Emily's Worldview

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the cast of characters at the house where I am staying. There is Florence, my “host mother” (she is only 27), who has a bubbly laugh and is very fun-loving. There is Peter, the father of the house, who is a nice guy who spends a lot of time making exasperated sounds at the TV news. The oldest child is seven-year old Sandra, who is quiet and sweet and falls asleep like a person falling off a cliff. There is her younger brother, Francis, who everyone calls Uncle. He is a typical active 5 year old boy who can often be seen kicking a soccer ball around the house, putting his fingers in the communal food dishes, throwing trash on the floor, rifling through my things, yelling, and being told to stop whatever he is doing. In addition to the nuclear family, there is the housekeeper from the village; there is Evelyn, a 14 year old girl who goes to school during the day and does huge amounts of housework in the evening (she is somehow related to somebody in the house); there is Odipo, another relative, who is a student about my age whose spine is twisted into knots by a case of childhood polio. Then there is a rotating cast of 1-3 other unknown relations who appear for some reason, stay for a few days, and then leave without notice.

The 9+ of us sleep in three bedrooms with four beds total, we gather around the table for dinner and make the kids share chairs with adults, we swat mosquitoes in the evening, take turns playing soccer with Uncle, watch World Cup games, laugh, make noise, and sometimes get angry at each other. At times I get a little jealous of my friends here who have their own rooms and get to go to sleep when they want to, eat what they want to, and avoid the minor eruptions that take place whenever people live in close quarters with each other. But overall, I feel very lucky to have been invited to share the life of this family, and I find that I grow more tolerant of the annoying parts over time, not less.

The work is going great, and if anything I am overwhelmed by how much more I am going to be able to do than I expected. I spent a week in the big hospital in the relaxed town of Kisii, poring through reams and reams of inconsistently kept, handwritten patient registers. I can’t say that the large amounts of data entry this project requires are particularly thrilling, but I do get some geeky kicks out of what the analysis is turning up. I have to make a 10 minute presentation of it all in about two weeks, in addition to a clutch of reports, so I’m feeling pressure to figure it all out and boil it down quickly.

But, the real fun has been on the weekends. Two weeks ago two friends and I woke up late one Saturday in Homa Bay and headed for Homa Hills. This task was complicated by the fact that we had missed the morning’s boat and the once daily minivan, so we hung out by the water’s edge until somebody gave us a reasonable price to get across the bay to where the hills loomed. The boat dropped us on a shore where people were washing their dishes and their children in the lake’s water. We started up the only road, passing nothing but farms and fields and friendly people carrying water, firewood, babies. With every step, the view was more beautiful, as we could see more of the silvery lake, ringed with pale blue hills, more of the fields we had already passed, more of the red road snaking behind. Eventually we decided to turn off the main road to head up the steep part of the hill. We asked around and started up a path between the fields, which we lost, then found, then lost again. As we were trying to figure out which way to try next, a very pregnant woman came scampering up and proceeded to lead us up the hill, on what might have been a path if the millet hadn’t been fully grown and ready to harvest. As it was, it took a lot of crashing around and picking our way through downed stalks until we came out on a little hump that brought us the most beautiful view yet of the fields, the silver bay, and the mountains in the distance. Much farther up the hillside, children tending herds of animals whooped and yelled to each other.

Then this last weekend, five of us went to Kakamega Forest, a national preserve that protects some of the last remnants of the rainforest that used to stretch across the country. After an irritating hassle at the gate, we were immediately mollified when a red-tailed monkey crashed through the trees above our heads. We spent the next two days wandering the forest’s trails, marveling at iridescent butterflies, enormous snails, strange birdcalls, troops of colobus, red-tailed, and blue monkeys. Despite our combined intellectual prowess, we did not plan well for the afternoon rainshower and ended up running around looking for our cabin in the midst of a soaking storm, with two umbrellas and one jacket between us. On the second day, we woke up while it was still dark and charged up a hill with a lookout tower. As the sun came up, mist moved through the trees, birds and monkeys called, and we could even hear drums from a church in a neighboring village. I was overwhelmed. The guide told us about all the amazing and wonderful species of animals that the forest kept well-hidden; he told us that the two little snakes we had spotted the day before were about the deadliest in the world (10 minutes, he said, and you can see your leg disintegrating; 20 minutes and you’re dead) and on our way back to the cabin, he identified two sets of tracks: serval cat and pangolin (worth looking up).

Later that morning, we missed a turn and ended up on a six hour hike through the dripping forest, with little food or water and less than 100% certainty that we were heading out of the forest and not deep into a neighboring preserve. At our tiredest and most footsore, after we finally found our way and were trudging up a long murderous hill, we came upon a troop of baboons, which included a tiny baby with its ears sticking out, who looked back at us calmly before moving into the trees. Fortunately, I was with a group of three guys (our fifth companion left the day before) who kept laughing throughout the whole ordeal, and even held up well when our ride to town from the park gate ended up being a school bus carrying an entire, very excited, girls soccer team. For once, I was not the star attraction. Despite the fact that every time I spend a day with these guys, I miss lunch, have to share my water, and end the day sore, scratched, sweaty, filthy, and usually bleeding, and despite the fact that they chose to wake me up for our sunrise hike with a farting contest, it has been on our adventures that I have felt the most alive and the most like myself.

I know that I am here to work on HIV and to learn about health care, and doing that has been rewarding in many ways, but this country is beautiful end to end and I wish I had time to see every part of it. I guess it’s a beautiful dilemma—feeling overwhelmed by all the amazing things you wish you could be doing at once.