like two trapeze swingers

please remember me, happily/by the rose bush laughing/with bruises on my chin, the time when/we counted every black car passing/your house beneath the hill and up until/ someone caught us in the kitchen/with maps, a mountain range, a piggy bank/a vision too removed to mention

We get up early in the morning. The four of us are usually up and at 'em by 8am. Probably because we turn into pumpkins after dark so we go to bed on the earlier side. My 3 roommates like to run in the morning, and i've never been running's #1 fan. So, i tend to stretch on our balcony with Iron&Wine on repeat, and at that hour, when it's perfectly cool and breezy it's pretty close to heaven.

Today we took a tour of the AMPATH hospital. Assuming you all did your homework and cruised the website I won't bore you with repeating their programs, but it's a well-oiled organization and we're in it here. They have a handful of initiatives and programs for their HIV/AIDS clients, one of which is the FPI, or family preservation initiative, which operates under the notion that even if you give patients ARVs if they have inadequate nutrition or extreme poverty, their condition will not improve. (as public health students, we like this) So, there is a farm on site where produce is sold (income-generator) and given to "food-insecure" patients with a prescription from a nutritionist for up to 6 months. Currently though a change is happening where the healthier clients will work on the farm to generate an income while also providing food for their less-healthy counterparts. there is also a passion fruit juice factory. and they are currently grafting the "purple passion" and the "yellow passion" to make "an even sweeter passion" (the jolly Kenyan man was very enthusiastic about his job)

a kenyan woman distributing maize brought in once a month by the WFP

us on our farm tour

The partnership between IU-Kenya-Moi-USAID-PEPFAR etc, etc is intense and AMPATH is essentially a symbolic acronym for the collaboration that operates under the Kenyan Ministry of Health. Also, technology is cutting edge around here. Google was in town last week because they will (eventually) provide phones with GPS and data collection software that can be formatted accordingly, so trained counselors can go door-to-door in the 3 million people catchment AMPATH area of Western Kenya and test people for malaria, TB, HIV all within their homes and rural villages (!!!) This weekend there is a "launch party" in a village where people come out to play and listen to talks and sing--all done to ultimately gain enthusiasm for a program beginning in a new area. it's pretty exciting. and that's a fragment of what we learned. all before noon.

i walked into town in search of (room temperature) milk and it never ceases to surprise me how handicapped individuals operate in developing countries. i passed a woman on her hands and knees using two pairs of flip flops (one for her hands and one for her knees) because her lower legs were deformed. another man cruised by me on his knees because he didn't have lower legs. either we provide surgery in the U.S. or they are hidden from my view, but i haven't seen anything like it in a long while. a girl on our program wants to do her culminating experience on handicap-access in kenya. needless to say, it is few and far between.

and it would be nice if the powers that be could give haiti a break. that news is so sad.

tonight us, and the other few dozen of mzungus on this compound, are going out to an indian dinner. AND i got the seat lowered a bit on my hip new bicycle, so tomorrow i will take her for an early morning cruise.

OH! and our address here is: Lauren Welch
c/o Indiana University/George Washington Univ
PO Box 4806-30100
Eldoret, KENYA
[obviously packages, letters, postcards, etc would be greatly appreciated. we will just all have to hope it gets here by May]

so alivia taylor can see how cool i look with my neon backpack on a daily basis

terrific tuesday

hipsters need to abandon williamsburg and get to kenya. they would have a field day. the ironic clothing is everywhere. today i saw a pair walking: one in a hoodless sweatshirt with a siberian tiger on it that said "love your mother" accompanied by an elderly woman in a neon colored sweater with the nike swoosh on it from 1983. a majority of people ride old, rusting, vintage bicycles, with baskets and without helmets. i bought a ($4!?!?!) jansport backpack for school, and naturally, the only color they had was neon green. my clothes may be cooler than your clothes by the time i get back.

