On the Road, Once Again

Dear all,

Today I depart for my month long study on health in Coastal Kenya. I got back from my Educational Tour in Uganda and Rwanda Monday evening, and there are plenty of pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/10290870@N06/?saved=1 or at the side of the blog. They’re also on facebook. This week I have spent doing readings in preparation Independent Study Project (ISP) and writing a very interesting but taxing paper on how development influences public health and how public health influences development. The moral of my paper, I suppose, is that they are inextricably linked. Without adequate development, there can be no access to proper healthcare. Diseases such as cholera and schistosomiasis spring up without proper sanitation and potable water access. Without proper education for everyone, including girls, extreme health issues arise. Similarly, without proper health care, development couldn’t possibly occur in large part because people are too sick to get out of bed. As one of our lecturers, Professor Frank Nabwiso, PhD (a really cool man who helped with the downfall of Idi Amin and also served in parliament for five years), said, ““if the stomach doesn’t have enough food, the brain cannot work.” Similarly, if the body doesn’t have the basics of life, no kind of development can continue.

Anyways, the Uganda/Rwanda trip was absolutely incredible. We spent a gillion hours in a tiny van driving back and forth across Uganda, which was actually pretty fantastic because I managed to read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Speaking of, I highly recommend the book. Not only is it beautifully written, entertaining and enlightening, it may also give you all a good idea of what the next month will be like for me. The book is about a family of missionaries that travel to the Congo in 1959, right before independence. The village they live in has a lot of similarities to Shirazi and has a similar feel. Fantastic book.

So, I few of my biggest highlights of the trip: we stayed one night in Sipi Falls, Uganda and did the most epic hike ever. If you look at the pictures on flickr of waterfalls and rainbows, this is the one I’m talking about. It pours every day in Uganda, and it poured right before we left for this hike so we spent the entire time slipping up and down the side of a mountain. We got really sweet bamboo walking sticks, which I actually stole to bring back to America, assuming customs doesn’t mind. We hiked to the base of two separate waterfalls and stood under them, getting completely drenched. Oddly enough, I can’t think of any time I’ve felt as powerful as I did when I stood underneath that much water, pouring onto my head. It’s just such a rush. Don’t worry though, we didn’t go directly underneath, and nobody was hurt in the process. The hotel that evening was also my favorite, and you can see the amazing view in a lot of my pictures, as well as the incredible swing that made you feel like you were flying and the huge hill where we watched the sunrise and sunset with an amazing 360 degree view. For all of your viewing pleasure, I videotaped the view, which should be the first image on the flickr site.

Another really amazing experience was seeing the Nile River. I remember flying over it on my way here and being absolutely amazed that I was going to someplace I had only read about in my history books and seen in National Geographic, but that day I stood there where the White Nile begins, where it intersects with Lake Victoria. The Nile was pretty green and really did seem grand enough to be the basis of life in Ancient Egypt. I tried to imagine myself at that point thousands of years ago, and it ended up feeling pretty much the same except minus all the vendors trying to sell to tourists and the giant monument saying that some of Ghandi’s ashes has been scattered there.

Those were my biggest highlights from Uganda. We did a lot of educational stuff too, which was good because it was primarily development. It managed to fill in a lot of my gaps of knowledge, since I’ve been so focused on health this semester. Both Uganda and Rwanda are gorgeous countries, far greener than Kenya. I found the biggest difference in the two countries in terms of scenery is that Uganda is more uninhibited green, whereas in Rwanda every single inch of land is agriculture, growing coffee or tee or bananas. We actually only spend 24 hours in Rwanda, but we had enough time to visit the Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali, the capital, and talk to the second in command of the Peace Corps in Rwanda, which just returned in the last few years after the genocide.

My emotional and academic highlight of the trip was in Rwanda. The day we arrived we visited a church that had been a major genocide site, where Tutsis had been hiding from the Hutus so when the Hutus arrived they murdered 6,000 people. Most incredibly, our tour guide was one of the six survivors from the massacre there. This young man of only 24 years solemnly walked us over to a little hole in the wall that had been his hiding place. He explained that his brother had put his head on the hole, covered him with blood, and told him to stay still. His brother went to check on another child and never returned. The boy did not move for two days, and after two days he adjusted his position slightly for another day. After that he and 15 others who had survived fled to a sewer, where they hid for many more days. Only six made it out of there. The government had asked him to come share his story, and he said some days telling the story brought him to tears and other days he was just telling somebody else’s story. He took us through the church memorial, which held hundreds of skulls and bones that had been found at the church. Walking through the tiny corridor surrounded by the skulls of people who had been brutally murdered just fifteen years before was a chilling experience I will never forget.

So I leave today back for Shirazi. The more I read the more I get interested in ideas of disease causation and mother’s medicine, the healthcare done at home and passed down through generations. I’m really excited and mildly terrified to get started, but I know it will work out in the end. There’s no Internet there, but I should be going to Mombasa on weekends and will check email there. I promise to post!

Missing you all,
Alix