Ok. Finally settled into the AVMA Convention in Atlanta. It should be a pretty busy time here. I've already missed a couple of the things that I wanted to see, but there are still plenty more to come.
I'm amazed to see so many of my colleagues from SGU here at the convention. People seem to be coming out of the woodwork.
But as seems to be my traveling luck recently... I showed up to the airport after driving 2 hours from the beach, only to find out (at check-in) that my flight was... the next day. D'oh.
Once I managed to arrive on the correct day, things went much smoother.
Atlanta is hot. Humid and hot. I've been in Africa for the balance of this summer and this place still feels hot...
Ok... off to dinner.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Home! Sort of...
Whew... Made it.
So after spending last Friday morning in the field, Friday afternoon driving to Kisumu to catch a short flight to Nairobi, and Friday evening flying from Nairobi to London Heathrow, I finally hit some travel snags...
Knowing that I only had two hours between my arrival at Heathrow and my departure for JFK, I had to hustle from the HUGE British Airways terminal to the equally huge international terminal. After catching the tram and arriving at terminal 3, I checked the boards to see which gate I needed to head to so I could board... Then I saw it: "American Airlines 115- CANCELLED" Uhoh... Looked at the rest of the board... Saw something promising- "American Airlines 215 New York(JFK) @ 11:30" Great! Ran over to the ticket counter to rebook.
Little did I know... Apparently, schools in the UK had just gone on summer holidays the previous day... so every flight was booked/overbooked! And the 1130 flight to JFK was no exception! (nor was the American Air flight from the previous night that was overbooked by 10 people all of whom were then put on stand-by for my flight that was canceled!). So... after reviewing several contingency flight plans that would at least get me to somewhere in the US, we tried a couple different options:
1)Stand-by on the 1130 flight to JFK. While it would have gotten me in too late to make my connection to Baltimore, I figured I could just take a train home from there. Well again this was not to be... The flight was overbooked by probably 10 people, plus the people who were on stand-by already from the previous evening's flight, plus the people who were there from my flight... When they closed the jetway doors, there were still about 50 people standing at the gate... Some were less than happy about the prospect of missing the flight...
2) Heathrow --> Edinburgh --> Newark --> Baltimore... Close but the guy standing next to me booked the last seat from Edinburgh...
3) Heathrow --> Chicago --> Baltimore... Great! But... couldn't get confirmation on the flight from Chi-town to Baltimore... So we decided to pass on that one.
4) Heathrow --> Boston(on Virgin Atlantic) Overnight in Boston, then Boston --> Baltimore on Sunday morning... Ok, at this point, I figured this was about the best I could do beyond waiting til Sunday to leave London. So I took it.
So, when I finally arrived in the United States and was passing through Immigration, the agent asked me "So which flight did you end up coming in on?" I was confused. "Excuse me?" "Well, sir, we have you entering the United States on 4 different flights to 3 different cites today..." Ah... yeah, that makes sense. Anyways, I guess he found it funny and let me back in the country.
Then I headed over to the baggage claim so I could make my way through Customs. I wasn't really in a hurry at that point, I knew I was spending the night in Boston. Even if I had wanted to hustle at that point it was a non-started, it was about 2am to my body at that point... So everyone is grabbing their bags and slowly the baggage carousel becomes distressingly unpopulated with baggage... Thats the point at which a Customs beagle dog comes and sits down next to my carry-on bag... Little son of a gun sniffed out the second half of my chicken finger BLT from the Heathrow TGI Fridays... My dinner was promptly confiscated... Also by that point I realized that my bag was not there and would not be magically coming out either...
Going through customs after being out of the country for 7 weeks without luggage attracts some attention. Especially when when the forms indicate that I had been on 'farms' and had 'exposure to livestock.' The agents were nice enough, but began to give me the 3rd degree about my level of exposure to livestock and 'soil' in Kenya... Luckily, when I explained to them that I was there working with a research group and we did all the rig-amoral associated with biosecurity, it became a much easier ordeal.
