Kenya: video documentary

[You can play a short, 6 min, version of the FACES documentary here. Viva YouTube!]


It feels good to be doing creative work again. I’m excited to spend my time brainstorming about sequences, soundtracks, what clips to take out of the 10 hours of raw footage I have to work with. The process is amazing in itself: to be able to ask people probing questions about why they do the difficult work they do, to discover the intricacies of the community in which we work, to have a large group of children climbing over you to see what your filming, to climb the rocks of an island and battle thick swarms of lake flies to take footage no one else has. People are also generally excited to be filmed; it helps them feel appreciated and important for the work they do. Then I get to take all of this and turn it into a narrative that tells a story, constructed to emote what I want.


Rose-colored glasses aside, I also have to deal with the very frustrating aspects of being in Sub-Saharan Africa: the only equipment I have to work with is the stuff I brought with me, on my back. Don’t get me wrong: it’s crazy in itself that I own and carry all of the equipment I need and am producing this documentary, from start to finish by myself and with my own money. I’m proud I can do this (though I wouldn’t mind some help, especially with funding!) Still, I need to deal with some crazy situations, which make the adventure… well, more of an adventure. While on the islands, I had to make sure my batteries didn’t run out (no electricity) and that nothing fell into the water, since we spent 4 hours on leaky wooden boats every day. When the kids climb on me, I need to make sure that the camera doesn’t get dropped or otherwise broken. There is no one but me to fix it. And after digitizing only a small fraction of the clips I think I might use, m hard drive ran out of memory. All 100 gigabyes have been used, which leaves me no room to render or export the sequences I create. So I spend excruciatingly long hours digitizing, then backing up to DVDs, which I run out of. There are no blank DVD-recordable discs to be bought readily in Western Kenya. (Though I bet I can pay some of the guys who pirate DVD movies to get some blank discs… I know where to find them.) Everything has to be planned out just right so that I have the clips I need on the hard drive to make the sequence. All these challenges are time-consuming, but in the end they add to my experience and help me plan for the next time (i.e. bring a damn external hard drive!).


As is inevitable with documentaries involving NGOs and health care workers, people’s speaking skills are highly variable. There is very little of the interviews that looks good or sounds good on screen. I can probably only use 10% of what was filmed, and even then I need to cut out a ton of um’s and stutters and repeated statements. While doing the interviews, which are fun in themselves, you can tell who the good speakers are: Reson gives clear but long and comprehensive narratives; Steve can eloquently describe the touchy-feely philosophy of the organization, and Kwaro, given some time to prep, can give a succinct speech with the stats and facts that you need. All without stuttering. And with a decently loud voice. A few aspects of Kenyan culture don’t mix well with these interviews: people speak with very soft voices and tend to talk in overly formal circles, saying the same thing several times in only slightly different ways. I think that this is why Kenyan meetings are long and boring. And why a lot of my interviews are long and boring. And why Kenyans often complain that amerikans are too loud and direct.


Fortunately, Kenyans like to sing, especially at FACES. So to make up for the soft voices that speak in circular statements, I have some great footage of staff meeting songs and Kids Club chants. Good music, good singing, beautiful scenary, interesting work: this is what is saving the documentary from being ordinary.

Kenya: the islands of Suba

I spent a week in Suba District, the district of Nyanza Province in western Kenya with the highest HIV prevalence of Kenya (35-40%) and where FACES is training HIV providers. There is nothing that I can write that would capture the feeling of being there. It was astounding in every way: the beauty, the rawness, the poverty, the illness, the calm despite the storm.

