St. Joseph's Hospital

I took my second trip in a week to Migori. The purpose of this trip was quite different from the last, though; this time we headed straight for the hospital. Amy and Marta came with us in the car, and we dropped them off at Barclays. The ride was as bumpy as always but riding shotgun made it that much better.

The hospital, Saint Joseph’s, is Catholic-affiliated. It comprises of several one-story buildings, with separate quarters for the reception, pharmacies, patients’ wards and laboratories. The area in between the buildings is spacious and open, and full of greenery. Thankfully, too; it would have been very claustrophobic otherwise, and I was glad that I could get some fresh air.

By the standards of a US hospital, Saint Joseph’s is poorly equipped. Given that I had just come out of Muhuru Bay, however, it was something of a shock to see the mercury sphygmomanometer and digital thermometers that the nurses were handling. After waiting in one of the open ‘rooms’ with a couple of other patients who were coughing rather disturbingly hard (TB?), we were admitted into the office, and the clinician had a proper computer with a database system. Albeit one that didn’t have the test he wanted me to take at the lab. We took the handwritten sheet down to the lab, where we were again told to wait.

This wait lasted a good hour and more. It turned out that they'd run out of some of the equipment they needed for my throat swab, so they had to go out to buy it. After the third time Abigail asked them about it, they finally let us into the tiny lab room—thank goodness both of us are small. Then the assistant disappeared without an explanation, so—of course—we had to wait, yet again. It turned out that they'd realised that they didn’t have the wooden stick either, so he had to go and get some from goodness knows where—after it was already our turn to take the test. Why they couldn't have prepared beforehand, I don’t know.

The lab assistant was not great with the swab, when it came. He kept telling me to “relax your tongue” whilst sticking a sharp rod with one end wrapped in a bit of suspiciously brown cotton wool down my throat. I wanted to yell at him, but of course I couldn't. Eventually I somehow managed to stop myself from gagging for long enough for him to put the swab in deep down, and then we were out of there as fast as I could persuade Abigail to go. She really is such a sport.

We came back forty-five minutes later (with me in a much better mood, having bought four very choice mangos) and were pleasantly surprised to learn that the test results were already out. It was strep-positive. I guess at that point it wasn’t really surprising anymore, because I knew it wasn’t just a normal sore throat, and to be honest I was glad to see that I hadn’t been making a fuss about nothing. We went back to the clinician (another brief wait), got the prescription, went to pay for the medication (another long wait), and then finally, finally went to the pharmacy section for the drugs (yet another wait). I’d been prescribed two antibiotics because the original one the clinician had wanted to use was out of stock, as well as an antihistamine. The worst of the strep was  already over and I probably would have gotten better on my own without taking the meds, but I wasn’t about to waste all that waiting!

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I hadn’t been planning on running today, but after we got back I felt so stiff and antsy that I decided to go for a short one, not pushing myself, after all. Thank goodness I did. It was probably the best run I’d had in a long, long time, despite the strep throat. The weather was cloudy and it was getting late, so it was relatively cool, and it wasn’t painful apart from a tingling in my throat. I felt so much better afterwards as well. That was when I knew that I would be recovered soon; I could run again, so everything was fine.

Migori, Take Two

Four of the WISERBridge people (Adria, Elizabeth, Frank and I) took George’s car to Migori today. Since we didn’t have as many people squashed in the back seat this time, the trip was much more pleasant!

We had lunch at a restaurant labelled ‘MILANO HOTEL – A TASTE ABOVE THE REST’, right between Bansi and Shivling.

The walls were decorated with pictures of delectable-looking Western food—pears and grapes and glasses of champagne—none of which, of course, were actually on offer. Still, it was an improvement, and it was cheap. It is also right next door to the two supermarkets and the photo-printing store, so after I finished eating I went to print the pictures for Eunice Akoth. The lady looked surprised that I only wanted three photographs. On my way back I walked straight past the restaurant and had to retrace my steps, much to the amusement of a troupe of primary school students walking nearby.

