That Darn Cat

After spending two days taking samples in the field, I was excited to start looking at some of them in the lab. There is no fieldwork on Fridays in Busia, so this was a good opportunity to get started. I was assigned to work with George, who gave me the exciting task of weighing poop. Samson, an Animal Health Assistant in training, showed me how to do it and then watched over my shoulder until George gave him something else to do. Then I got to add water to my poop, put it in a fancy machine to mash it up, and wash it through a variety of sieves. Just when I was getting the hang of it we were told we had to stop our work and go to a very important training.

Ephy, the health and safety director at ILRI who I knew only too well, had flown in for two days of training. Two days! Not only was I going to miss my day in the lab, but I was going to have to sit through animal handling safely on Saturday! Friday's session was a first aid "review", taught by the thinnest man I have ever seen from Saint someone or other's first aid training company. His first powerpoint slide took 45 minutes to cover. I wanted to die.

I quickly learned that the Kenyan way of teaching is just to say the same thing in as many different or repeated ways as you possibly can, and this guy was really good at it. He was doing his best, but I couldn't help cringe when he explained that the point of a Heimlich manoeuvre was to dislodge something in the esophagus, and that you should always try to help wounded people, but if you were at risk for losing your job you could excuse yourself. His scenarios were not helpful in the least for practicing first aid skills but they were interesting peeks into some recent (and true) Kenyan tragedies. The first was about how a fuel truck had broke down on the road and then exploded after hundreds of people had surrounded it trying to syphon fuel (we were asked what we would have done when we saw the truck break down). The second was about an electric fire at a supermarket where the guards locked everyone inside to prevent people from shoplifting (I don't remember what we were asked about this situation). The value of these discussions came in the form of a sobering warning that people in this country could act totally irrationally in high risk situations, and that if you ever suspected that something was off, even in a very public place, you should just get the hell out of there.

After spending hours on important topics like how to count to 30 wile giving CPR (i.e. how to keep yourself busy when someone is dead), how to stabilize and transport a spinal injury in the field (HA!), and how an AED works (even though there isn't a single one in the town of Busia), we spent the last half hour on relevant topics, like snake bites. But what could have been a helpful discussion quickly turned into a rather heated argument over which traditional treatments (from sicking venom, to tourniquets, to slicing the limb open lengthwise) were valid and who believed in snakes that could rot your flesh instantly, and do whatever you want but when I get bit by a snake I am slicing my own leg open! We were supposed to stop at 4, so around 4:50 the training finally wrapped up.

While we were waiting to go home, I told Jon to take a picture of me while I pretended to ride the parked motorbike. Philip saw me doing this and offered to give me a lesson. Really? So for the next 10 minutes he ran behind me as I jolted from one end of the yard to the other, somehow managing to stay upright but completely unable to turn. It was fun but I think I'll stick to riding behind someone else.

That night Ephy joined us for dinner. The power went out as usual so I helped Charles find some candles for the table. It was nice to spend time with Ephy out of the health and safety context. I found myself liking her more and more, especially when she became the only Kenyan I have ever met who took a cat to the vet. She didn't want to. She doesn't even like cats. But her husband and kids keep two in the house and one night Happy got sick so they insisted she be brought to the vet. She ended up staying there for 6 days, and although Ephy refused to go with them when they brought her in, she was guilted into visiting the cat with her children over the next week. The bill came out to 6,000 KSH ($75) and although Ephy had to admit to her mother that they took their cat to the vet, she still hasn't told her how much it cost. Shaking her head with an expression shared in all cultures, Ephy explained how kids will make you do the darnedest things.