03. The First Few Days

 

My flight to Kenya was pretty uneventful. It was an overnight flight, and since the leg-room was much better on the Kenyan Airways jet, I was able to get a decent amount of sleep, though I was still very tired from the sheer length of the trip.

 

Nairobi from the air.

 I decided to wait around the Nairobi airport for most of the morning and early afternoon to catch my flight up to Eldoret. In the morning I found a small café-restaurant and had a nice meal of pancakes and an omelet. After breakfast, I was really tired and went to the domestic terminal to wait. I tried to read, but kept nodding off. Finally, we were loaded onto the small jet, and took the 31minute flight to Eldoret. It turned out that there were some storms in the area which forced the plane to circle the Eldoret airport several times, then go in for a somewhat bumpy landing. I met up with the taxi driver who was waiting for me, and was driven on a 30 minute drive to the Indiana University House (or IU House). 

IU House compound (you can see the security gate)

IU House (looking the other way)

This is a walled compound of 6 buildings that house the various students and doctors who come to work at the Moi Hospital. One of the houses has a large kitchen/dining hall built into the first floor, which acts as the community eating space. 

IU House Dining Hall

Breakfasts are self-serve – with cereals, bananas, oatmeal, and tea being provided. During the week the IU House kitchen staff prepares lunches and dinners. These are almost always simple fare, vegetables in a simple sauce or broth, potato and/or rice, and a pulse. These are usually served with chapatti (much of the local cuisine is influenced by Indian cuisine, as there are a large number of Indian immigrants living in Kenya).

I was met by Katherine Macdonald, a pediatrician from Indiana University, who is a long-term resident here in Kenya. She set me up in my room, and explained some of the procedures of IU House. 

My room at IU House

I found out that I would not be starting on Monday, as it was the day after Easter Sunday, which is also considered a holiday by the Kenyans. After getting myself settled in, I was invited to dinner by Joe Mamlin, one of the founders of the IU-Kenya program. Dr. Mamlin is a man of 80, but moves and acts like a man of 60. He is bright, extremely energetic, and clearly loves his role in Kenya. He continues to work to expand the role of the IU program through the AMPATH model. His wife, Sarah Ellen, a pediatrician, is in charge of the the pediatric child-life center at Moi Hospital.

AMPATH originally started as an initiative to combat the spread of HIV, TB, and other infectious diseases. It was designed as a long-term partnership between North American Universities and the Kenyan health ministry, as well as the Moi Hospital. They started the exchange of medical students and residents in 1998, right around the time that the Moi Hospital was starting its local medical education program. As the program grew, the founders realized that simply working on infectious diseases was not enough, for the people here are also plagued by the same diseases in the developed world – diabetes is growing, heart disease is a huge problem. And furthermore, while the program had started as an exchange with a large teaching hospital, they realized that many of the diseases they were seeing were preventable through better primary care. One of Dr. Mamlin’s current projects, therefore, is to grow the capacity of the outlying clinics in small towns. The plan is to work with them, incorporating the equivalent of Family Medicine into the medical system, and hopefully better managing chronic problems, as well as heading off the more serious complications of poor health before they reach a critical point.

The dinner was yummy. It was at the one local Chinese restaurant. The owner knew the Mamlins from way back, and always refuses to allow him to pay. He fed us many dishes of fairly excellent Chinese food, including one that was especially yummy – cashews dipped in a tangy sauce. At the dinner were also Gino, a Indian-Kenyan entomologist who teaches at Harvard, Princeton, and Stony Brook. He is really an all-around naturalist who knows birds, and other wildlife. He also has worked with the Leakey family on their paleo-anthropological digs in the Rift Valley, both in Kenya and Ethiopia. We also met Catherine Ngarachu, a Kenyan woman who founded a local wildlife conservation group, and ran it almost single-handedly for years up until recently. She knew the local birds well. And it was decided that on Monday morning the group of us would take a birding trip out to a farm near Eldoret owned by friends of the Mamlins. Yes! After dinner I was really beat, and quickly went to bed.

The next morning I was awakened to the sounds of multiple loudspeakers blaring out what sounded like the cross between competing auctioneers and cacophonous chants. Not yet having my ears attuned to Swahili, I at first thought it might be the Mulsim call to prayer, until I remembered it was Easter Sunday and I thought I could make out one word being chanted over and over again, something like “Wayboo.” But maybe it was “Jesu.” Asking about it later, I found out that the local evangelical churches generally try to outcompete each other’s volume during the services on the holy days. After listening for a while, I got up and spent the morning catching up on Internet and exploring the IU House a little bit. 

Izzy

My friend Izzy, who was finishing up an Emergency Medicine course at Moi Hospital, met me at around noon and we immediately walked up to The Boma Inn – a fancy hotel near the IU House that has a small gym and offers monthly membership. I joined, and so I’m gonna be able to stay strong during my month here! Izzy, who had lived in the student hostel, also said that she regularly used the Boma gym to shower, since they have really nice ones, and the hostel does not. 

 

The street just outside of IU House compound