The lost luggage lady from Virgin Atlantic wanted to buy me a beer for having the weirdest itinerary and future travel plans... First of all I had a bag that was tagged for British Airway since I had flown with them from Nairobi. Then I was supposed to fly on American, but instead flew Virgin Atlantic, and in between those flights I was standby for a couple other flights on a couple different airlines... My bag could have found its way onto any of those flights by mistake... So she looked in the computer and couldn't find the bag anywhere... British had scanned the bag in Nairobi, but there was no other record of it elsewhere, she said it was possible that since I was bounced around flights that the bag had gotten set aside somewhere in London... So whatever... Next problem... when they do find my bag how should they get it to me...? Well, I couldn't register a lost baggage claim in Baltimore since I would be checking into a flight to Baltimore on a different airline without baggage... So my bag would have to be sent to Boston once they found it. Ok- Well where is my permanent address to which they can send the bag? Um... well I wasn't really heading 'home' at that point. I would be stopping by my parent's house to pick up some clothing, but then I would be heading down to the shore to see them for 4 days... Then I would be flying to Atlanta for 5 days, then Baltimore for one night, then back to the beach for 4 days, then Baltimore for 5/6 days, then I would be heading to my 'permanent' school address on the island of Grenada in the Eastern Caribbean... The poor lady... She had to try to put all that info into the computer for my claim... So we just agreed to have it sent to my parent's address and have one of our neighbors drag the bag into their house until I had the chance to swing by and pick it up...
Anyways, the rest of the trip was fine. The airline put me up in a hotel room that night. It had a bed roughly the size of the room that I had shared for the past 6 weeks with another person, so I was pretty happy. But didn't really get to enjoy the room cause once I sat on the bed, I used all my energy to call the front desk to arrange a wake-up call for 430am the next morning!
Fast forward 24 hours- I'm at the beach with my family. Enjoying the 'heatwave' that happens to be the lead story on the news here. Virgin Atlantic's computer system still hasn't located my baggage, but I am almost resigned to the fact that it may never be seen. There isn't much in there that holds too much value to me that can't be somehow replaced. Such is life! Anyways, I'm glad to be back, but I already miss the work we were doing in Kenya.
Couple days to relax before I head out to Atlanta!
So after spending last Friday morning in the field, Friday afternoon driving to Kisumu to catch a short flight to Nairobi, and Friday evening flying from Nairobi to London Heathrow, I finally hit some travel snags...
Knowing that I only had two hours between my arrival at Heathrow and my departure for JFK, I had to hustle from the HUGE British Airways terminal to the equally huge international terminal. After catching the tram and arriving at terminal 3, I checked the boards to see which gate I needed to head to so I could board... Then I saw it: "American Airlines 115- CANCELLED" Uhoh... Looked at the rest of the board... Saw something promising- "American Airlines 215 New York(JFK) @ 11:30" Great! Ran over to the ticket counter to rebook.
Little did I know... Apparently, schools in the UK had just gone on summer holidays the previous day... so every flight was booked/overbooked! And the 1130 flight to JFK was no exception! (nor was the American Air flight from the previous night that was overbooked by 10 people all of whom were then put on stand-by for my flight that was canceled!). So... after reviewing several contingency flight plans that would at least get me to somewhere in the US, we tried a couple different options:
1)Stand-by on the 1130 flight to JFK. While it would have gotten me in too late to make my connection to Baltimore, I figured I could just take a train home from there. Well again this was not to be... The flight was overbooked by probably 10 people, plus the people who were on stand-by already from the previous evening's flight, plus the people who were there from my flight... When they closed the jetway doors, there were still about 50 people standing at the gate... Some were less than happy about the prospect of missing the flight...
2) Heathrow --> Edinburgh --> Newark --> Baltimore... Close but the guy standing next to me booked the last seat from Edinburgh...
3) Heathrow --> Chicago --> Baltimore... Great! But... couldn't get confirmation on the flight from Chi-town to Baltimore... So we decided to pass on that one.
4) Heathrow --> Boston(on Virgin Atlantic) Overnight in Boston, then Boston --> Baltimore on Sunday morning... Ok, at this point, I figured this was about the best I could do beyond waiting til Sunday to leave London. So I took it.
So, when I finally arrived in the United States and was passing through Immigration, the agent asked me "So which flight did you end up coming in on?" I was confused. "Excuse me?" "Well, sir, we have you entering the United States on 4 different flights to 3 different cites today..." Ah... yeah, that makes sense. Anyways, I guess he found it funny and let me back in the country.
Then I headed over to the baggage claim so I could make my way through Customs. I wasn't really in a hurry at that point, I knew I was spending the night in Boston. Even if I had wanted to hustle at that point it was a non-started, it was about 2am to my body at that point... So everyone is grabbing their bags and slowly the baggage carousel becomes distressingly unpopulated with baggage... Thats the point at which a Customs beagle dog comes and sits down next to my carry-on bag... Little son of a gun sniffed out the second half of my chicken finger BLT from the Heathrow TGI Fridays... My dinner was promptly confiscated... Also by that point I realized that my bag was not there and would not be magically coming out either...