I lived in a house-shed without electricity or running water or clean water with three guys on Mfangano Island. I was thankful that Boit, the island clinical officer, gave up his room and gave me a bed to sleep on. We spent the days taking wooden boats out to mobile clinic and Ministry of Health public clinic sites, seeing and treating patients with HIV medications who otherwise would have no contact with healthcare providers. We took care of children named Steven Biko and Fidel Castro. We ate freshly-caught tilapia fried in metal woks over open flames. We walked home on dirt paths, trying not to inhale the swarms of lakeflies which would coat our bodies. We bathed and swam in Lake Victoria. I watched the guys take water from the very polluted Lake Victoria, put “water guard” into it, and drink it. We spent the evenings talking world politics by kerosene lamp. I went to sleep to the sound of rain pelting down on corrugated tin roofs and woke to the sound of roosters and insects in chorus.

Kenya: FACES Home Visit

Home visits represent to me the quintessential experience of being a doctor. I get an amazing diversity of background and information about a patient from observing them in their home environment rather than in the clinic. I get the privilege of seeing how they eat, how the sleep, what they do during the day, how they interact with their family, roommates, neighbors. I can assess their sanitation and safety. It much more adequately satisfies the part of doctoring that is a bit of an anthropologist … but goes much further than the anthropologist by synthesizing the information into an intervention that is best suited for that particular patient / subject / person.

The downside of home visits is that often you uncover complicated and difficult issues that you can’t solve. We as doctors are trained all the time to solve problems and “fix” people. This of course is very difficult and a stressful expectation, in any setting – be it clinic, the hospital, or the home. If you go by yourself to do the home visit, which is what I do in the US, you then have to figure out how to address the psychosocial and financial problems that you don’t have time or skills or resources to deal with. The nice part about doing home visits in Kenya is that you automatically go with a team. In fact, usually the community health workers often go by themselves, so they especially appreciate it when a clinician goes with them to help with management issues. It makes a world of difference to have a team. You feel so much better supported and able to focus on the issues that we are trained to deal with: medical and psychiatric management.

We went to visit Margaret (pseudonym), a 22 year old with a rapidly falling CD4 count (from 500 to 200 in 3 months) and failure to thrive. She had also been pregnant and miscarried at 7 months at home – one month before our visit. The clinicians had been concerned about her weight loss and falling CD4 count, so they initiated her on HIV antiretrovirals and TB medications. She stopped coming to her clinic visits and the staff were concerned that her family was not supportive, so we decided to make a home visit together.

It started out very strangely. I sat back and let Kendi, the clinical officer, Elija, the community health worker, and Nicolas, the nurse, take charge of the visit. I also wanted to observe how they ran it. The home was small but very neat. Margaret’s older sister kept the two-room home very clean: swept, laundry done daily, food on the table for Margaret. Her sister greeted us at the door and sat with us during the interview. She seemed supportive. Margaret, on the other hand, was lying on a couch, barely moving, with an imperceptive voice. Her face was completely flat. She expressed no emotion, except later, when I sat next to her and asked some more questions. For the first 20 minutes, the clinic staff sat on the other side of the room, bombarding Margaret and her sister with questions, many of which sounded accusatory.

“Why aren’t you eating?”

“Have you been taking all your medications? Show us what you’re taking?”

“Why haven’t you picked your TB medications?”

No one shook her hand, sat next to her, examined her. They mostly spoke with the sister. After the 20 minutes had past, my assessment was that Margaret was suffering from untreated severe major depression, almost a state we call catatonic depression- where the patient is so depressed that they don’t move or speak. She barely spoke, in a whisper, and gave simple one-word responses. When I sat next to her, shook her hand, and spoke with her with much softer tone, she started to cry. She shed tears in the near-catatonic state: no change in her flat expression but now she had tears and mucus running down her face. After she started to wet her much-too-big t-shirt, she grabbed her kanga, which she was wearing as a skirt, and wiped her face. She told me that she was unable to walk, unable to motivate to eat, and lay on that couch all day, not speaking to anyone, not doing anything. She just cried when I mentioned the miscarriage. She didn’t say anything about it. But at least I addressed the elephant in the room.

