Kenya Tour Winds Down With Earth Day

April 28, 2006. Friday, 3:31pm.
I just made the most amazing fried rice ever. I say that every time I make fried rice, so maybe by the time I leave here I will be cooking award-winning fried rice. Today was yellow squash fried rice, using squash and green onions fresh from my shamba. Fry up and salt to taste: yellow squash, dried fried onions (thanks Mom!), green onions, 1 egg (fresh from my chicken’s arse, sans bird flu), soy sauce. Peace Corps is an exercise in how to cook vegetarian when your mindset is that you haven’t really eaten unless your food has meat in it. I once saw this t-shirt that said: I’m a vegetarian not because I love animals, but because I hate vegetables. And my favorite quote from our technical trainer, Kibet: I’m a nyamatarian. (Nyama = meat).

Anyway, I’m finally winding down my two-month unintentional tour of Kenya, at least for now. It was hard readjusting to the relative isolation of life in the village when I got home yesterday afternoon, especially because I don’t have any plans to leave my site for another month. It’s a weird duality of experiences here. With other volunteers and ex-pats my social nature comes out, and in the village I like to be a creature of solitude once the sun goes down and everyone retreats into the safety of their own homes.

But after this last trip I had a hard time switching back to site rat life - cooking quietly at home, weeding contentedly in the shamba, rating songs on my iTunes playlists, curling up under a blanket in fuzzy pajamas to read about the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill (thanks Lynn!). I managed to do all those things but I missed having people around. With the right group of PCVs we always manage to have engaging conversations about African politics, racial diversity in America, tribalism in Kenya, immigration, genocide, gender inequality, Burts Bees beauty products, Italian food, Chinese food, Thai food, Mexican food, the best chocolate in Kenya, Dave Chappelle, movies, Buddhism, and of course, the latest Peace Corps gossip. This last trip was only two days, to help Jen with her community’s Earth Day. Her supervisor had rounded up local environment and public health officers, politicians, and school kids to pick up trash in the town center and plant over 1,500 trees.

SMS to Lexie, from me: Need help w/chikn dance.its hand thing,wing thing,booty shake thing right?Words go:nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh.Anythn else?

To me, from Lexie: Yup that’s it! Kenyans love it!

Goal # 3 of the U.S. Peace Corps: To share knowledge and culture about Americans with host country communities.

A small group of PCVs met up in Jen’s village on Wednesday morning. We went to the D.O.’s office and joined like 300 primary school kids. As we stood around and chatted while the officials made preparations, the kids slowly creeped closer to us to get a better look at the mzungu freak show.

“It’s amazing how stealthy they are,” one of us observed.

“You can’t see them moving toward us, but next thing you know they’ve got us surrounded,” someone else noted.

“It’s kind of uncomfortable,” someone else said.

“OK EVERYONE! WANT TO LEARN THE CHICKEN DANCE?”

Like most lessons I’ve taught in Kenya, the first time around it was the wazungu making fools of ourselves to a crowd of students stunned into silence. They’re imitating chickens. But soon they warmed up to us, especially when we shook our booties as fast as we possibly could, and after a few rounds we even convinced one of the more enthusiastic boys to take over as the dance leader.

The festivities lasted all day and it was the most fun I’ve ever had picking up the most filthy trash I’ve ever seen in my life. A lot of the kids were picking up trash barefoot, and we had to tell one girl to leave a random pile of garbage where it was because it wasn’t going to fit into our bag. Of course, this being Kenya, the day ended with several riveting hours of boring speeches. It was after 3pm and we hadn’t had lunch yet. But we were on stage in the guest of honor section so we couldn’t excuse ourselves. Plus we wouldn’t be allowed to leave until we each had made a speech. The last speaker said, “The good thing about going last is that everyone has already said everything. The bad thing about going last is that I end up repeating what everyone has already said.” And then he proceeded to speak for another 15 minutes.

Rafting Wrap-Up, Or How I Found My Sense of Humor in Uganda (How Did It Get All the Way Over There?)

So a month later I am posting something called Rafting Wrap-Up, mostly because I just received an sms out of the blue from one of the rescue kayakers in Uganda who saved my ass about 20 times, and was suddenly reminded that I haven’t blogged yet about one of the best things to do in Africa: raft the Nile. Better late than never I guess.