Going through customs after being out of the country for 7 weeks without luggage attracts some attention. Especially when when the forms indicate that I had been on 'farms' and had 'exposure to livestock.' The agents were nice enough, but began to give me the 3rd degree about my level of exposure to livestock and 'soil' in Kenya... Luckily, when I explained to them that I was there working with a research group and we did all the rig-amoral associated with biosecurity, it became a much easier ordeal.
The lost luggage lady from Virgin Atlantic wanted to buy me a beer for having the weirdest itinerary and future travel plans... First of all I had a bag that was tagged for British Airway since I had flown with them from Nairobi. Then I was supposed to fly on American, but instead flew Virgin Atlantic, and in between those flights I was standby for a couple other flights on a couple different airlines... My bag could have found its way onto any of those flights by mistake... So she looked in the computer and couldn't find the bag anywhere... British had scanned the bag in Nairobi, but there was no other record of it elsewhere, she said it was possible that since I was bounced around flights that the bag had gotten set aside somewhere in London... So whatever... Next problem... when they do find my bag how should they get it to me...? Well, I couldn't register a lost baggage claim in Baltimore since I would be checking into a flight to Baltimore on a different airline without baggage... So my bag would have to be sent to Boston once they found it. Ok- Well where is my permanent address to which they can send the bag? Um... well I wasn't really heading 'home' at that point. I would be stopping by my parent's house to pick up some clothing, but then I would be heading down to the shore to see them for 4 days... Then I would be flying to Atlanta for 5 days, then Baltimore for one night, then back to the beach for 4 days, then Baltimore for 5/6 days, then I would be heading to my 'permanent' school address on the island of Grenada in the Eastern Caribbean... The poor lady... She had to try to put all that info into the computer for my claim... So we just agreed to have it sent to my parent's address and have one of our neighbors drag the bag into their house until I had the chance to swing by and pick it up...
Anyways, the rest of the trip was fine. The airline put me up in a hotel room that night. It had a bed roughly the size of the room that I had shared for the past 6 weeks with another person, so I was pretty happy. But didn't really get to enjoy the room cause once I sat on the bed, I used all my energy to call the front desk to arrange a wake-up call for 430am the next morning!
Fast forward 24 hours- I'm at the beach with my family. Enjoying the 'heatwave' that happens to be the lead story on the news here. Virgin Atlantic's computer system still hasn't located my baggage, but I am almost resigned to the fact that it may never be seen. There isn't much in there that holds too much value to me that can't be somehow replaced. Such is life! Anyways, I'm glad to be back, but I already miss the work we were doing in Kenya.
Couple days to relax before I head out to Atlanta!
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
6 pigs, 4 Cattle and
17 more cattle tomorrow down in the swamp!
From Sunday's Nyama Choma
Its looking like I'm gonna manage to keep myself pretty busy right until I get on the plane here in Kenya. I guess the one good thing about having a trip home that doesn't start til 630pm, is that I can still manage to fit in a half day in the field and an hour in the office to fill in any missing data!
I am racking my brain to try to find a way to get back to here (or elsewhere in Africa) again at some point. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here and I would absolutely love to do some more in depth work here.
But meeting the people I have met here have also made me want to go see other parts of Africa too... They say some places are 'in the same Africa, but on a different planet.' The adviser of the grad student that I am working with just returned from a conference in Tunis, Tunisia... Sounded like a totally different and interesting place, actually all of North Africa sounds like such a mix of people, cultures, styles... As does West Africa... But I guess I have to find a 'job' at some point after I graduate too!! Keeping my fingers crossed I can find something that 1) I will enjoy and 2) that might allow me the chance to do something 'crazy,' like Veterinary Medicine in some far flung, less seen places on this planet!
As I sit and contemplate my time in Kenya, my mind is putting logs on the fire in my mind that fuels a desire to see the rest of the world...
From Sunday's Nyama ChomaI am racking my brain to try to find a way to get back to here (or elsewhere in Africa) again at some point. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here and I would absolutely love to do some more in depth work here.
But meeting the people I have met here have also made me want to go see other parts of Africa too... They say some places are 'in the same Africa, but on a different planet.' The adviser of the grad student that I am working with just returned from a conference in Tunis, Tunisia... Sounded like a totally different and interesting place, actually all of North Africa sounds like such a mix of people, cultures, styles... As does West Africa... But I guess I have to find a 'job' at some point after I graduate too!! Keeping my fingers crossed I can find something that 1) I will enjoy and 2) that might allow me the chance to do something 'crazy,' like Veterinary Medicine in some far flung, less seen places on this planet!