She had no cough, nothing focal except for muscular back pains. She looked very very wasted: her skin clung to her bones except where it was stretched out for her recent pregnancy. Her eyes looked ghostly and glowing white in the darkness of her home, which has no electricity or windows. I held her skeletal hands while she tried to stand up during my neurological exam. She was very weak and her muscles contracted, stiff and thin.

In retrospect, I suspect that her CD4 drop was in large part due to her pregnancy (it was checked during the start of her third trimester) and that she probably doesn’t have TB, though in a person who was not as severely depressed as her, I would definitely think more seriously of treating for it empirically. I think that she has severe untreated depression, and while the clinicians in Kenya are often reluctant to acknowledge and treat psychiatric conditions, I pushed the issue and hopefully she has started on her antidepressants. And hopefully the staff sees the importance of acknowledging, treating and counseling people on depression – not in the accusatory way, but in a supportive holistic way.

Kenya: poverty & health

[photo at left: Traditional Birth Attendants being trained to do PMTCT for HIV+ pregnant women in Turbo Village. They represent an important piece of task-shifting to community-based members. They also represent a large cadre of people who are not trained in traditional university settings but who are doing great public health work. They reach women in their homes, saving them the cost of going to far-away clinics.]

Poverty and Health

Sickness and Wealth

Poverty and health status are inexorably linked. That goes without saying. We wrestle with this fact every day in clinic. You can’t ignore the blatant poverty that our patients struggle with, even if you tried to. It keeps you from doing your work as a health care provider. On the other hand, you can also see it as part of your work. I like to think of being a good health care provider as being an anti-poverty worker. You treat people so that they are healthy enough to work and take care of themselves. The problem lies in when people are too poor to pay for the treatment they need.

Chicken or egg? Chicken AND egg.

During my first week here, a 60 year old mama came in with a deep foot wound, one week old. The wound happened when she was digging through the dirt of her family farm and cut her foot on a piece of jagged glass in the ground (these types of traumas are common here, as there is lots of broken glass and metal in the earth). She came from a rural village about an hour away by matatu. She was widowed, not just once but twice – by her first husband and then by her husband’s brother (she was inherited as part of Luo tradition); they likely died from HIV and passed it along to her. She had to pay 100 shillings one-way to get to our clinic, which is the equivalent to her entire day’s income from selling milk from her small herd of cows. It took her two weeks to save enough money to cover the roundtrip to and from clinic. She didn’t come in when the wound occurred because she couldn’t afford it, so instead she went to a local tribal healer and got some herbs to make a poultice for it.

She looked like she was 80, she was so withered and thin. She was WHO Stage 3 for weight loss; we didn’t know her CD4 count yet. With her HIV infection, she is at risk for invasive infection from her wound. This is especially true since she’s been walking on it with little dressing… and only little broken cloth shoes and a rag protecting it. The wound was deep – I was able to see her subdermal layers and muscles sticking out- almost to the bone. Surprisingly, and probably thanks to her herbal poultice, the wound was clean, and I didn’t see anything overtly infected.

When I tried to refer her to the district hospital near her home to get a tetanus shot, dressings and wound care done, she refused. She said that she couldn’t afford their fees. While the public hospitals are supposed to be sliding scale, people won’t do anything for you unless you pay something, which pretty much amounts to a bribe. Public hospitals here are notorious for providing bad, shady care. I worked in one in Eldoret. I hated it. Patients at this hospital got terrible care, and I felt terrible that I couldn’t fix it for them. There were several deaths every day of young people who died of treatable infections. I cried every day from the seeming futility of in-patient work here.

I don’t blame the patients at all. I would avoid the hospitals too.

I couldn’t stand the fact that this mama was not going to get the care she needed because she didn’t have the 200 shillings to bribe someone at the district hospital. I would suture and dress the wound myself, but there were no supplies I could use. I know that this is no long-term solution, but I decided to give her the 200 shillings to cover the expense. So maybe it’ll help prevent her from getting infected and losing a leg.