we started classes and they're great. it's wonderful because we are taking our courses in 4 intensive blocks as opposed to spread out over the semester, so we can spend three weeks with our kenyan counterparts in the field. it's super because we only have one or two classes at a time and we just bust 'em out in a few weeks and move on. and this place is a big deal. the IU-Kenya partnership is impressive and you should definitely take a minute to cruise their website. and we live on the compound with joe mamlin, no big deal to take your breakfast with a nobel peace prize nominee. we have our tour of the hospital tomorrow. and there is a center for abandoned babies where you can go drop in whenever and just hold them and play with the children. perfect stress reliever.

today, however, we didn't have class. so we laid by the pool (sorry?) then wandered through town, sat and drank coffee and read my new danielle steel (err, i mean, ernest hemingway) "novel" AND i got a bike! it's perfect. so in kenya you go to the grocery store and you buy a bike (new for $90) then you immediately take it to the fundi (fix-it man) to get it fixed. i brought my kenyan friend, which was smart considering the pedal fell off as i was pushing it out of the store--found out later it was missing a bolt. then for about $4 the fundi fixes it like new and you pick it up 2...or maybe 3...or maybe 5 hours later. it's a bit dodgy being a white girl with a new bicycle so i will have to roll it around in the mud for a bit. but it makes me happy and on weekends i can go on ride around on the dirt roads, it's a speed demon! here they also have bike taxis, boda bodas, where someone puts a cushion on the back of their bike and hauls people around. if i get strapped for cash i think it would be a good job prospect. just a thought.

oh! and i got a new phone. an even nicer one with a flashlight and SNAKE. bring it on! my highest score is already 1250 (that's a snakemaster for those of you unfamilar with the game)

the number is: +254 716715464 (it may be temporary, but i'll keep you posted)

me with my new bicycle!
(sorry aaron for straight-up stealing your handkerchief during summer 2k9--forgive me?)

ladies by the pool we have access to

eldoret is happenin'

we made it to eldoret. i slept most of the way in the back left corner of our rented matatu. and just listened to music and watched kenya go by. it's green and rainy and little children walk up the side of the road with their goats. we stopped to see the great rift valley and to take pictures at the equator (!!) we also passed through a small town called bird forest which suffered the most during the post-election violence last year. a few hundred kenyans are still living in IDP camps along the road. our living accommodations are nice. there are four of us to a room and i am in the moi university hostel first, which means we live with kenyan medical students, and we have to cook for ourselves (this morning i had a peanut butter sandwich and banana).

the great rift valley

all of us at the equator

our room

a view from our balcony

the walk from our hostel

the hospital

at the bar/restaurant

meat meat meat meat

yesterday we went for a walk through the town, which is busy and full of people. we had some lunch, walked through the open air market and managed to not get run over. i also bought a newspaper and spent my afternoon digesting the kenyan news.

here are some headlines (and highlights) from the national paper, The Standard (which tends to be bias towards the Opposition side of politics--a majority of Western Kenya):

homosexuality perversion is a threat to survival of humankind: "Homosexuals have coined the term homophobia, to mean intense fear or hatred of homosexuals. Accordingly, I am classified as a homophobic. This is on account of the fact that I cannot stand homosexuals...let me have about me a couple of dozens of Tiger Woods and their dozens of concubines. I can live with that and so, too, can Mother Nature and a whole world out there....but homosexuality is another ballgame all together...it is worse than scandalous that society allows homosexuals to brazenly talk about such psychotic and psychopathic things as 'gay marriage'...then there is the rapist. If the homosexual must have his space, let the rapist have his space too. The lowest common factor between the rapist, the pedophiliac and the dog-man is that they have evolved perverted carnal appetites that run counter to the law of nature..."

how to recover when cheated on: 1. don't act like the victim, yes you are hurt and perhaps confused, but sitting back and feeling sorry for yourself won't help. 2. don't accuse: you need to swallow your anger and pride 3. get to the bottom of it: this is going to hurt, but you must know the reason for the cheating and fix it 4. forgive and forget: this may be the hardest step, but it is the most necessary.

