Great Weekend and....

... the beginning of the end?

So... didn't really end up going on any of the trips that we were thinking of taking this past weekend. When Fabrice woke up Friday morning, he felt a little ill... He thought he had Malaria, which judging by the fact that he and I routinely killed a dozen mosquitoes a night in our room before bed, it might have been a pretty good assumption (luckily he doesn't have Malaria... probably just exhausted from working the long hours in the bush and swamp country).Anyways, I really made the most of the chance to stay around Busia. I had been checking with Charles (the Project House's cook/cleaner/handyman/everything or as they call it here in Kenya- houseboy) to see if there happened to be anything going on locally over the last few weekends. But there was a trip here or a trip there that always stopped me from hanging around town... I wish I had stuck around earlier!

Big Ups

I was pretty lucky as it was a really busy weekend for high school sports here in Busia. Charles told me about one of the local high schools that was 'hosting' the men's and women's volleyball and soccer district championships. And Saturday was our chance to catch the preliminary rounds... I would have never thought that I would be spending ~7 hours watching high school volleyball, but these guys were pretty good and the atmosphere was electric. It was held outside and there weren't stands to speak of. Everyone was so CROWDED around the court that when a ball would go up and head out of bounds the players would run/dive through the crowd to get to it!! Charles and I each picked a team that we liked and we managed to follow them around for the day (it wasn't hard, there were only 2 courts). The team we picked won all its games on Saturday and qualified for both the Provincial playoffs and the Championships that would be happening the next morning(I didn't get to take any pictures cause I was too into the match!).


When the day's volleyball was over we jogged over to the local stadium to catch the end of the men's soccer semi-finals. But we only managed to catch a couple minutes of the tail-end of the match. So we started the journey back home. The Project House is at the far end of town from where we were, so we caught a boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) home... Again, it scared the living daylights out of me, but we somehow made it 'safely' through the rough streets, traffic, tanker trucks and potholes.

In the words of Carl Spackler from Caddyshack- "He's got a beautiful backswing - that's - Oh he got all of that one!"

Sunday morning I met back up with Charles after he went to church and got his hair cut for a day of Championships! First up was the volleyball finals. If there were a lot of people there watching the day before, there were twice as many watching the finals. Like I said above, the match was too exciting to try to take pictures. I'd rather not watch it through a lens if at all possible, so thats what I did, figuring that the pictures from the day before would suffice! In the end it went 4 matches with our pick winning 3-1.

Not the best keeper, but managed to keep a clean-sheet...

From there it was off to the stadium to get a seat in the small set of concrete stands that faced off at an awkward angle from the soccer field... Strange that we went straight there from volleyball cause the soccer game wasn't slated to start for another 2 hours or so... But again Charles knew what he was doing... Over the next hour or so, the stands filled up and then over those two 'long' hours, the perimeter of the field started to stack 5 people deep on all sides with spectators! By the start of the match there had to be 2000 people huddled in the stands and all around the field (Charles claims at least 3000). Overall it was a decent match. But it was sort of the 'typical' African football style, a kick and run/north-south/route-1 game plan. However, the team that we picked to win was at least trying to put together some passing out of the back field and to build an attack... It was tough going as there was kind of a lack of grass on the field, so a good deal of passes were running very long and even when the passes were there, the finishing was admittedly sub-par. None of that however took anything away from the excitement and the tension as the match went to extra time and on to penalty kicks to decide a winner.

After all was settled and the celebrations that were blocking the only exit died down, we headed off to catch another boda-boda ride home. We had tried to look around on the walk to the main road for some fresh fish for dinner that night but we couldn't find any without umm... the 'air' of suspicion (if you know what I mean). We were thwarted at all turns... So we returned home defeated, only to find out that Fabrice had been in town earlier and had bought some goat(yes, goat... and it was delicious) to roast and had invited some members of the research team over to the Project House for an impromptu Sunday dinner. The rest of the team arrived later with some more meat and some of the local Tusker beer(decent enough stuff) and we proceeded to have a little nyama choma (Kenyan BBQ). It was the perfect end to what turned out to be a great weekend. Kind of like the days of the week previous, the adventure was had in the journey, not in the destination. Going nowhere turned out to be something great!

Sadly it *is* my last week here in Western Kenya... I arrive back to the US on Saturday, spend the night in Baltimore then its off to the beach until Thursday afternoon when I head to Atlanta for the AVMA Convention. I'm there til the following Tuesday, then its back to the beach with the family until Friday... Then Sunday, its the annual river tubing trip to Harper's Ferry with the Gang. All before heading back down to Grenada on August 14th for the start of the semester... Long couple weeks, but I'll be glad to have them! Hope to see you all at some point during them!!