Because of the poverty, people will defer evaluation and treatment as long as they can, in hopes that they will get better and avoid any additional financial burden. The other phenomenon is that avoid going to the hospital at all cost (pun intended). Our clinics provide free care. So when they are sick, no matter how sick they are, they come to our out-patient clinics, which are not equipped (AT ALL) to deal with such sick patients. Well, the fact is that the hospitals here are also not equipped, but that’s another story. They are supposed to be better equipped than our out-patient clinics. It is not terribly unlike what our uninsured patients do in the US, though in the US we have a safety net… and here, the poverty is far more extreme. The financial problem with the hospitals here is that they charge you for everything, and if you don’t pay, you are held hostage in the hospital until you pay something. The horrible irony is that you stay because you can’t pay, and as you stay your debt burden gets bigger and bigger. One of our FACES patients has been in the hospital for 10 days for simple diabetic control because she couldn’t pay for two days of hospitalization. It should have been just an overnight or few-hour admission.

While I was at the AMPATH Turbo Clinic with Joe Mamlin, two patients were brought in to the clinic completely unresponsive and sick as stink. In the US, they would have been coded and brought to the ICU right away. One was an older woman abandoned by her family and found sick by her neighbors. They called an ambulance to bring her to the clinic rather than the hospital, because they knew she had no money. Joe knows the patient a little and thinks she has TB meningitis. Another young man was brought in by neighbors… they weren’t even sure of his name, so no one could find his chart or figure out his medical history. He wouldn’t respond at all. He was septic- they couldn’t get a blood pressure and barely got a pulse. These are serious medical emergencies. And they were brought into the out-patient HIV clinic. And they had to wait 3 hours before getting transported to the provincial hospital because the “ambulance” which was called decided to take 3 hours to get some petrol (i.e. get sodas and snacks and take their time coming).

A couple of such folks come into FACES each week too. What we often admit to the hospital in the US, we manage as out-patients here in Kenya because people will adamantly refuse to go to the hospital. And for good reason. Amazingly, people will do OK with outpatient management, even with limited resources. This is largely in thanks to the great care that family members and neighbors will give to sick people. For example, in the three weeks I’ve been here, I’ve seen a bunch of patients that we diagnosed with rip-roaring pulmonary or extrapulmonary TB, severe hepatitis or biliary obstruction, bacteremia, toxoplasmosis leading to hemiparesis, severe malaria… all of which we have treated as out-patients, and most of whom have come back for diligent follow-up. If you can breathe, take your oral medications and drink a little, we try to treat you as an out-patient.

It’s great to see how good out-patient and community support can heal you. It’s more affordable, and often, it works.

Still, some people can’t even afford the few hundred shillings for an out-patient course of medications or treatments, like the 60 year old mama with the deep foot wound. We can’t keep on providing piecemeal doses of money to cover costs. Besides, the mzungus are at the clinic only sporadically. AMPATH tries to address this by providing a large network of waived fees subsidized by a large foundation and grants, along with income-generating programs. AMPATH is unique in how well-endowed, comprehensive and wide-ranging it is. FACES is not so. And the rest of Kenya (besides Nairobi) is even less so. Despite how much AMPATH is doing, Joe Mamlin still feels like his program is a failure.

Poverty feels like a gi-normous, insurmountable problem. It is pervasive in everything we do here.

I can’t even imagine agitating for universal health care in Kenya. The government seems too disorganized to entertain the idea. Kenya doesn’t have the leadership, vision or persistence that Cuba has. But it needs it. It needs more leaders who can use its precious few resources in creative, wide-reaching ways.

If you are a good health care provider here, you are an anti-poverty worker.