a cougar is born: "I invited Timmy and his friends over and eventually Mr Out of Bounds man bought them a play station 3. Timmy (a 20 yr old college student home for the festive season) and i would cuddle on the couch."

needless to say, I will buy the paper much more often now. There was other news, about the government, a man's goat farm, the matatu strike, the African Cup (soccer. errr, football), and the trouble brewing in South Sudan. But the articles on lifestyle choices I found most interesting and educational.

last night we went out to nyoma choma which is just huge slabs of meat they cut up and serve you with beer and the football game playing. then we went out to the dance club in town, called Spree, to practice our dance moves with the kenyans. It's fun, they play reggae and hip-hop from about 5 years ago and have lasers and bright lights. I watched this Kenyan couple bump and grind for about half hour simply trying to figure out how human hips can physically move like that. i don't have the gene.

hope you all had a super duper weekend.

internetz

i've been reading a lot of andrea gibson. and other than my dear friends sarah lawson (rememberwhenihadablog.blogspot.com) and justin searns (who guards his brilliance), she is certainly my favorite poet.

and i've found a bit i like a lot:

i've never seen a bomb drop.
i've never felt hunger.
i've also never seen lightening strike
but i know we've all heard the thunder
and it doesn't take a genius to tell something's burning.

"Please call me by my true name,
I am the child in Uganda all skin and bone."
Do we remember the rest?
And, "Jesus Wept."
Jesus wept, but look at our eyes,
dry as the desert sand
dusting the edges of our soldiers' wedding bands.

Do you know children in Palestine fly kites
to prove they're still free?
Can you imagine how that string
must feel between their fingers
as they kneel in the cinders of US-made missile heads?
You can count the number of the dead by the colors in the sky.

The bough is breaking.
The cradle is falling.
Right now a six-year-old girl is crouched in a ditch in Lebanon
wishing on falling bombs.

Right now our government is recording the test scores
of Black and Latino 4th graders
to see how many prison beds will be needed in the year 2015.

Right now there's a man on the street outside my door
with outstretched hands full of heartbeats no one can hear.
He has cheeks like torn sheet music
every tear-broken crescendo falling on deaf ears.

At his side there's a boy with eyes like an anthem
no one stands up for.

Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who
aren't there.
It's that we ignore the ones who are.
'Til we find ourselves scarred and ashamed
walking into an emergency room at two am
flooded with a pain we cannot name or explain,
bleeding from the outside in.
Our skin is not impervious.
Cultures built on greed and destruction
do not pick and choose who they kill.

Do we really believe our need for Prozac
has nothing to do with Fallujah,
with Kabul, with the Mexican border,
with the thousands of US school kids
bleeding budget cuts that will never heal
to fuel war tanks?

Thank god for denial.
Thank god we can afford the makeup
to pile upon the face of it all.
Look at the pretty world.
Look at the smiling people,
and the sky with a missile between her teeth
and a steeple through her heart
and not a single star left to hold her
and the voices of a thousand broken nations
saying, "Wake me, wake me
when the American dream is over."

[andrea gibson-when the bough breaks]

and, sadly, this happened in south sudan
this is interesting based on uganda's recent politics around homosexuality

BUT, also little things to make the world a tad more beautiful. It's Friday. We start our adventure in Eldoret shortly and children in uganda have skateboards.

wapi dawa man?

i suppose i should explain the origin of the blog name. i have a small swahili phrasebook that translates helpful things (i.e. "where is the bathroom? how much is this?" etc etc) I was flipping through it before departing the U.S. and there is a section on romance and "social activities" (read: sex). Needless the say, the translations are quite funny including:
"No. You will not use me for sex."
"We need to use a condom" (always helpful)
"I do not want to marry you."
there are then some commands followed by "Easy, tiger!" which, as you may have expected by now translates to "tulia, simba!" I found it entertaining that lonely planet thinks that would be helpful to a western tourist. thank you, lonely planet.

