs go out and do a registration drive and put the Mothers' health IDs for Childcount on a sticker inside the front cover of the maternal health booklet as I had realized on Monday that the patients donot know their health ID at the moment which is a huge problem given that I am using that as the primary piece of ID for the system. We solved that though and tonight I went through and made the three new forms that will be needed for the health centers. There is also a new CD4count machine coming to the subdistrict hospital soon and we figured out a way to manually capture that information until a more automated solution can be put into place. Oh and Katie was a TA in the phlebotomy lab in med school and Komolo asked her to help do some trainings for doing blood draws.

Today katie and Claire went to the field with me,which was awesome and at the second health center the driver was waiting and asked us to be fast so as I did my interview I sent Francis out to take photos of whatever he thought would be interesting for my report. I am a bit shy with taking photos, especially at the health centers, Francis is not, and I think I got much more good stuff by sending him out with the camera. I also think that people are less shy when it's a Kenyan taking the photos. Anyway, I though about it, and sent him home with the camera, and asked him to just take photos of whatever he thought was interesting that night. I'm pretty stoked to get the results and I think i might repeat the experiment with him and also with other people i trust over the course of my time here. I'll post someof the shots soon.

Okay, well tomorrow I am meeting with the programmers and we will set out the specific course of action to be taken beginning Monday, and then it's off to the field to finish up with the health centers.

Oh, and I can't believe I forgot this, Yanis who has led the effort to get this program set up presented a few slides I made last weekend of the work i am doing here at the UNAIDS HQ in Geneva. I am pretty stoked about that and I guess they must have liked it as he said there was good news! I am keeping my fingers crossed that this means we will be continuing this project after I graduate in December. Okay folks, It's late and i have a meeting in the morning as well as a ton of writing for my report I have been putting off to go and visit the Impala sanctuary with Claire (I shook hands with a baboon! I really need to talk about that when I have the pics uploaded) so I'm going to go and leave you to the rest of whatever you were supposed to be doing. Oh and I totally missed the planning meeting yesterday in Yala, butno one told me it was happening!!!! Crap, I need to makeit to thenext one so my project is assigned time, we are still hoping to go live with the alpha in about 2 weeks. Okay, I'm really going now.

No

Really

I'm going to go

Stop reading

I might be really tired and a little loopy

Are you still reading?

s'en allez!

Goodnight

Whew! A lot has happened this week!

The past couple of days, I have gotten to visit two different families and it has been great! Sunday, all 3 of us met up with Francis, Casey's workmate at MVP, and Samuel (also at MVP), to have dinner at Francis’s mom’s house. When we arrived by tuk tuk down a very bumpy dirt road, we entered a compound on foot and went into his grandma’s home. She did not speak English, and we know only a few words in Kiswahili (and practically none in Luo!), but that didn’t really matter. Years ago, Francis’s grandpa bought the land at a great price, and his family is set up nicely today. After the introductions, we went for a walk to the dams nearby, where kibokos (hippos) live. It was a little crazy to think we might come across one or more of these gigantic beasts, but we never saw more than just where one had stomped the grass down not too long before we arrived. It was a pretty place for a walk, flat, with lots of repetitions of the same types of vegetation (I wish I had a field guide!). I think I identified some sort of Achillea, and I definitely saw water hyacinth, which is an incredibly invasive species from South America that has caused huge problems for the fishing and shipping industries of Lake Victoria. I saw some plants that had yellow, honeysuckle-like flowers, and when you broke the stem there was milky latex. The fruits (non-edible), were like 2 oversized green cherries and evidently, kids use the dried out seeds to play jacks. Francis’s sisters were eager to tell me what they knew about the plants, and even more eager to hold Claire and play with her.
On our walk, I fielded many questions from Samuel about the United States and much more; he and Francis both made me feel at home and at ease by their outgoingness and interest in learning about us. As it turns out, Samuel is going to be training other health workers on phlebotomy, and asked if I would like to come and help teach! I’m looking forward to it, and although it has been a few years since I TA’ed stab lab, it will be good.
Once back, Francis’s guardian (his mother and father have both passed), had laid out quite a supper for us! There was chapatti, white rice (grown in Kenya), and fried rice, meat stew, lentils, bananas with peas, and passion fruit drink. It was delicious.
Monday, Lynne invited me to her sister’s home to meet her mom and brothers and sisters that were in town.


Lynne's sister's home and the next door neighbor. The houses are super tiny and there was no kitchen to speak of, but Lynne managed to make some amazing food despite this! There wasn't even a counter to chop the veg on.





It was a fun day of hanging out and once again, eating delicious food. Lynne prepared fish in a stew with ugali (maize dish used to scoop up the other foods), coleslaw and rice. Claire totally dug the ugali and stew!





Casey calls this picture "Claire in Africa." It was taken outside of Lynne's sister's home in Kisumu.






Tuesday—pretty boring. Laundry, washing and just chilling out at home.
Wednesday Casey, Claire, Lynne and I went to the Impala park that is across the street from our house. It was way more than I expected it to be, and at around $15 US per person, I would hope it was! They have lions, a leopard, impala, bushbok, African rhinos, guinea fowl, various monkeys, baboons, cheetahs, and zebras. The impala, some of the monkeys and the zebra were free roaming. We came at feeding time, which I thought was going to be cool, but turned out to be kinda boring. Lynne repeatedly mentioned how greedy the animals were to eat so much meat, and asked the man-with-meat-wheelbarrow if they ever cut any off to take home? He said no, they would get sacked if they did. Funny thing, Casey asked one of the caretakers at the park if there were too many impala, what they did with them? (As in, did they eat them?). The answer was the same. Casey also thought the guinea fowl looked fat (and tasty, perhaps?). I think both Lynne and Casey were seeing dinner at the impala park!
Today, Thursday, Claire and I went with Casey into the field. Whew, it was a long day, and I can see why Casey is tired at the end of his days. We traveled in a packed truck for around an hour out to Yala where the field office is, over pothole-ridden roads. We met up with Francis and Samuel there and hung out until we had transport to go to the health centers. Packing into yet another vehicle, we went out on bumpy, albeit in beautiful countryside, roads to the health centers. I’m glad I got to see Casey in action—the nurses seem excited about his project and how it will help close some gaps that were problematic for keeping mothers coming in to visits and on track with their meds amongst other features that will be built into the software, hopefully in the near future. When we finally got home (maybe I’m a bit tired tonight!), Kana and Yoshi cooked us Japanese curry, which was lovely, and we sat down for a family dinner with those two and Janet. I’m really enjoying our “family” here, and see a trip to Japan in the future! Janet wants to bring us to her home area as well, which sounds awesome. I think she lives amongst artists that do a lot of pottery, specifically making the little stoves that burn efficiently and don’t put smoke into the house.
Only in Africa----------------------->

Ok, that was a really long post. I’m exhausted, and going to curl up next to the already sleeping Claire. Good night!