(Thursday 12/16/99)
So I decided to take a couple of days off from writing to charge up my
internal batteries. I thought that I
would use that time to work on the website’s appearance and to make the pix
ready for consumption. Instead of
charging up my batteries I feel really run down. Computer technology is an all-consuming, if you’ll excuse my
language here, pain in the ass.
It takes so long to make a program work properly, that by the time
you’re ready to work on it it’s three in the morning. Computers are on the same reward schedule as gambling: random
payoffs at random time intervals at a random rate.
“Maybe if I try this one last thing, it’ll all work…”
Then you DO get it to work and there are sooooo many options. I found myself spending huge chunks of time
trying to decide exactly what shade to use as a background for the home
page. Is this one a little too
yellow? Is this one a little too red?
Ridiculous.
I finally got some of the picture software and hardware to work
together. There is one picture on-line
now (Test Picture), but it took me hours and hours to
get on, and it is really huge. I spent
another couple of hours trying to figure out how to make it more presentable
and easy to view, but, honestly, I was bored to tears with the whole
thing. I’ll try to get it on before we
leave town for Christmas and New Year’s.
And the fonts!!! Can I go on for a moment about the fonts? First you gotta load them on, because you
only start with five or six. Then, once
you get them all on, you’ve gotten them all on. There are thousands of fonts to pick from,
and you end up doing the same thing as with the colors. “Is this one too Gothic?” “Is there a
significant difference between Blackadder and Brushscript?” On and on and on.
And then, once you have finally settled on a font that is just right,
you find out that the vast majority of browsers won’t even recognize it.
Goody, how do you do this stuff all day? It must become more enjoyable once you know what you are doing.
For me, forget it about it.
So I’ve given up on that for the moment and thought I would return to
the part that was considerably more interesting to me.
So here we are on Thursday, December 16th. On Wednesday, Kim’s boss, Feiko, invited me
to come out with them to “The Field.” I
love that researchers call it that. It
sounds so playful, so innocuous.
“Let’s go out to The Field today!”
“You’re going out to The Field!?!
Can I go too!?!”
It sounds like so much fun.
It doesn’t sound at all like, “Let’s go into an impoverished village
where we are measuring incidences of deaths and sickness caused by
disease-ridden mosquitoes, poor hygiene practices, contaminated water,
malnutrition, anemia, and AIDS.” I
suppose if you had to face that with some frequency, then you’d have to call it
something cheerful like, “The Field.”
Before I came here I saw a lot of information about all of this
stuff. Mostly maps set up like those
weather maps on the evening news that shows the bands of high temperatures
across the U.S. The blue blobs are the
cold spots (usually Michigan) and the red and yellow blobs are the warm spots
(California and Florida.) In this case,
all of the red blobs indicate areas where there is a high infection rate for
the disease highlighted on the map. For
Kenya, and for the Kisumu area specifically, all of the disease maps show a
blob of angry red. Malaria, AIDS,
anemia, all present, all the time.
(I’ll try to find some maps to link to on the Web.)
I saw all of these maps before I came and I guess I had formed some
unconscious expectation of what that would mean walking around town. The fact that Kim was coming here to study
malaria, and that I have to take little pills once a week to keep from becoming
infected, probably also colored my expectations. I don’t know that I really expected to see people with malaria
stumbling down the streets, but I guess I expected to see some evidence of the
presence of malaria besides the mosquitoes themselves, which are in constant
evidence. In point of fact, this city
seems like any other, as I suppose only makes sense. You don’t see people who are really sick shopping at the
supermarket in any city. Why? Because they’re home in bed! Duh! And if you are trying to make it through
malaria with limited access, at best, to medical care then you aren’t going
anywhere for a while.
So with that in mind, I was going out into The Field with Kim and
Feiko. We were going to a village
northwest of Kisumu called Asembo Bay.
