Kakamega in Western Kenya

The drive to Kagamega took about 7 hours and passed by Lake Naivasha and Lake Nakuru, where I could faintly see the pink glow that indicates hundreds of wading flamingos. We also drove through Kisumu, which is a city on Lake Victoria, the biggest in Africa, which also touches Tanzanian and Ugandan soil. We stayed at a guest house on the outskirts of Kakamega. It offered a variety of dishes, but the common ones are ugali (white mash made from ground corn), sukuma wiki (greens) chips, and chicken.

I had no idea what I'd be doing, but the first farm we visited had two pigs. One was a little guy tethered by his leg to a stick in the ground, and the other a large sow tethered to a tree. Having never dealt with these creatures before, I watched as Flo (a vet from Nairobi) put a metal cable snare around the little pig's snout as someone wrangled the pig still by grabbing its ears. We took length and girth measurements, got a blood sample from a reservoir behind the eye, checked the tongue for cysts (from Taenia Solium), injected it with ivermectin subcutaneously behind the eye, weighed it, and ear-tagged it. This would become the procedure thereafter.

There is something I didn't know about pigs' vocal habits. When they are not bothered, they grunt happily while eating and walking around. When they are hungry, they whine by squealing loudly. But when they are snared by the snout, they wail like they are meeting their end. It doesn't matter how big they are either, the little ones are just more high-pitched. It took some getting used to this, but eventually it didn't bother me and I became quite the pig-wrangler.

One day I was feeling sick, so I asked to go back to the hotel to sleep it off and be closer to the faciities (to put it nicely). I woke up at midnight that night feeling nautious so i grabbed a bucket from the washroom, but I blacked out and when I opened my eyes again, I was flat out on the ground in a cold sweat. I knew this was fairly serious, so I managed to meander to knock on the next room over where Flo was staying before I fainted again, this time in the hallway. When I opened my eyes I saw Flo and another neighbor whom I don't know hovering over me with concerned faces (I later learned that he was asking Flo if SHE needed any help, implying that I was some drunk tourist who was harassing her by knocking on her door then passing out in my boxers! haha). I managed to get some clothes on and we went to a local hospital who checked my blood pressure and temperature. They told me to come back in the morning when the lab staff were there to do tests. It ended up to be a simple case of Giardia that I picked up either from India or from food in Kenya, which 3 days of tinidazole quickly remedied. It became an ongoing joke that Flo had to deal with this muzungu (what little kids call white people, it means white stranger) in his boxers in the middle of the night. Apparantly all I said was 'we have to go' (implying the hospital).

Before we left, we visited Kagamega Forest, a national park. We saw many colobus and red-tailed monkeys and some of the coolest trees I've ever seen. The reason for the interesting trees is that this is Primary forest, untouched by modern development thanks to Kenyan National Park Service. We also saw some baboons crossing the footpaths in front of us. There was a lookout point where we could see much of the forest, but it was a climb to get there. We took matatus there and back (local minibuses) which drive twice as fast as they should due to the potholes and quality of the vehicle itself, but provide quite an exhilarating (albeit dangerous) experience.

I like eating sugarcane. All you do is take a big stalk, tear off the skin with your teeth, and bite off the inside stuff. Then you chew it to get the juice from it and spit out the fibre. It is natural liquid sugar, and provides quite a midday boost of glucose when waiting for matatus!