Kenya: name-calling

[photo at left: me addressing the FACES staff crowd during my CME talk on "cough and shortness of breath" in HIV+ clients]


The staff at FACES love it that I have a Chinese name. During the first staff-meeting (when I met everyone) I told them a story about my Chinese name and how people constantly mispronounce it, so now a lot of the staff are making an effort to say my name properly. They do much better than my non-Chinese American colleagues, who mostly don’t bother to try. Often in the mornings I will be greeted at the clinic with a hearty handshake and a “Hello Sophy Shiahua, How was your morning?” The Luo staff do a particularly good job pronouncing my name. Apparently Luo also has a bunch of tones, so speaking with specific intonations come naturally to those who also speak Luo.

The nurses have given me a Kenyan name. The nurse mamas (older women) in Eldoret gave me the Luo name “Akinyi,” when I was last here in 2004, which means “she who was born in the morning.” They just guessed that I was born in the morning, which is correct. However, when the nurses here in Kisumu gave me the name “Achieng,” which means “she who was born in the daylight,” they said that it was more appropriate since I was born around 10 am (i think…) rather than in the dawn hours. I prefer either Akinyi or Achieng over the other nicknames I have been given here, like “Chinese Madam” and “Japan, Japan” and “Wing Chong Ching” which people call me all the time on the street.

Now my full name is (drum roll and deep breath, please)…

Sophia Sophy Shiahua Akinyi Achieng Pokey Resister Wong

Kenya: photo album

This is my online photo album of photos from Kenya. It includes clinic and work photos from Kisumu (FACES), Eldoret and Turbo (AMPATH), daily living, and adventures, such as to Kakamega Forest. I'll keep adding to it during the trip, so please visit the link periodically during May 07!

Kenya, April-May 07

Kenya: faces of FACES

Check out a slideshow of the fabulous staff at FACES, taken for a photobook i am putting together:

faces of FACES

Kenya: FACES Clinic & expansion of HIV care

[FACES Kid's Club - older kids posin on the staircase]

It is astounding how much HIV clinical care has expanded in Kenya since I was here in January 2004. At that time, I was in Eldoret, a smaller and more mountainous city about 3 hours by matatu from Kisumu. We were just beginning to roll out antiretrovirals (ARVs), and most patients who were on them had to pay out of pocket for their ARVs. Cipla was producing Triomune 30 and 40, the generic fixed-dose combination pill which includes d4T (stavudine), 3TC (lamivudine), and NVP (nevirapine), and ARV treatment suddenly became more affordable. Part of my project in Eldoret back then was to help link patients diagnosed with HIV in the hospital to be properly referred to the subsidized HIV treatment available at the new AMPATH HIV clinic, which was in the process of being built. That program in Eldoret was also starting to branch out to a few rural and more remote clinical sites.

You can read an article about the AMPATH program in Eldoret here: http://alumni.indiana.edu/magazine/kenya.shtml

Imagine providing HIV management and treatment in a place without roads, electricity or clean water. It is still like that in many places. But now these places are remarkably better staffed, better resourced and are seeing 10 to 20 times the number of patients. The Kenyan government has trained young medical officers in ARV management, and now Kenyan 20-somethings are running HIV clinics with 10-20 staff and managing huge public health programs. I’ve never witnessed such rapid development and growth in healthcare. And I am fortunate enough to be a part of it.

Back in early 2004, the AMPATH program in Eldoret had only a couple thousand patients involved, and only a small fraction of those on ARVs. We were just beginning to roll out Triomune for free or heavily subsidized rates. Of all the people who needed to be on ARVs due to advanced HIV disease, less than 1% of those people were getting it. Now AMPATH is serving 33,000 patients, runs several children’s programs and innovative farm-based nutritional and micro-enterprise programs. In Kenya, roughly 20% of the people with HIV who need ARVs are now getting ARVs. That means 80% still go without, but this is way, way better than more than 99% of people going without treatment. This is a result of a massive influx of attention and resource allocation by the Kenyan government, NGOs and global public health institutions. They’ve built clinics, they’ve provided lab equipment, we’ve trained thousands of clinical staff in HIV care. We’re in the middle of a 20-fold jump in treatment, and there’s still a lot more to do to get it to 100%.