There is a running tradition in PC/Kenya that each group of volunteers goes rafting in Uganda right after in-service training, about three months into their service. Because of the lockdown in November, our IST was postponed to December, and our rafting trip was postponed to March. I’ve been a swimmer my whole life but I don’t think those skills really cross over to being catapulted out of a raft into churning Class 5 rapids with euphemistic names like The Bad Place and The Dead Dutchman. So I was a bit reluctant to go. I’ve rafted a few times before, in the U.S. and in Thailand, but nothing more than Class 3 rapids. Rapids are graded from Class 1 through 6, and as PCV Misty, a veteran rafter, explains, Class 6 = Death.

Just a plug here for Nile River Explorers in Jinja, Uganda. There are three rafting outfitters that ply that stretch of the Nile flowing from Lake Victoria. Nile River Explorers supposedly is the cheapest, especially with the Peace Corps discount. The camp faces west over the river and has a nice bar, dorms, private cabins, campsite and best of all, shower stalls with one wall “missing” that looks out over the Nile. The staff and guides are top-notch, well-trained and take your safety seriously. Of all the outfitters I’ve ever rafted with anywhere in the world, NRE is the most professional and their guides and rescue kayakers are world-class. Many of them are on the Ugandan kayaking team.

Our whole group of 27 PCVs showed up at the put-in area the first day lathered in sunscreen and giddy with excitement, or second thoughts (“I’m voluntarily marching towards my own death. Admittedly a rather romantic one, in which my cold purple corpse could be floating down the longest and most legendary river in the world, eventually becoming an evening feast for crocodiles, Nile perch and cormorants.”)

A small flock of inflatable orange rafts was waiting for us on the bank of the river, while our guides tried to look busy (shirtless and flexing their muscles) doing some final maintenance on these thin tubes of rubber that meant the difference between returning to our noble lives as PCVs in Kenya, and a letter that begins, “We regret to inform you…”

Obviously the risks involved with rafting are smaller than I’m making it sound. The designated “safety talker,” Juma, hopped onto the end of his raft and began his speech.


“I’m Juma and I’m here to talk to you about safety. Unfortunately I don’t speak much English so hopefully you’ll eventually figure it out yourself.”

What’s this? Something strangely foreign yet familiar. A sense of humor? I haven’t seen one of those in awhile.

“To put on your life jacket, make sure you pull the straps really, really tight around your chest. Make sure it’s so tight you can’t breathe, because you don’t need to breathe when you’re underwater.”

After the safety talk, we selected our rafts. I climbed into a raft with Jen L, Tom, John, Tessa, and Patrick (who later bailed due to that fact that he’s smarter than the rest of us). We settled into our chosen seats, paddles resting in our laps, helmets and life jackets strapped on tightly. The boat was still well inland, on the sandy bank. Our guide, Alex, came over to introduce himself, but instead just looked at us like we were idiots. “You’re all facing the wrong way,” he said.

Oh.

He instructed us to get out of the boat and carry it into the water. Good advice. Once we were on the river, Alex gave us another safety talk, about how to handle our paddles without decapitating or inflicting lifetime head injuries upon each other, how to respond to the commands he would use to guide us through each rapid (“Get down doesn’t mean get funky and start shaking your booty. It means crouch down inside the boat so that all your weight is lower.”), how to fall out of the boat, how to get back into the boat, how to float down the river, and how to communicate with the safety kayakers.


“Okay, are we ready to hit our first rapid?” Alex said in the most charming Ugandan-New Zealand accent ever.

“Uhh…” We’d probably never feel ready.

“Don’t worry, this is the first time I’ve ever guided anyone on the river. Hakuna matiti!” (No boobs.) “Oh, I mean, hakuna matata.” (No problem.)

As all the rafts made their way downstream towards the first rapid, a laid-back Class 2, we heard one boat scream, “Alex’s mom is a pregnant gecko!”

In retaliation, Alex had us yell, “Juma is a lizard!”

A few moments later Juma sailed by and said, “Hey Alex, how are your wife and my two kids?”