Migori is actually a considerably large town (city? Maybe not quite). We saw more of it today, walking to the KCB after lunch. It was also busier and more crowded than it had been the last time we were here, since that had been on a Sunday. We passed the single-story concrete buildings where the supermarkets were, on to a bridge that looked out over a somewhat dirty and sluggish river.

There is no pavement, just a dip in the sand and dirt between the road and the grassier area where the shops and stalls are. George pointed to us the direction of the hospital where Reese and Tara had been taken. We also passed a sizeable mosque—or mazdiq as it is called in Arabic—pristine in green and white. It is probably the most beautiful building we have seen in Migori; religion is a serious matter here.

The KCB building is more Western, and looks newer than the other buildings we had passed. I suppose it would have looked out-of-place, had Migori not already been such a mishmash of eras and cultures. As we were waiting at the ATM, two wasungu—a man and a woman—walked out. Frank greeted them as though we’d met before: “Oh hey!” The woman looked startled, as though she wasn’t quite sure how to respond—which was completely understandable, really—and then, smilingly, replied, “Nice to meet you.” It was a short and slightly strange exchange, but not awkward the way it would have been if we had been in the States. Here, our similarity—that we were different—was enough to put us on acquaintance terms.

In the rare occasions when we’d met other foreigners, we’d always exchanged greetings or conversed, but it is not like the conversations we have with the local people. If I am honest, it is because no matter how friendly and interesting and capable our community partners in Muhuru Bay are, there is still too much of a gap between us. We strive for reciprocity, but there are areas in our relationship which are very, very unequal. Like their poverty and our relative wealth, their confinement and our awareness of the world. Because in the end we are wasungu, and we do not really belong here. Even Margaret, who is so dedicated to her work, longs for the chance to leave Muhuru Bay; and why else do we take every opportunity to visit towns and cities, if not to regain a little of what Muhuru cannot satisfy us with? We may say we love this place and mean what we say, but none of us will ever, ever choose to stay, and we only really enjoy being here because we know that it will come to an end. We can choose to go back if we want to. And that is why our relationship will never be equal, because this is something the residents here do not have—the choice of leaving.

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When we were buying fruit at one of the street-side stalls, a little boy with a Duke jacket walked by! I had my hands full of mango so I yelled at Frank to take my camera and take his photo. It was great!

His grandfather (?) wanted money for it so George gave him a ten-shilling coin.

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There are electricity poles along the road back from Migori. They jut out of the landscape, towering far above everything else in sight. The poles look as though they are formed from polished whole tree trunks—the texture of the wood is still clearly visible. I wonder where such tall trees had come from. I haven’t seen a large tree since the day we left Nairobi; most of the vegetation here are shrubs and cacti, certainly none of the imposing trees that populate Duke’s campus. George had told me on one of our drives to Lisori that the people in that area sold firewood for a living, and I had had to ask him where the trees for the firewood were because I definitely did not see very many around us. Gone, he’d said, because people cut them down without replanting. When he was young the grasslands we were passing through had been bushy. Now they had to go as far as Tanzania in order to find enough wood to sell. When these were gone, then who knows how they’d live?

The coarseness of the woodwork is something I’d noticed before, in fence poles on the way to Bomet and in the roof timbers of the Senye building. The shafts are all uniquely crooked, not perfectly straight and identical like the ones I am used to seeing. They were probably made by hand, the way most things are done here. The unrefined handiwork is charming in its own way but at the same time it is slightly alarming—I couldn't help but doubt the sturdiness of the poles when I first saw them. I suppose that is the culturally insensitive First Worlder in me speaking though; the craftsmen and construction workers clearly knew what they were doing, because the poles are holding up!

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The trip to Migori is very, very dusty. The road is all dirt, which billows around whenever another vehicle drives past, and it’s too hot and stuffy to keep the windows closed. I made the mistake of wearing a white shirt, and by the time I was back at WISER, it had turned various shades of brown. Our hair, faces, and necks all turned a different colour as well, as though we’d had a bad tanning experience. Oops.

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I’ve had a sore throat since Monday, but tonight it got really quite bad. I had been able to talk in Migori, but it is difficult to do so now, and swallowing is also very painful. I hope it gets better. THANK GOODNESS I’m not teaching these few days!