I will visit Eldoret and the AMPATH program at a more rural site called Turbo at the end of this week. It’ll be really interesting to see how much it has changed.

FACES (Family AIDS Care and Education Services) is the clinic where I am now working in Kisumu. First, I should note how great it is to work at a place where people are incredibly welcoming and happy that you’re there. It creates a much happier, positive work environment. The staff at FACES seems to naturally create a constructive work community. Similar to AMPATH, FACES started with a partnership between a Kenyan medical site in Kisumu, and a US-based institution. In this case, it was the CDC and UCSF Ob-Gyn program. They had started with PMTCT (prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV) and microbicide projects, and then expanded their clinical care to include one of the biggest glaring health needs: HIV clinical care for adults. This is where the UCSF ASPIRE and internal medicine residents (like me) step in. We can actually be helpful in training folks here to manage complicated adult HIV cases.

Their family-based model is great in involving whole families and encouraging everyone in the family to be tested and treated as needed. It is much more holistic than dividing families up into internal medicine, pediatrics, and ob-gyn. It also includes home-based, hospital-based visits by staff, nutritional supplementation and counseling, as well as programs such as “Kids Club” and “Family Empowerment” workshops. [I attended the most recent Kids Club yesterday and got some really great photos and video of the kids. It’s not hard to get great pictures of kids- they love the camera. I’ll post some up.] FACES also has an integrated lab and pharmacy, so patients can get all these services on site, rather than having to trek around town to get blood drawn and their medications. The approach is so much more comprehensive than most of our out-patient clinics in the US. And they do it with a lot of people-power but not much in material resources.

The FACES clinic in Kisumu started out in September 2004 with just a few hundred patients and now sees over 4,000 patients, most of who are on ARVs, including children. It is truly inspiring to see how far HIV care in Kenya has come since 2004. They have a lot more to work with than what I had 3 years ago: a full formulary of medications, CD4 counts, HIV qualitative PCR (measuring the presence of the HIV virus), and they used to provide viral loads too. And it’s free for patients. The clinic has a very deliberate patient flow model which allows them to see about 200-250 patients every day. For the number of clinical staff, it is incredibly productive.

I’ve seen patients for three clinical days during my first week at FACES, and already I’ve initiated (alongside a clinical officer) several people on ARVs, diagnosed ten or more smear-positive malaria cases, managed people with extrapulmonary TB on ARVs. I’ve seen with Liz and Everia (a Kenyan FACES clinical officer) a young man stumble into clinic with left-sided pain and weakness and treated him for presumptive toxoplasmosis, a parasite that can create masses in the brain causing focal neurological deficits. I see about 20 patients a day… and I’m relatively slow! It’s a very very busy clinic. And amazingly, despite my newness to this clinical site, I feel helpful: seeing patients and helping clinical officers think about the differential diagnosis and treatment options, assisting with paperwork and getting the patients the treatment or investigations (labs and studies) they need.

You can read more about FACES at their website:

http://www.faces-kenya.org/index.php

I also have a number of projects that I created for myself and have been assigned to do by the rotation. Because the clinic is so busy, it feels a little crazy to add so many things on top of the clinical work. However, it is the diversity of my work that keeps me engaged. I think I would go crazier if I saw patients from 8 am to 6 pm every day without other work projects going on. This is not news, but I am once again confirming that I need a wide variety of creative, clinical and program/systems-level projects to keep me happily and actively engaged with work. Here’s my current list of projects, in rough order of what I personally think is most important. Pole, sorry, it's like showing you my to-do list, but at least you get an idea of what I'm doing here. You’ll hear more about them as they develop:

1. video documentary on capacity building and training at FACES (my own gigantic project)

2. the faces of FACES staff photo book (my own project)

3. CME (continuing medical education) session on HIV and pulmonary (lung) diseases

4. mentoring clinical officers and nurses

5. organizing the rotation for future UCSF residents with proper orientation materials and resources so that they are useful and get the most out of being here

6. less formal educational workshops for clinical officers; i will do one on a subject they choose

7. journal club (not my favorite thing to do because it is highly entrenched in academia, but it has become part of the rotation)

8. developing sections in the clinical officer handbook; i will likely tackle sections on HIV and pulmonary disease, diarrheal disease (my personal fave!)