Kisumu is at the most inward point of a narrow bay on Lake Victoria, and
Asembo Bay is on the north shore of that bay, but closer to Lake Victoria
proper. It is a fishing village mostly,
but there is also a bit of a mineral industry, as I will explain. It is not very far from Kisumu by distance
(I would guess about 20 miles) but it takes over an hour to get there from the
guesthouse. The first portion of the
drive was very pretty. When our boxes
get here I might videotape the drive. The
north side of the bay is an escarpment to a larger mountain range heading
towards Uganda. The road that leads to
Asembo Bay flirts with the escarpment for some distance and then turns onto a
series of rolling foothills by the lake. Large brown boulders are strewn across
the hills perched precariously atop one another like a natural Stonehenge
multiplied by hundreds. As we continued
down the road, I was struck once again by the number of people on the roadside,
all carrying or doing something. And
the Matatus don’t stop at the edge of town: they go everywhere. We passed them by the score with people from
floor to ceiling, from back to front, and the roofs piled high with their bags
and bundles.
We passed through several roadside villages on the way. You know how things in the US are
increasingly paid for by corporate sponsorship? For example, the United Center in Chicago, the Alamo Car Rental
Bowl, The Prudential Half-Time Report, the Sunkist Orange Bowl, etc. You know what I mean…They have the same
thing here! If you want your building
painted for free you just have to agree to have the corporate sponsor’s logo on
your building (usually one entire street facing side.) We would drive through a village with maybe
thirty small roadside business buildings and half would be ramshackled and the
other half would be freshly painted with huge advertisements for Tusker Beer
(“Your Country, Your Beer!”) or Trust Condoms (“Let's Talk”) or,
almost ironically, Sandolin Paints (“Color Your World!”). Corporate consumerism really does run the
world!
We arrived, somewhat late, at the field station. Scheduled for the day was a two to three
hour meeting with the supervisors and sector supervisors of the Bednet project
that Kim is working on. Really, I am
not quite sure who was meeting with whom, as I didn’t stick around for the
whole thing. They set up a table, some
chairs and benches outside in the shade of the little three-room office
building that is used as the administrative field office (this is not where Kim
will work all of the time, she will mostly be working out of the KEMRI office
in Kisian, to be explained later…) As
the “honored guests” we three wazungu were given the chairs facing the benches
set up in rows with the table between.
As Kim would be working with them over the next year or three, formal
introductions were made. Lacking
another easily explainable title, I was introduced as Kim’s “husband-to-be.” It turns out that the idea of
boyfriend/girlfriend is fairly non-existent here; even the idea of fiancé
didn’t seem to make much sense to them.
They introduced themselves by name, rank and sector. Everyone has a first name, usually a
Christian or Muslim name, such as George or Mohammed, and a name in the local
language, which are usually descriptive in some way. Family last names are not common here. If they were they would have their own series of problems. I had thought that my family connections were
complicated to explain and name given families, step-families, half-siblings
and ex-step-families, but African families put mine to shame. Julius, the guesthouse caretaker, tried to
explain his family to me and I was overwhelmed, mostly by the generic use of
son and daughter to describe several different relationships. Once you throw polygamy into the mix it’s a
real mess. If I can come up with a
system to explain it all, I’ll post it somewhere.
As to their rank, if I understood correctly the study is set up with
several different levels of supervision:
village monitors on the bottom, supervisors above them, sector supervisors
above them and an overall supervisor above them all, all report. It seems that not only is it important to
get things done, it is also important to get jobs for people. Consequently, sometimes there are layers
upon layers upon layers. It certainly
explains why there are so many people working in the supermarket. I am not sure that this is necessarily the
case here, I may be exaggerating, but it is often the case. Anyway, Feiko told us as an aside early in
the meeting, you not only hire people you hire their family and friends and the
problems of all of them. During the
meeting we spent a little bit of time talking about Feiko’s efforts to get one
of the assistant supervisors out of jail (for murder! - the charges were
trumped up, Feiko reassured us).
After introductions, they began the meeting. They started off the meeting with some pretty disturbing reports,
namely, the death reports from the last two months. They went sector by sector and reported how many children had
died and from what cause. This particular
group of assistants was in charge of the “Cohorts” program, and not vital
statistics, so they didn’t know, for sure, all of the causes of death. I am not sure what the “Cohorts” program
does, but, man, doesn’t it sound cool!
