Work and Play

As usual, play is more interesting than work, but here is the update.

About a week and a half ago the other students and I moved from Eldoret - a modestly sized city with a large referral hospital - to Webuye - a rather unimpressive town with a district hospital. The referral hospital in Eldoret is used to having students. The district hospital in Webuye, on the other hand, is not. The hospital does have a Family Medicine Residency program, which is affiliated with Moi Referral Hospital, and run by some American family docs, but that didn't end up meaning that they had any idea what to do with 5 visiting medical students. We decided to focus our time on work for the research projects that we are required to do as part of the rotation. Two of the guys are doing a survey on pain prevalence and pain control, while the two other guys and I decided to do a survey on GI disease (diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain) and health, sanitation and hygiene education and practices (like latrine use, hand washing, ORS use, water treatment). So essentially we've spent all our time here filling out surveys. It hasn't been very interesting. I won't tell you any more about it.

What HAVE been interesting are our weekend adventures!

The weekend before last we decided to go on a little PikiPiki adventure. PikiPiki is the swahili word for motorcycle. Given the size of motorcycle engines here, it turns out to be a quite pleasing and appropriately onomatopoeic term. Trey - one of the other med students and our local motorcycle enthusiast - fomented enough excitement to get quite a little posse together. The plan was to head to the Kerio Valley -- about 60km away -- and head down into it (another 60km) to a secluded national park (down a 25km sometimes passable dirt track) reknown for birding and crocodiles. We rented four motorcycles at a cost of about 9 dollars per bike per day. Trey and I were both riding. I also had one of my new Kenyan intern friends as a passenger. Naomi, our Moi University med student liaison, jumped at the opportunity to learn to ride, and after only 2 short lessons from Trey and I during the week, was adamant about joining us. Phil, another visiting med student and novice cyclist was going to join us, but thought better of such an adventure given his experience, and opted to hop in a car with the other guys and meet us there. This, it turns out, was a fairly wise decision.

It's not that there were any MAJOR injuries. It's just that, as spectacularly curvaceous and entertaining as the descent into the valley was for we rather more experienced riders, it turned out to be a little too much for Naomi, who at some point got a bit nervous, hit a turn too fast, mistook the clutch for the break and drove off the road into some rocks. And some thorn bushes. She escaped with some scrapes and bruises and only one huge thorn in her side. Her bike wasn't completely nonfunctional afterwards, but it wasn't exactly in peak condition, having lost a mirror, the front brakes, the headlamp, any semblance of alignment and the rightwards range of motion of the front wheel. I tried calling AAA, but it turns out we were in rural East Africa. We bent the bike into shape sufficiently to drive it to the nearest town, where a mechanic charged about 8 dollars to fix everything. The alignment was still a bit busted, but it was far more ridable. With daylight remaining, we still made an attempt to make it to the park, down what turned out to be an alternatingly insanely rocky and uselessly silty road. Naomi opted for the car for this portion.

Despite our valiant efforts, we never made it. Daylight was failing and we didn't want to brave Kenyan roads at night, so we turned around. Impressively, Naomi got bored in the car, and decided to ride again. While this seemed reasonable at the time, it turned out poorly, as she became increasingly frustrated and despondent as her motorcycle troubles continued, and the stress of heading back up the valley wall turned out to be too much. We ended up having to stop in a town called Iten on the valley edge and hire someone to drive her bike back to Eldoret, while she got a ride in a car. This took an unfortunate amount of time to arrange, and by the time Trey and I eventually arrived back in Eldoret we were sufficiently tired, dusty, and freezing from the night ride home to know that it was a good day.

This past weekend was arguably more exciting, and it was even motorcycle accident free! This past weekend we went to Uganda. Webuye is only about 70km from the Ugandan border, and it's only about a half day's trip to Jinja -- the burgeoning Adrenaline-Sport capital of east Africa (per lonely planet). Jinja is a nice little southern Ugandan city on Lake Victoria at the mouth of the Nile. At this point it's the Victoria Nile (it becomes the White Nile somewhere in Northern Uganda, and the Blue Nile comes from Ethiopia, I believe), and it boasts some of the worlds best class 5 rapids.

Rafting Ensued.

What can I say? It was awesome! And we only seriously thought we were going to die once. Luckily there is DVD video of it. Our boat's colossal crash made the highlights real in slow motion, though the clip doesn't continue to the point where I resurface somewhere downstream, having gotten trapped under water between our river-guide's legs somehow and having failed miserably at my attempt to breathe Nile water.

My advice to future rafters -- take a deep breathe BEFORE the raft flips over. Then just enjoy the ride. Also -- apply copious sunblock to the legs. While I have learned that I am incapable of achieving other than a Lobster Tan, and apply lotion as such, one of my compatriots neglected to protect his legs, and ended up essentially bed-bound for 2 days, with a burn so painful he could not bend his knees.

There was also Bungee jumping. Despite my father's email pleas to reconsider, I bungeed. Sorry Dad. I can't think of a lot of spots more ideal than this alcove of the Nile, with monkeys playing along the steep banks, and the sun setting over the western bluff, to stupidly thrown myself off a cliff with rubber bands tied to my ankles. When you get up to the edge they say don't look down. For me, the looking down wasn't a problem -- I've never had much of an issue with heights. I think they should have said -- Don't Think. Becuase if you think, you'll realize that you're about to do something incredibly foolish, and if you let rationality take over, you're just not going to have any fun!

I bungeed 3 times. The second time is half price and the third time is free. How can you resist! The first time I went for the straight down, full submersion dive, hitting the water up to about my thighs. The second time I went for distance -- if you jump out you don't get as much water, but the rebound is real real fun. The third time I went for something they called a Harness Jump, but I think should have been called the Leap of Faith. Basically rather than being tethered at the ankles, you wear a harness with an attachment at the chest. Then, instead of a dive, you just run off the edge as fast as you can. Basically, all techniques are awesome. The only style I didn't try was backwards. They say it's the scariest way to bungee. It was tempting, but you gotta save something for your second time, right...?