Somewhere lodged into this list is the clinical work of seeing patients. I can’t decide how to prioritize that because it always becomes a priority once I commit to seeing patients on certain days. I’ve decided to see patients for at least 3 days a week and spend one full day and some half-days on my other projects.

Yikes! It’s a lot to get done in the next 3 ½ weeks. Time here always goes so quickly.

Kenya: wiki moja, first week explorations

[photo: me, baby Shawn, and mom Triza, who is also the pediatrics medical officer at the Nyanza Provincial Hospital]

*adjusting to life in Kisumu

I intended to have a restful first weekend in Kisumu. I was finally able to chill out after my long journey and busy tourism in London. I pictured myself lounging by the pool, reading and finishing my crochet amigurumi mushroom dude. No such luck!

But it was poa (cool) because I was able to meet up with my friend Kibachio, who happened to be in town for a Kenyan Medical Association meeting. He now is a Medical Officer in the provincial hospital of Embu, and apparently in charge of both the maternity ward as well as expected to help manage the HIV clinic. They were discussing the Millenium Goals in healthcare, since most countries have not yet met these goals. It was great to be able to meet up with him because 1) he is a all-around fabulous person with good energy and 2) he has really grounded, constructive insight to the politics and health care systems in Kenya. Despite his packed schedule at the medical meeting, he came out early to meet with me and catch for an hour or so. He also gave me 15 minutes to interview him on the topic of capacity building in Kenyan healthcare. I accompanied him on his errands in preparation to leave and met his friends Triza and Katana, who work for the district hospital and CDC-Kisumu, respectively. It’s helpful and normalizing to be able to hang out with friends here and meet more folks who are roughly in my peer group. Triza and Katana are young Kenyan doctors, about my age, and have a new baby. They are coming over to the cottage with their baby, Shawn, for afternoon tea today.

I spent the next few days incredibly jetlagged, probably the worst I’ve ever been coming to Africa or Asia. I blame my prolonged stopover in London for this. I had adjusted to Sophy-Standard-Time (SST) in London, which is the equivalent of going to bed at 2 am in London, which is 4 am in Kisumu. The problem with this is that I have to get up a 6 am on workdays so I can make the 45 minute walk to work, and arrive for 7:30 meetings or 8 am clinic. A few days of 2-4 hours of sleep was still not making me tired enough to sleep at a normal time in Kenya; this was bad jetlag. Part of the problem was the nasty crunchy foam mattress I was sleeping on, the suffocating feeling of a mosquito net over a small bed, and the insane amount of howling animal and insect noises at night. I was trying to spare my melatonin for my trip home (I sadly didn’t bring much and had used up most of it in London), but gave up and took some for the next 3 days to get some shut-eye.

*Kisumu is big and diverse

Kisumu is a big city. Way bigger than I remember Eldoret being. The largest market in western Kenya is in Kisumu. Apparently people come over from Uganda to buy stuff here. The market is so big that it has metastasized and spilled way out of the marketplace area into the public park, main road, and has established sub-markets in different areas of the city. This makes the city incredibly lively (which I like) as well as crazy and congested (which I don’t like).

If Liz wasn’t here for my first week in Kisumu, I would have gotten totally lost going to and coming from work every day. There is so much construction and craziness downtown that it makes it all the more difficult for a directionless person such as myself to get her bearings.