I started to realize that despite the fact that our guides were probably recycling these jokes and one-liners day after day for each new batch of rafters, I was laughing. Really hard. Like I hadn’t laughed in months. MONTHS.

I needed to lighten up at site. Lately there had been nothing to distract me from obsessing for hours on end about how absurdly offensive it is to be screamed at everywhere I go for looking different. Or about the suffering and struggle that people, especially women, in my community go through every day because of corruption and gender inequality.

Alex was a great guide, and a deadpan comedian who rarely cracked a smile at his own jokes, but laughed at everyone else’s stupid comments (the operative phrase being “laughed AT”, not WITH). Strangely enough, he claims he’s never been outside of Uganda, yet his accent sounds like someone who has lived in New Zealand for years. He took us all the way down the river without letting us flip, except for the very last fall, an insane Class 6 (“Death”) that involved a short portage to the last section, which was calm enough to be rated a Class 5. This was where “The Bad Spot” was.

We watched two rafts ahead of us sail right through with no problems, and we thought, “Maybe it just looks treacherous. We can do it.”

No, we couldn’t. We all shot out of the raft like cannon fodder, and within seconds the rescue kayakers had converged on us and plucked us all out of the water. We took a short hike to the pickup point, where our buses and a BBQ picnic were waiting for us. And by BBQ picnic, I mean the best lukewarm steak, salad and beer I’ve ever eaten in my life. The staff hustled us onto the bus so they could clean up before the rains came.

“Who’s going rafting tomorrow?” someone asked.

Not me. I had to get back to site. It couldn’t possibly get any better than today.

----------------

The next morning, I was on a truck with six other PCVs to go rafting again. We were the crazies, going back for a second dose of life-threatening adrenaline. (Not really, Mom.) Everyone else opted for a day of relaxation (read: drinking beer at the bar), hiking and swimming along the river bank, kayaking lessons, or for the truly fearless, bungee jumping over the river.

Each raft holds six rafters plus a guide, and there were seven in our group, so I volunteered to go in a raft with a bunch of strangers – a British couple and a German woman. I thought that fewer people in the boat meant we’d flip less often. I was wrong. We flipped on nearly every Class 3 and larger rapid.

Later I found out that just for kicks the guides basically instruct you in a way that makes the boat flip or not, depending on how much swimming he or she wants to see you do that day. Our guide was Juma, and he was a grinning troublemaker. Thanks to him, I got to know all the rescue kayakers pretty well.

And honestly, the more times I got thrown out of the boat, the more I began to shed my fear of the river. Most of the rapids look intimidating, but even the “washing machine” spots that suck you under and churn you around like an old pair of jeans eventually spit you out after 5 or 10 seconds, and then your life jacket forces you back to the surface. What makes it scary is when you don’t know the dynamics of these spots, and you think you’re being sucked to the bottom of the river. The guides warned us of sketchy places, and made it a point to avoid them, telling us which direction to swim if we got thrown out of the boat.

I had a painful sunburn on the top of my thighs from the day before, so I wore a long skirt in the boat. It seemed like a good idea at first, but ended up being a big drag, literally, everytime I fell in and tried to swim. But I didn’t want to be sizzling for another six hours because of what Misty describes as “basically sitting on a mirror all day.”

I didn’t have to worry about that. After an hour the equatorial sun started retreating behind some clouds. Some ominous gray clouds rose from the horizon behind us, and by lunch time we were basically paddling to outrun the storm.

The other three rafters in my boat stared at my head and started laughing hysterically.

“Look at your hair!” the German woman said. “It’s standing straight up!”

I looked at her hair and it was doing the same thing. It was like something out of a cartoon, long strands of hair sticking up perfectly straight, as if she had stuck her finger in an electrical socket.

“Um,” I said. “Isn’t this what happens to people just before they’re about to be struck by lightning?”

No one else seemed to think it was very plausible, and I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone, but (whisper) we didn’t get struck by lightning. But the storm had caught up to us, and it started raining big, heavy drops. The wind picked up.

“Juma, let’s paddle,” we said to our guide. “We’re getting cold.”

I was glad I’d worn my skirt after all, because although it was wet, it was still warmer to cover my legs with it than not at all. Even Juma was starting to shiver, and while we paddled, he huddled down in a ball inside the boat to keep warm.