(sort of villainous in a cooperative, chummy kind of way) I’ll find out from Kim later what they do.
It was difficult to get an idea of how many children they were talking
about. There are about seven sectors,
and most of them had zero or one deaths (though one of them said three deaths),
but I am not certain of the size of the populations or the length of time under
discussion. I think it might have been
about five hundred per sector and over the last half year. But I have no idea what this means
really. How many children dying over a
period time given a size of population is the “right” amount? And how many is “too many”? I don’t know. I’m willing to guess that this is an area where children die far
too frequently for a variety of reasons.
We were looking at some general statistics that someone left on the wall
of the guesthouse room and they say that the life expectancy of the average
Kenyan is 40 years, but that statistic is weighted heavily by the infant
mortality rate. It doesn’t mean that
you can expect to live 40 years. Once
you make it past being a kid here, you’re pretty tough.
They moved on to more administrative matters, and, quite honestly, my
attention began to wander a bit.
Fortunately, Feiko had been very thoughtful and provided me an
opportunity to escape the meeting and go on a tour of the village with one of
the men that works as a “Quality Controller” (another separate job hierarchy,
on the same level as supervisor, I think.)
His Christian name is Henry (I don’t remember his family name,
unfortunately.) He took me on the tour
of Asembo Bay. We walked through the
center of the village and up to the place where he was staying. He told me that he had another home ten
kilometers away, but he was staying in a little place in town so he could be
close to work. We went inside and all
of the kids from the neighborhood came through to get a look at a Mzungu. He brought me some raw maize to eat. Which turned out to be not bad, but very
dry. He offered me some water, and I
almost drank some before I realized where it was probably coming from, Lake
Victoria, home of several unfriendly organisms. Fortunately, I had brought some water with me so I was able to
make it through most of a cob of maize (I split some of it with the kids.) We talked for some time in his home, and
then headed out for the rest of the tour.
As I mentioned earlier on, I am more than a little paranoid about
taking pictures of people here. It just
doesn’t feel right to me. You could eat
like a king for a month on the cost of the camera. It also feels rude to record people in an unflattering light as
an outsider. These are problems I’ll
probably work through at some point.
Because I knew that we would be driving a long way out, I thought that I
should bring my camera to take pictures of the landscape at the very
least. Since I had it with me, I
thought I should ask Henry if it was O.K. to take pictures in the village or of
him. I could not believe how excited he
was! He was actually a little bit upset
with me that I hadn’t mentioned it earlier so we could take pictures of his
house. We went back to his house and he
and his two sons went in to a back room for at least ten minutes while I stood
around. It took me a little while to
figure it out, but I finally understood that they had gone back to change into
their nice clothes for the picture.
Here’s the first picture: Henry and Kids Inside
And here’s the second: Henry and Kids Outside
This was the first real Kenyan home that I had been in and I’m not sure
how to begin. Fortunately, I have a
picture here as a starting point. It
was tiny. The room we were sitting in,
the turquoise one, was clearly the largest room in the place (if you look you
can see the water I almost foolishly drank on the table.) And it was hot, really hot. It had a corrugated metal roof, which is a
sign of some amount of wealth in a village.
It was a little oven, cramped and with a dirt floor. Although this was a sunny day, and
definitely on the hot side, I’m sure that it gets much hotter here. I can’t imagine what it would be like living
here then, after ten minutes I was dripping sweat. If you look, you’ll see that one of the little boys is wearing a
sweatshirt and sweatpants. I guess you
must acclimate.
We continued on our circuit of the village, walking down towards the
lake. We tried to go into a compound
where they refine gold that is mined a little ways up in the hills, according
to Henry. The guard wouldn’t let us in,
as we didn’t have permission and the fact that I was on a tour of the village
didn’t sufficiently convince him to bend the rules. I think that Henry was fairly certain that my white skin would be
all that we needed to get into the complex.
As if white people don’t steal gold…
We made it down to the lake’s shore.
Here’s a picture of the woman going through the nets of the fishermen: Fishing Nets
I’m not sure how well it will come out but the white stuff is netting
and the thousands of little tiny silver things on the net are fish. Also not visible, but present, are flocks of
birds hovering above waiting for the people to get out of the way so they can
eat the fish. Henry was quite happy showing
me around. I had the impression he was
showing me off a little bit.
