Another Busia Day

Today is the half way point of my trip. And I am a week behind in my blog. Oh no! At the risk of spoiling the surprise, I will jump ahead and tell you that upon returning to work here in the lab at ILRI, nothing exciting what so ever has happened to me. So now I am caught up with this week, but it's time to finish last week...

Thursday morning I found myself in a truck with Edwin and Milton. I had been warned about Milton's driving, but I'm not sure anything could have prepared me for the real live experience. Everything in his path fled. Children ran into corn fields, terror on their faces, and animals sprinting to the ends of their tethers and were violently flipped back to the reality of their confinement. Edwin was so used to it that he simply leaned his head back and slept, and I cranked down on my seat belt and listened to the blaring radio.

The topic that morning was bad husbands. Does your husband provide for you the way he should? Financially, physically, emotionally? Or does he waste his time sitting and watching TV while you cook and clean? Gender roles in Kenyan society are depressingly traditional, and I had gotten my first idea of this while sitting under a bush with Philip and Steven the day before. They had just found out that I was married, and were asking me what Andy does. I told them he was back in Ithaca working, and the familiar pang of guilt prompted me to explain that while he was supporting me now, as soon as I graduated I would take over and he could do whatever he wanted. "Ah, that makes a lot of sense" said Steven, "but that would never happen here". I then learned that even if a Kenyan woman makes tons of money, she has no obligation to spend it on her immediate family. She can save it, or support her parents, or buy clothes, and might occasionally help with food expenses, but the man is responsible for providing for his family. "If a girl has no money, you run the other way. Only rich kids and professors date girls in college. You have to pay for EVERYTHING, even her phone and phone credit if you want to talk to her." As it turned out, both of these guys had families of their own that lived at least 2 hours away. They only saw them on the weekends, and otherwise worked in Busia, making money to send their kids to school.

The first calf we visited was a year old that day. It was his final visit for the study, and as a happy birthday present we poked and prodded him even more than usual. There was also a really cute dog that looked like an overgrown corgi and happily snoozed in the dirt while 50 or so chickens scratched all around him. I asked the farmer if I could send him my dogs to be trained.

For those of you who care, I will now go into some nerdy vet related detail that would make Dr. Bowman proud. Cool things I saw included:

1. Rhipicephalus appendiculatus aka the brown ear tick: the vector for east coast fever (my disease!)
   
2. Amblyoma something or other with very ornate scutums (scuta?)
   
3. Rhipicephalus evertsi which looks just like the brown ear tick but has red legs
   
4. Thelazia eye worms!!! Remember that disgusting movie we had to watch in parasitology?
   
5. Taking ventral midline skin biopsies to test for oncocerca
6. Aspirates of totally swollen pre-scapular and sub-iliac lymph nodes (about lemon size, and this calf was not large)

I have pictures of everything but the Thelazia (although I'm sure Bowam would lend me that video), so if you want to see them come to my presentation in the fall. I also learned some interesting things about the local breed (African Zebu) and husbandry practices. They all have these huge flaps of skin around their umbilicus, which can enlarge for a number of reasons (imminent parturition, hernia, edema, snake bite). They don't seem to impart any advantage that I can think of, but apparently farmers think cows with large dewlaps (extra skin under their neck) and umbilical flaps make good mothers, so they are actually selected for. But it's hard to be a good mother when you are only allowed to suckle your calf on a restricted basis. These cows only give 0.5 -1.0 liters of milk at each milking, and are typically milked twice a day. That isn't even enough to feed a holstein dairy calf. But these calves don't get nearly that much. They are allowed to suckle briefly before milking, to stimulate milk letdown, but then the farmer takes as much as he can before the calf is allowed the dregs. I'm not sure how they live on so little, and it's no wonder they are barely the size of holstein yearlings when they are full grown.

We visited 5 calves that day, and between my impressive temperature taking skills and Milton's driving we were back by 1:45pm. I finished the day off with a breathless sprint behind Sam, Jon, and Amy. Their pace was much faster than what I am used to, but I had to keep up for fear of not being able to find my way back. At one point we were joined by a group of kids who somehow knew we would be coming and delighted in sprinting past me over and over again, while women gave me pitiful looks and told each other how glad they were not to be running.

Then we piled in the car and drove home. The driveway was blocked by a rope going across, about 2 feet off the ground. Amy was quick enough to gather there was some sort of animal on one end of it, hidden in the grass, and in response she slowly pulled the car up and drove over it. The cow, 18 inches from the car, didn't even pick her head up.