“What a crap guide,” I said. “He’s so scared of the river he’s shivering.” I was still trying to get even with him for knocking me off balance when I was trying to dive off the edge of the boat earlier in the day. I’d fallen in sideways and sucked in a nose-full of schistosomiasis-infested Nile water.

All the rafts rendez-voused at the top of a big fall, a Class 5. The rain was pounding down in a blinding sheet now, and combined with sound of the roaring falls, everyone in my boat was basically staring glassy-eyed and intimidated at the rapids ahead of us, which we could barely see. Jen, the one female guide (who has a body of steel), paddled up with a bag of long-sleeved nylon pullovers and passed them to us as we gratefully reached out our cold, white, snot-covered hands.

“Let’s go,” Juma said after we’d put on our pullovers. We looked at each other in confusion. Go where? It’s raining.

We paddled into a rock-enclosed eddy to the right of the falls, and hung out for a few minutes. He just wanted us to find a calmer spot to rest, I thought, much to my relief. We were all still being pelted by cold rain, and I was in no mood to go over those giant falls and be cast into the water when I was already feeling hypothermic.

“How long do you think it will be until the rain lets up?” I asked Juma. He shrugged.

“Let’s go,” he said again. I looked at the other people in the boat, who all looked as nervous as I did. We started paddling obediently, but we weren’t sure what he was thinking. We weren’t ready to go over the falls. “Paddle forward!”

The raft edged out of the eddy and downstream towards the rapid.

“Juma, we don’t want to go yet,” I said. The German woman behind me looked terrified.

“Paddle right!” he said. The boat straightened and we were heading into the falls.

“Wait,” I said. We all said it. “Wait! We don’t want to go yet!” The German woman started to cry. We stopped paddling in protest, but Juma paddled us closer to the falls.

“Juma!” I yelled. “Stop! Stop!” I imagined us all being flipped out of the boat and the German woman drowning in her panic. But it was too late. The rapids sucked in our raft eagerly and we were in the middle of it, being tossed high in the air on whitewater, then plunging down into the base of the waves, dwarfed by heartless, sparkling sea green.

“GET DOWN!!” Juma bellowed. We did. A large wave crashed over our heads and into our boat, but miraculously, or maybe not so miraculously, we were still afloat and upright, and the rapids were behind us. We all looked at each other, then broke into huge grins. We’d made it! And we were warmer, because the river felt like bathwater compared to the rain.

“Let’s do it again! The water’s warm!” the British woman said.

I looked at the German woman, who was also smiling with relief. Then I looked at Juma, who was calm, but wouldn’t make eye contact with us. He seemed annoyed and hurt that we hadn’t trusted him.

At that moment, I realized that maybe an American guide would have waited until we were ready to go over the falls, but our Ugandan guide, despite ignoring our pleas, trusted his own instincts enough to take us through the falls safely. It’s not the way I would have done it, but even though we didn’t know it at the time, Juma knew the river, and his own skills, well enough to know he wasn’t compromising our safety. I loved this man.

The rain eased to a determined, but not aggressive, hammering. None of the guides had ever seen rain like this on the river before. Most of them had kayaked this stretch hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. Even though we were rafting the same route as yesterday, it felt like we were on a different river altogether. The rapids were no more or less brutal, but the weather made everything a greenish gray, and the rain elevated all our audio and visual surroundings to melodrama. The day was beautiful in its own right – moody, stark, and cold. We were literally at one with nature, not exactly embraced in her warm, reassuring bosom, but swallowed into her belly.

The day before had been one of those clear-blue African skies days, leisurely floating past vibrant green banana farms and the funny round huts common in this area of Uganda. Cormorants perched on poop-encrusted rocks, lazily fanning their wings to dry. The sun bore down on us, with no respect for SPF 45. Our legs, which had been covered by long skirts and trousers for the last nine months to protect the sensibilities of our conservative village communities, fried. Fortunately the safety helmets we were wearing, which made us all look like kids on the short bus, were dense enough that they shielded our faces, ears and scalps from the sun. I was one of the luckier whities. My legs only felt like they were on fire for two days. I could still walk, gingerly, and I never blistered. I only peeled – huge, satisfying sheets of skin, in clean wide strips. If you looked closely at the peels, you could even see the little holes where the hair follicles were. It was fascinating, to me only.