As I sit and contemplate my time in Kenya, my mind is putting logs on the fire in my mind that fuels a desire to see the rest of the world...
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Almost Forgot...
I hate ANTS... alot. More than mosquitoes, tse tse flies and gigantic moths... combined.
I survive nearly 6 weeks with NO bug issues... then on the hike back from a homestead yesterday I tried to step lightly around a HUGE trail of ants that twisted across the path... Should have stomped the crap out of them!! I guess the hugeness of the main trail that I avoided masked the smaller trail that allowed several of the intrepid adventurers to start their own trail up my leg underneath my pants...
They had the decency to restrain themselves from biting into my flesh until we were in the Land Cruiser, completely buttressed on both sides by thorn bushes... That was when they launched their attack... I noticed the first one as it sunk its rather large pinchers into the base of my thumb... Then I realized that they were all up on my leg... I was able to calmly ask James to STOP THE VEHICLE as Fred who was sitting next to me began to explain that the ants preferred to bite... 'more sensitive areas'.... Only one thing in my mind at that point: SH*T!! I literally dove out of the vehicle and started swatting up and down my leg hoping to kill as many of them as quickly as I could before the ALL started biting!!
I managed to kill all of them but several had already latched on leaving a couple little welts... Nothing a little Benedryl can't fix... But all and all pretty funny, with me throwing myself through scrubby sticker bushes out back of the Land Cruiser while the team stared out the back not sure if it was alright to laugh or not... It was.
I survive nearly 6 weeks with NO bug issues... then on the hike back from a homestead yesterday I tried to step lightly around a HUGE trail of ants that twisted across the path... Should have stomped the crap out of them!! I guess the hugeness of the main trail that I avoided masked the smaller trail that allowed several of the intrepid adventurers to start their own trail up my leg underneath my pants...
They had the decency to restrain themselves from biting into my flesh until we were in the Land Cruiser, completely buttressed on both sides by thorn bushes... That was when they launched their attack... I noticed the first one as it sunk its rather large pinchers into the base of my thumb... Then I realized that they were all up on my leg... I was able to calmly ask James to STOP THE VEHICLE as Fred who was sitting next to me began to explain that the ants preferred to bite... 'more sensitive areas'.... Only one thing in my mind at that point: SH*T!! I literally dove out of the vehicle and started swatting up and down my leg hoping to kill as many of them as quickly as I could before the ALL started biting!!
I managed to kill all of them but several had already latched on leaving a couple little welts... Nothing a little Benedryl can't fix... But all and all pretty funny, with me throwing myself through scrubby sticker bushes out back of the Land Cruiser while the team stared out the back not sure if it was alright to laugh or not... It was.
Slow Day of Data
With the GPS problems from last week preventing us from booking homestead visits for this week, I was left with an 'office' day today (and most of yesterday too!!)
I wish I knew more about Microsoft Access or better yet had the program! Its pretty expensive to get the version of Office that has Access included so as it stands I am exporting the data I have from the study to Excel... Its an ok system. Since I know Excel pretty well, I can use it to look at the data... But everything I read online about Access say that it is the best for looking at databases... Also I lose some of the connections with the data in the switch from Access --> Excel, so it becomes a matter of manually matching up results in the spreadsheet... That has been what has occupied most of my day...
I also managed to try to plan ahead for the lectures next week when I am at the AVMA Conference. Never imagined that there could be 20 hours of lectures on reptile cardiology!! But I think I have a pretty good mix of subjects to check out when I am there! I'm pretty excited to get back for it and to see all my fellow SGU students that will be headed there.
Anyways, sorry about the boring post today... If anyone is great with databases, let me know when I get back.
Wow... this was a lame post. Oh!! I almost forgot, I saw a Mongoose yesterday! It was dead on the side of the road. Thats all I got...
I wish I knew more about Microsoft Access or better yet had the program! Its pretty expensive to get the version of Office that has Access included so as it stands I am exporting the data I have from the study to Excel... Its an ok system. Since I know Excel pretty well, I can use it to look at the data... But everything I read online about Access say that it is the best for looking at databases... Also I lose some of the connections with the data in the switch from Access --> Excel, so it becomes a matter of manually matching up results in the spreadsheet... That has been what has occupied most of my day...
