Made it Home from Kenya and Now I’m Off to Croatia in Two Weeks…..

....after a good three-week trip here and in Rwanda. One of the downers was no Internet access while I was in Kisumu but, in a way, it was of nice going a whole week with no Internet, newspapers, emails or cell phone.

Kisumu is reportedly the third largest city in Kenya but is nowhere the size of Nairobi. It is also considered a peaceful place normally but all of Kenya is under alert right now because the government is trying to rewrite the constitution to allow for equal power sharing and the process is deadlocked right now. South Africa is sending in a mediator to get the negotiating process going again but this power sharing thing is very touchy with the people right now. You may remember two years ago, after the elections here, there was widespread rioting and killing over the new government changing the constitution. The initial rioting started here in Kisumu and something like 1,200 people were killed in the first three days alone. Buildings were ransacked and churches were burned—one church with about 200 people inside it. I’m told the Center for Disease Control chartered a jet from Europe and evacuated during that period.

Well, the power sharing issue is back in the news and there is a really pronounced police and military presence here in the city. Instead of making people feel safer, however, it is making people even more nervous because the police are generally considered more dangerous than the criminals. Around mid-week we drove by a small group of police on the sidewalk and they were all carrying machetes. I’ve never seen that anywhere else in the world—not even in Africa. I don’t think they were planning to do any landscaping work.

Also around mid-week, we drove out towards the Uganda border and drove past the village that reportedly President Obama’s father was from. Tourism isn’t very established here so much of what you hear and see is undocumented but Obama did visit here in 2006 when he was still a Senator. As is normal in the countryside, there isn’t much to the village and we didn’t stop. I’m told there is a sign leading to his father’s house and you can pay to visit but, like I said, we kept on driving. He also visited the Center for Disease Control facility while he was here and had his photo taken with a lot of the people working here. They published a commemorative photo book of the event and it seems every desk has a photo of somebody posing with him.

Overall, the week went pretty well. The Center for Disease Control is a very large facility here and they were good hosts. The main drawback is that they were 30-40 minutes from town and most of our training needs to be done in the city. On Friday morning we were picked up at the hotel and were going out to the facility on the two-lane potholed road when we ran into a road jam. Cars and trucks were backed up for quite a distance and we slowed to a crawl. We thought it was an accident but as we got very close to it we heard automatic rifle fire. It didn’t sound like popcorn or popping balloons—it was obviously gunfire and people on foot started running back towards us. Since we were boxed in with the traffic and couldn’t move, we were pretty much stuck where we were. My thought was “get the camera out.”

As we got closer, we heard another burst of gunfire and saw more people running. When we got up to the scene it wasn’t an accident but an arrest being made. The police were arresting this van driver who was a pretty big guy and the crowd kept moving in trying to help him. There were several policemen there and two of them had automatic rifles and as the crowd got too close they would start firing in the air. They did it again while we were right beside them and I have no doubt they would have fired directly into the crowd if they had felt threatened. The man they were arresting was in the back of the police wagon—basically a flat-bed truck with a cage welded on the back—and we could see he had had his shirt ripped mostly off of him and he was already pretty bloody. While we were right there, I guess he decided he didn’t want to go down to the Kisumu city jail (and who would blame him), so he went charging out the back of the cage. Just as he got out, two policemen tried to take him back down and I shot a photo from the back seat then put my camera away. It’s a blurry photo but you can see the two police wrestling him to the ground. After we passed by, we picked up speed again and I remember looking out the back window and watching four or five policemen with clubs just beating the heck out of him on the ground. I mean they made the Rodney King incident look like fraternity hazing.

Anyway, while the week went well overall, the machete-carrying police and the arrest with gunfire didn’t exactly make for a relaxing environment. As I said in the previous post, one of my favorite moments each day was to go to the top floor and drink tea and watch the sunset over the lake. My final night was a good one—probably the most beautiful sunset of my visit.

Friday we wrapped everything up around noon and headed back to town. As a side trip on the way back to the hotel, we drove down an old dirt road to a place called Tilapia Beach located on the banks of Lake Victoria. While the place wasn’t exactly Cancun, it did have the thatched-roof cabanas with tables. Lake Victoria isn’t particularly pretty right here but it is historically significant in that it was embroilled in conflict over the illusive “source of the Nile.” While we were there, fishermen were out doing their thing and the kitchen had a large number of Tilapia drying in the sun.

We sat down under one of the cabanas and had something to drink together as we were splitting up in six different directions that evening. When I do these international jobs, it is not uncommon that the group that week gives me something small to remember them by. They don’t make a lot of money so it’s usually something very small but they are also things I really appreciate. This group, it seems, decided to thank me by providing a fish dinner and had ordered three large tilapia for lunch. Given the sanitation standards of the kitchen and the unknown factor of the sanitation of the waters of Lake Victoria, I would not normally have eaten here it would have been a major insult to have refused so I double-checked for my emergency medicine I carry in my left pocket, smiled real big, said thanks, and grabbed the first handful. You basically just use your fingers to dig the meat off the carcass and eat with your fingers. I enjoyed it and, thankfully, didn’t have any lingering after-effects.

They were all flying out on Saturday and I had a Friday evening flight so I caught a ride to the airport; transferred to Nairobi; made a relatively smooth trip through customs and ticketing and spent about three hours at the business lounge there finally getting Internet access and checking my emails. The flight from Nairobi was nine hours with a three-hour layover at Heathrow in London where I had really good Internet access and posted my previous entry on this blog. From there it was a ten-hour flight to Houston and a one-hour drive home.

Overall, it was a very good trip: No major problems with a lot of interesting things and a little excitement.

I leave for Zagreb, Croatia in about two weeks so there’ll be more on the blog from there…..