We went down by the fishing boats where we took another picture of him
and the kids that turned out pretty well: Henry & the Kids on
Fishing Boat
While we were by the shore there were quite a few kids around. All of them yelling, “Mzungu, Mzungu!” I’m sure that I‘ve mentioned this before,
but since it happened so much here and in a slightly different manner, I think
it’s worth revisiting.
“Mzungu” means white person.
That’s it, I think. I haven’t
detected any connotations to the word that mean anything else. When I lived in Japan we were called “Gaijin”
which can translate to “Barbarian.”
There were definitely times when you could feel that connotation being
applied. In Kenya the kids just get
excited to see a white person. The kids
in Kisumu are a little more used to it, but the kids in the villages just about
lose it.
“Mzungu! Mzungu! How are you?”
They yell over and over again.
Amongst the newbie Mzungu population it is a favorite conversation topic
and everyone talks about how sick of it they are. I don’t mind it so much.
The kids are just excited, and, for the most part, are quite
friendly. The kids by the lakeshore were
beside themselves with Mzungu-generated excitement. I should come up with a little routine or something, because I
think they get disappointed when nothing spectacular happens.
Also on the lakeshore we stopped at a pier and took another picture of Henry and the Boys on
the Pier and also one of Henry and the Boys and
Luo Women who were Getting Water.
He said that one of the women (girls, really) was one of his wives. I think he was kidding, but…who knows.
While coming back to the field office from the pier a man, probably in
his early twenties, started following us.
Henry introduced us, and told me his name was translated as “night’
because he was born at night. We shook
hands, Africans are big on shaking hands, and I thought he would go about his
business as we headed back. Instead he
followed us. He followed us really
closely. I kept running over him,
bumping in to him and stepping on his feet.
The first couple of times it happened I apologized, after that I started
to worry.
(Did I mention that Luo men are short?
I’m not that tall, 5’9”, but I feel like one of the tallest people in a
crowd when I walk around. I can’t wait
to find a basketball game!)
But this kid, “Night,” was taller and clearly stronger than me. I wasn’t sure if he was going to mug me or
kiss me or just beat me up. We walked
some distance this way, him walking as closely as possible to me, and me trying
to ignore him politely while making conversation with Henry. I kind of figured, in some way, that Henry
wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me, but still… It wasn’t until we were back at the field station that he
disengaged from my left hip.
The meeting had ended and all of the benches and chairs had been moved
right up against the wall to take advantage of the tiny sliver of shade still
remaining. In the sun it was quite
hot. I sat down with Kim and Feiko, and
joined them in the afternoon tea they were having. I know it’s supposed to help, but hot tea in the middle of a hot
afternoon makes no sense to me. Even
though I was in the shade and finally sitting still for a little while, I burst
into a new round of profuse sweating after the third sip. Kim and I talked about her meeting and
Henry’s tour, for a while. I then
noticed that that guy, Night, was sitting on the doorstep ten feet away from
us, just staring at me. No expression
on his face, just staring. I continued
talking to Kim, keeping her head between him and me, but I could still sense
him staring at me. I started to get
more than a little freaked out.
We sat like that for a little while and, when Feiko had finished up, we
got in the truck to leave. I was
sitting in the front passenger seat with the window open. As the driver was getting in and getting
situated, Night came up to the truck and looked at me from not a foot
away. I tried to be friendly and say
good-bye. I even shook his hand, but he
just stood and stared at me, his head inside the window, with me shrinking as
far away as possible. Finally, some of
the guys from the station pulled him away.
It was a good thing that he cooperated and just somberly backed away
with the same mostly blank expression on his face, because he looked like he
could have put up a helluva fight.
The rest of the way back was fairly uneventful. We did blow right through a couple of police
checkpoints. The police set up
roadblocks and search and “fine” Matatus and public transportation as they
enter and leave town. They set up those
tire spikes and stand by the side of the road with guns. A little bit scary, but Mzungus are
apparently exempt.