Home from the big city

Happy New Year everyone! I hope that 2009 is treating you all well so far. After much traveling, I'm now back home in Bundibugyo. I spent a week in Nairobi visiting other World Harvest people there with Ashley and Heidi, and had a very fun and relaxing time. Nairobi is a real contrast to Bundibugyo - it's dry and brown and urban and breezy and beautifully cool. At one point I was outside in the shade in the middle of the day when I stopped and turned to the girls and said "Hey! I'm not sweating!," which is seldom the case in Bundibugyo. As a special treat, we even got to go ice skating on New Year's Eve at an indoor rink in Nairobi. I never expected to skate here, and I was able to skate and swim in the same week. On Jan 1st we drove through Nairobi National Park, a park teeming with animals and within sight of the high-rises of Nairobi. We saw giraffes within a few feet of the car, zebras, cape buffalo, impala, eland, a rhino, and, after much searching, we found a pride of lions relaxing in the shade of a tree. (Some of my favorite photos from the park are above). It was my first game drive and I had a great time, as well as baking in the equatorial sun. Throughout the week in Kenya we enjoyed a lot of rest - waking up late, sitting around drinking coffee, relaxing and talking, reading, watching movies - general down-time activities. While this might seem like a lame thing to do on vacation in a new country (at first glance it does to me, too), there is really no down time in Bundibugyo, there's always someone at the door, some request or need, some work to be done. As an example, in the course of writing this post up to this point, I've been interupted about 5 times by kids at my door asking for water, and even now I have two of my young friends walking around the room and looking at my computer. So, just having the time to relax was a real blessing. We also got to see Kibera, the second largest slum in the world and probably the most densely populated place on earth. We had a Kenyan walk us through the slum for about 45 minutes. This was the place where the ethnic post-election violence started last year that caused such great suffering - we talked with several children in our time there who had lost one or both parents. It was an interesting place - the houses are mostly of mud and corrugated steel and are right on top of each other, leading to sanitation problems that are hard to comprehend. At the same time, there is electricity there and we saw many people who were quite well dressed and out shopping or coming back from work in the city. It was interesting to see a place of urban poverty when I live in a place of rural poverty, and it's hard to say if one is better or worse than the other.

An interesting aspect to the trip was the gender ratio - it was me, Ashley, Heidi, and the three girls from the Nairobi team hanging out most of the time. How lucky for me, you might say. However, every guy knows that a guy needs guy time, which there wasn't much of to be had. I did meet a couple guys in Nairobi and was able to throw a football around, but then again, I also watched Pride and Prejudice. I countered that by following it with the first hour of Gladiator after the girls went to bed. The girls have been very kind and sensitive to the fact that I'm the only guy around when it comes to movie choices and the like, but there's only so much one can do when I'm outnumbered that badly :) So, when I got home yesterday evening, it was nice to stand around the grill with Scott and another doctor who is visiting for a week, sip on a beer, and cook steak.

I drove over the mountains on the way back, my first long drive on a stick shift with the wheel on the right side of the car. My only previous drive had been taking a kid to the hospital for an appendectomy, so it's been trial by fire. I only stalled twice which, given the condition of the Bundibugyo road, I didn't consider too bad. I also never was asked for a driving permit at any of the police checkpoints, which was nice considering that I don't have one. Bumpy doesn't quite describe the road - it's like a driving on a combination of speed bumps, rumble strips, and craters for three hours. And it's much more stressful to drive than to ride, because it's like being locked in combat with the road, me trying to find the least jarring way home, and the road trying to shake the vehicle into pieces.

So, now I'm safely back in Bundibugyo (mention safely, because I'm returning from a city that is less-than-lovingly nicknamed Nai-robbery). I'm glad to be back and I really enjoyed being greeted by all the neighborhood children - I found that I'd missed seeing them. But I'm also back to a place of little rest, of constant requests and interupptions, and of my usual 24 hour coating of sweat. It was great to be away but it's nice to be back in the place that I'm more and more calling home.