The Vomit Clinic

My friend Julia runs the village vomit clinic. She calls it an herbal medicine practice, but when sick people come over to your house and barf into a basin so you can analyze it, I call it a vomit clinic. She has been running it for about four years, and people come from as far as Kapsabet and beyond seeking the healing powers of puke. The vomit potion is a family secret handed down through the ages, made by boiling the dried bark of a certain tree from the forest. Within ten minutes of drinking the potion, the patient inevitably vomits. This is when Julia works her magic. By poking at the contents of the patient’s vomit and observing its color, taste and the presence of mucus or blood, she can tell you what illness you have. Yellow vomit and a bitter taste (determined by asking the patient, not by tasting it herself) indicates malaria, while a small spot of blood suggests worms. Sometimes just vomiting seems to cure the patient, while other times she’ll tell them to go to the dispensary or pharmacy to get medication. The clinic is only open on Saturdays from 7am to noon, but its reputation has spread through word of mouth and now she does big business, especially during harvest time when people have relatively lots of money. I invited myself to see her vomit clinic one of these Saturdays, but just to watch. Will give a full report when I do.
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Today was a marathon of visiting water projects which, on Kenyan time, means two. My village gets so much rain most of the year that water is not a problem in and of itself. The main problem is accessing the water sources, which are often overflowing. The topography here is hilly, which makes it difficult and more expensive to pipe water long distances. About ten years ago the Ministry of Water laid some pipes and tried to offer a metered water service. Since there are so many water sources around here, people preferred to fetch water for free, even if it meant extra time and labor, so the Ministry was losing money. But then some thugs stole the generator that was pumping water from the river up to our village, so that headache was solved.

So it’s 2006 and most people still have to walk up and down steep hills to fetch water. When you’re fetching water for five kids, livestock and a few acres of farmland, that’s a lot of time spent Jack and Jilling it up the hill, tripping, slipping on mud, and falling on your arse with 20-liter jerricans full of water tumbling off your head and rolling into the valley.

One group I met with today asked me if I had heard about the problem that women have in their community.

“Which one?” I said. Being beaten by their husbands? Having no social status? Being stuck doing 90% of the work?

“Women spend all their time fetching water and don’t have time for their other chores,” he said.

“If you’re concerned about this, maybe you can help your wife fetch water.” I was being a smartypants because I knew what the response would be.

The room erupted with laughter. “That’s women’s work,” he said. “Men don’t fetch water. It’s a taboo.”

“If I marry a Kenyan man, he’s fetching water,” I said, because it’s always about me.

The room erupted with laughter again. “Maybe you can marry someone from another tribe then,” he said. “A Nandi man won’t fetch water.”

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I found my third chameleon today. This guy was army green and didn’t seem to have much of a talent for changing colors. His repertoire seemed to consist of army green and gray-green. He was also shedding his skin so it looked like someone had used his body to skewer a tiny piece of plastic grocery bag, much the way you’d pierce a Capri-Sun juice drink with a straw. The more chameleons I meet the more I like them. I’m always tempted to bring one home as a pet, but the neighbor’s cat would surely eat it, and after placing it on every item in my house to watch it change colors to match, it would probably lose its entertainment value. Or maybe not. They do have those cool eyes that rotate independently of each other.