Arriving in Busia

On Tuesday morning my alarm finally went off at 4:40am. I had gotten up to check it at least 4 times before that. The taxi driver rang the doorbell at 4:55 as I was scarfing down yogurt so that I could take my antimalarial pill. He had been driving all night and we were his last customers of the shift. With no traffic we sped down the dark quiet roads to the hotel where the other students were waiting. They are both vet students at Edinburgh University in Scotland. Jon is 22 and from Singapore, and Eleonore is 26 and from France/Western Canada. We got to the airport in plenty of time, and after getting to the front of the only line there, we were told our flight was not yet open for check in. There were no seats, no newspapers, and not even a vending machine.

Eventually we watched the sun rise over a cup of coffee and some bananas. When we were let out onto the tarmac, it seemed like we could simply board any of the 6 or 7 planes out there. We briefly considered a quick trip to Zanzibar as we waited in line to climb up the steep steps. After all that waiting our flight to Kisumu was barely long enough to drink some juice and throw the cup away. We flew in low over the Eastern edge of Lake Victoria and were on the ground by 8am. Eleonore asked if she could swim in the lake (?!). We picked up the luggage without setting a foot inside and found our driver, Mike.

Unable to find any bathroom facilities at the airport, and feeling there were too many people to go behind a tree, Eleonore and I begged Mike to take us to a bathroom before the 2 hour ride to Busia commenced. He drove us downtown to a little restaurant, spoke to a person inside, and led us through the dining area and kitchen, into a cement courtyard outback. We took turns holding the door of the dark musty shack and exited the restaurant considerably happier. Then back through town, past hundred of people on bicycles, and onto the only road going West.

Mike had an old tape of a band called Michael Learns to Rock, or MLTR (ironically enough). I would not have known this except some of the lyrics have since been burned into my brain and I was just able to google them. If any of you are not familiar with this musical genius, please, enlighten yourselves! So, MLTR smoothly serenaded us as we wound through the countryside. Over and over again. At one point the sound became completely warped but it played on. The ride was easy enough except when the road ceased to exist for 5 foot stretches here and there and we had to slam on the brakes and either drive through the ditches or around them. We passed small houses, fields of corn and sorghum, women with barrels of water on their heads, men on bicycles, boys leading cows, the occasional truck, and a small town every 40 minutes or so. Jon and Eleonore took a nap but I was determined to stay awake and see everything. When it seemed we could take MLTR no longer, Jon saw a man with sugar cane on the back of his bike, and told Mike to pull over. The man was happy to sell a piece of his crop, so the three of them wrestled a 6 foot cane out of the bundle (under the supervision of a nearby policeman), and broke it up so it could fit in the back of the car. The next small town we came to was Busia.

We were taken to the ILRI office which is a back building among all the other local government buildings of Busia. Past the birth and death office, the guards with machine guns, and goats. We unloaded our things, met a thousand people face to face with a handshake, then loaded everything back into one of the huge range rover things and went back up the road to the house. Upon opening the gate, we were welcomed by two turkeys, a goat, and Charles the young man who cooked and took care of the house. Sam, the Kenyan vet and PhD student who lived there asked Eleonore and I if we were friends. Yes? We had just met the day before. Good, because you will be sharing a room. We soon found out that meant sharing a bed as well, but neither of us felt like staying alone at a hotel so we decided it was fine.

Sam then explained that there were 3 teams that went into the field every day. A group also stayed in the lab to process samples. Occasionally a field team was called out for clinical episodes when a cow got sick or post mortem (PM) exams. On the weekends I asked? No said Sam, cows don't have clinical episodes on Saturdays. Hah! When we got back to the office, the only thing left to do that day was a PM on a pig. I still have no idea why we had to do this, or why it took 4 vets and 4 vet students to complete, but we all piled into the car and set out to find the dead pig. There were actually 3 dead piglets and one that had been mistaken for dead already and was nearly there. The dead pig we cut open looked normal enough except for some lung worms (not normal but also probably not the cause of death) and I still have no idea what our conclusion was. We students suggested euthanizing the almost dead piglet, but the men had not brought any drugs with them and though it inhumane to do it any other way.

Then Sam took us out to lunch at a restaurant across the street from the office and we had whole fried talapia from Lake Victoria (which incidentally belongs to Egypt since it is the source of the Nile) and ugali (the traditional cornflour and water mixture). We were informed that this was a luxury since there would be no lunch on the days we were in the field. Back at the house Eleonore had a lengthy and loud conversation with the goat and Jon and I decided to go for a run. It was then I learned, repeatedly, that the Swahili word for white person is mazungu. I didn't mind when excited children called to us, but it was less endearing when men yelled it somewhat aggressively as we ran by. It was dusk when we turned off the main road on the way back home and we realized we had no idea which dirt road/driveway to turn down. We tried a few, passed many humorless faces, until a boy finally showed us a path through some back yards to the mazungu house. There was no doubt everyone knew exactly where we lived.

That night I helped Charles make fish and ugali and we all ate together at the table. Besides Sam, Amy also lives at the house. She is a young vet from the UK who is about to start her PhD in Busia. We took refreshingly cold showers under a trickle of water, said goodnight to Sam watching the news, and crawled into bed under our mosquito nets.