last night the three of us wandered out to carnivore for a plate of meat and serious night out on the town in kenya's adult playground. it was just as extravagant (and delicious) as I remembered, and after a handful of dawas (medicine = vodka, honey & limes) we were frolicking on the playground, playing pool with the assistant manager and shamelessly dancing to MmBop (again?!)--kenyans have not lost their love for hilariously bad 90s pop music. i also learned that, as to be expected, facebook made it to this continent and even if you don't have a phone there are ways to make new (aggressive) friends.

slides!

the assistant manager that helped us win our pool game

another wonderful aspect of kenya is their television shows. namely i have watched mexican soap operas dubbed in english. so antonio is actually the father of jose but he's in love with another woman who told him she is pregnant but even her mother thinks she's lying, someone was poisoned AND everyone found out nicholas was lying about being blind once he saved a boy from being hit by a car. and that all happened in one hour!!

today, a couple of us wandered through kibera. i wanted to buy flip flops and was in the mood to be chased by adorable kenya children yelling "how are you!" which is exactly what happened. the slum is still shocking. the filthy water runs through it, as people throw their waste (fecal matter and trash) right out their front door, which is a 12'x12' mud hut with a tin roof they pay about $12 a month for. the children are adorable too. you will hear them as you're approaching "pshh, a mzungu, yada yada...a mzungu" to their friends. then like a well-rehearsed chorus they begin yelling "how are you! how are you! how are you!" it's not a question, some would be confused by an answer. i didn't bring a camera but this is the idea:

the railroad in kibera

waiting for our afternoon beer with our new irish friend

i should be packing. we leave for eldoret in the morning.

tembo, twiga & politics

the smell in this city is something you don't forget, it's somewhere between burning trash, smog and fresh cut grass.

this morning i woke up from a dream that i was a soccer star. i was the goalie and i dove for the ball repeatedly and missed it. we were playing girls vs. boys and there were a lot of people from high school playing in the game. odd.

then we hopped on a matatu and headed to karen to see the elephant orphanage and giraffe center. however, about halfway there i started to have severe stomach troubles. so i actually paid about $9 collectively only to use the bathrooms. i assume my luck will change for the better shortly. i did learn this about elephants: they are a matriarchal society and the eldest female actually controls the herd. they form deep personal connections: with friends, their keepers and when they lose an elephant close to them they can become very depressed which can make them physically sick. they are extremely intelligent and curious. and downright adorable.

baby elephant!

twiga

last night i had dinner with my former home stay family. my father works for the Norwegian Refugee Council and is going to the dadaab refugee camp on friday to open an office. NRC provides vocational education, shelter for many refugees and programs to address women and children rights. they are also exploring the possibility of opening an office in yemen--where there are a lot of somali refugees--but the U.S.'s current stance on yemen has already begun to cause complications. we talked at length about a handful of political situations in africa. he has just come from three years in liberia where the general population does not trust ellen johnson-sirleaf due to the fact she has been unable to stem corruption and has hired many of her friends for the central government. liberia is due to have a general election next year, yet he believes ellen will contest it (again) in an attempt to remain in power. there is an inadequate police force as well throughout the country, yet (beautifully) in september the first child to not know war in their lifetime entered kindergarten. he noted s. sudan would have a collection of problems in the coming years. firearms are in the wrong hands, and although all s. sudanese can agree they want autonomy, there is little else they agree on and there is a strong ethnic divide even among the southern sudanese themselves. uganda is due to have a general election in 2011 (where the LRA will certainly be a factor), followed by kenya in 2012. needless to say east africa will be a political hotbed for the next few years. all very interesting to me; i hope to be back.

this is happenin' in kenya

love your elders

a few photos to wet your whistle

the garden of the hostel we are staying in--moments before i lost my camera to the cement

megan & kei in prestige plaza

a view from the taxi

another view from the taxi

the sign that welcomes you in the airport

well, i found hartstone

a view of city market

megan and i on the city hoppa

my former home stay brothers, ian and issac, and their new baby sister!

and then there is this, just in case you need saving in uhuru park