We walk 3.7 km each way to the FACES clinic. I know because I took a taxi home one day and watched the odometer. Amazingly, the whole way is paved with nice asphalt. I really feel like I’m in a big city because of this. The walk would not be so bad, and in fact is mostly pleasant and allows us great exercise, except for the fact that you have to cross (unprotected) an undivided highway to Nairobi and walk on rocky dirt patches in order to avoid being hit by a swerving boda boda (see below) or a speeding matatu (privately-operated “public” transport vans). The roads are quite busy here. You have to share it with a wild medley of transport forms: people, carts carrying huge loads of petrol, carts carrying huge loads of chickens or furniture, boda bodas, bikes, matatus, tuk tuks (three-wheeled gas-powered covered vehicles for hire as a cheaper alternative to taxis), taxis, large buses, construction tractors, trucks crammed full of people in the back, trucks crammed full of various other goods, and oh yeah- cars. And of course there are no real traffic signals.

I’ve seen few mzungus here, relatively speaking. I see them mostly at the fancier stores and at the CDC. It’s nice not to be in a heavily tourist city. I even met a crew of four young men from Southern-Central China here. Of course, I bumped into them at a store in the rice and noodle aisle. They said that they had been in Kisumu for two years, operating a vehicle repair shop. They said that life here is OK, they miss home, but they couldn’t make enough money at home with their skills, so they came here instead and are financially doing better for it. Go figure!

There is a huge South Asian population here, and the cottage I am staying at is in the upper-class neighborhood of Kisumu, called Milimani. Most of the families here seem to be very wealthy black Kenyans as well as wealthy South Asians (South Asians here tend to be merchants and owning class). Despite the obvious class schism, it is nice to have different cultures represented strongly here. Plus, it allows me to go out and get lots of yummy South Asian food ingredients, and buy delicious samosas, dal and dhosas for lunch.

As Kisumu is quite cosmopolitan, it also has a bigger diversity of tribes represented here. Despite the large Luo majority, the businesses and NGOs here have attracted folks from tribes all over Kenya. FACES ends up being diverse for that reason. In fact, some of the clinical officers have to get interpreters who speak Luo in order to interview patients. I’m not the only one…

*boda boda phenomenon

There is a new mode of “public transportation” in Kenya now: boda boda taxis, or bicycle taxis. Generally, they are young-ish men with big, old school Chinese-style bikes outfitted with a big cushion, extra handlebars and foot rests in the back. They weren’t around when I was in Eldoret 3 years ago. Liz told me that someone had recently institutionalized the boda bodas in order to address the extremely high unemployment rate among able-bodied young Kenyan men. Very smart. Though now there is a surplus of boda boda drivers. And people are saying that Kenyans are now going to get fat riding on the backs of boda bodas rather than walking on their own. Ah, the price of development.

*Kenya is good for my health (except for the diarrhea, see below)

My pimples are gone, my color has returned, I walk 4 miles a day at 1130 meters, swim 20 laps every day, take most of my weekends off, work almost normal hours at clinic, and cook almost every meal. It’s amazing what a more relaxed culture and work environment will do for you.

*diarrhea

Alas, my GI tract has become immunologically oversensitive and wimpy from being in San Francisco too long. After I had been in Kenya for four days, Liz kindly reminded me that heating up the tap water in the hot pot was not exactly boiling the water for decontamination. Oh. Duh! I had basically been drinking Kenyan tap water (and lots of it) for four days. Somehow I had forgotten that the little hot pot that heats up water to a near-boil doesn’t really kill the organisms living in it. It might fry them a bit, but not enough.

Needless to say, on Kenya Day Six, I started having bad intestinal cramps and gas. Lovely, especially during clinic. The loose stool started on Thursday, Day Seven. I am proud at least to state that my GI system is at least strong enough that I didn’t develop the full traveler’s diarrhea of awful cramps and 10 stools a day. However, I was hoping to stave off the antibiotics and condition my GI tract more (don’t want to contribute to fluoroquinolone resistance!) but after three days of cramps, gas and gnarly loose stool, I decided that it was time to break out the cipro. Sure enough, twelve hours after taking the first dose, I am gas, cramp and loose stool-free. Yay!