I also managed to try to plan ahead for the lectures next week when I am at the AVMA Conference. Never imagined that there could be 20 hours of lectures on reptile cardiology!! But I think I have a pretty good mix of subjects to check out when I am there! I'm pretty excited to get back for it and to see all my fellow SGU students that will be headed there.
Anyways, sorry about the boring post today... If anyone is great with databases, let me know when I get back.
Wow... this was a lame post. Oh!! I almost forgot, I saw a Mongoose yesterday! It was dead on the side of the road. Thats all I got...
Monday, July 19, 2010
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!!
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
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!!
Friday, July 16, 2010
A day of adventure turns into....
Pictures from Tuesday's BIG samplingWe were out again on Thursday to do some recruiting for next week's set of locations. We ran into some problems...
First, when I flipped the GPS on the four GPS points that we had to locate were actually the ones we used last week... When James and I started to scan through the next set of points(thinking perhaps they were mislabeled), we quickly discovered that the points were in a different sub-location (basically a Kenyan county) than we thought we were in... Bad news- mostly cause we had picked up the sub-location Chief. And then when we checked the back-up points, we discovered that they had all somehow gone into the GPS unit as the same point... Add in the fact that the indicated point was 600 kilometers away and we knew we were working with some bad data (I looked it up today and it would be in the middle of a forest in the Congo...)!! So we called the grad student who I am here working with to try to adapt a solution.
Luckily, she was on the way to an area near where James and I were working and happened to have her computer with her. She could use it to generate new GPS points and get us back on out way. So we met up with her on the side of the main road between Kisumu and Busia, and she decided just to hop in with us in case we came across any other problems. She replotted the points and while it still looked like we were headed to a different sub-location, she chalked it up to a redistricting that had happened since the map we were using was made. So the three of us headed off with the Chief of the wrong area in search of adventure. The Chief still knew the way around the other area and since it is REALLY swampy country, we were glad to have him.
After a couple turns and ever narrowing roads to trails to tracks, the Land Cruiser finally reached its point of exhaustion. As 'bridge' construction halted the vehicle and the countryside began to look swampier and swampier, we abandoned the Land Cruiser for a pair of rented motorbikes. The drivers of the motorbikes seemed quite happy to drive all 4 of us, two on each bike with the driver, towards the southwest on whatever trails were available. I have probably never held onto anything so tightly in my life. On the back of a motorbike with two other people, riding down single track footpaths was pretty exhilarating... Then came the bridge... If anyone has ever been to the Baltimore Zoo, they have a rickety-sort of bridge towards the end of the Children's Zoo section that sways a little bit, enough to make it fun for the kids but not enough to make it dangerous. Imagine that sway, but 20 times as much... Exposed to the environment, God only knows when the thing was built there... Lets just say that there was quite a bit of give in each of the boards...
When we got to the end of the bridge, there were about 4 kilometers more before we hit total swampland... Realizing that we still had another ~14 kilometers to go before reaching the point, the boat trip that we were facing was unfortunately turned down as we opted to circumnavigate the 'small' Lake Kanyaboli at the head of the swamp. In order to get southwest of the swamp, where we needed to be, we drove two hours around the lake and a bit of the swamp. Of course at the other edge of the swamp is Lake Victoria... Our points appeared to be about 1800 meters out in the water... They were supposed to be nestled nicely on land... Opps... We tried our hardest to get to one spot that looked like it might be on a peninsula... No luck there either, which I am kind of glad cause in the 200 meters I walked to get to the shore, I encountered more mosquitoes than I have EVER seen in all of my years combined. The sound was not unlike the sound that you would get if you swatted a huge hornet's nest...
So.... Lian (the grad student) had to bust out the computer and re-plot the point again. While she was working, we were attracting quite a crowd of children from the little village we had passed through... Soon enough there were 25-30 kids climbing all over (and some into) the Land Cruiser. Lian was stressing out a little, so I figured I could distract some of the kids since one of them happened to have a little football made of plastic bags and fishing net. It was like a 20-minute long revisit to last summer (I ran a summer camp)... As the computer battery died, a set of points was uploaded to the GPS unit...
Again they were 8oo meters into Lake Victoria. We only discovered this after hiking up a rocky cliff and bouldering for a couple hundred meters to reach the end of what was another peninsula...
So with no battery remaining and a faulty set of GPS points (turns out to be a faulty layer in the mapping softwear) we decided to call it a day...
But as the saying goes, the adventure is not found in the destination but in the journey (or something like that). So if that holds true we had a GREAT adventure, in spite of getting little accomplished for the project.
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