The rest of our trip was relatively uneventful. Juma directed us right into the roilingest part of each rapid and we were consistently tossed out of the boat as it flipped over, but by then we were all comfortable bobbing down the river in our life jackets, with our feet pointing up and in front of us, while safety kayakers chased after us. BBQ and beer greeted us at the end again, and the crazies all agreed that our second day on the river was even better than the first. No regrets.

When you visit Kenya, I’ll take you to Uganda.

Post-Larium Dreams

April 3, 2006, Monday. 8:23am. Post-Larium Dreams

Well I stopped the Larium but I’m still getting weird dreams. I just woke up from a dream about discovering a gigantic cricket on my mosquito net. I mean GINORMOUS. Lobster-like. In fact it was inexplicably orange, as if someone had steamed it for a Cajun stew, and I thought its Alaskan king crab legs looked quite mouth-watering. PCV Shinita was staying over and was still sleeping in my bed. I woke her up and showed it to her. She looked at it, then PICKED IT UP as if it were a lobster and said, “What should we do with this?”

At this point you have to understand who Shinita is. This is the girl who thinks anything with more than four legs needs to be dead, but there’s to be no smashing with rubber flip flops or anything of the sort. If she sees a bug she recoils violently and immediately sprays it to death with Doom, the Kenyan equivalent of Raid. She singlehandedly keeps the Doom company in business. Everywhere she goes there is a can of Doom in her hand, or at least in her backpack. If she plans to sleep somewhere, it will get a healthy coating of Doom before she lies down. If there’s a single bug in your house she will spray the entire premises until you can’t see each other because of the cloud of Doom working its poisonous magic. She calls herself the “expert tucker” because she is so skilled at tucking her mosquito net into her bed that not even a virus could get through. If there’s even a tiny hole in her net she will scour her house until she finds a piece of dental floss or duct tape to patch it.

So in my dream Shinita picks up the cricket nonchalantly and says, “What should we do with this?” We discuss various options for awhile but can’t up with any good decision. Finally Shinita just opens the door and lobs the cricket onto my front lawn. It lands like a grenade, exploding and scattering dirt and cricket parts all over my yard.

“Wow, that was cool!” I said. “Did you know it was going to do that?”

“No, but I guess it’s gone now,” she said.

Then I woke up, and there were no crickets in my room, giant or otherwise.

Shamba Update

Rainy season is in full swing and that means three things:

1. I’M FREEZING MY ARSE OFF. Every evening is an exercise in finding all the warm clothes in my house and piling them over my body, and finding something, ANYTHING, to cook just so I can light the stove. This peanut butter needs warming…that sort of thing. More importantly, I’m experimenting with how long I can go without having to bathe, because it gets pretty cold once the clothes comes off. I’m at day four right now, not quite a Peace Corps record since Ten-Day Sean easily drop-kicks my ass, but definitely a personal record.

2. If I set a cup, bowl or basin of anything down for more than five seconds, something will manage to fly or leapfrog into it. I’ve discovered a second definition for the term “spooning.” Take a spoon and scoop out whatever just kamikazied itself into my tea or bathwater. Fruit flies, moths, crickets, spiders, unidentified exotic species. I could start a veritable bug collection.

3. My shamba is growing!!

The headmaster at my school generously gave me two points of land, which is a sprawling one-fifth of an acre, for me to experiment with my gardening skills. Can I just say that the squash family is an eager and hardy bunch? My squash are already six inches tall and blooming with leaves, and the zucchini aren’t so far behind. The cucumbers are smaller, and only about a third of the seeds sprouted, but I might be eating cucumber salad this year! I’ve gotten in the habit of saving the seeds of everything I eat: garlic, green peppers, chili peppers, plums. And potatoes must be the cockroaches of the food crop world because they never die. I’m getting potatoes where I didn’t even plant potatoes! I’m planning garlicky buttery mashed potatoes every night, a nice change from Kenyan rice, which has been disappointing so far. Still under observation: tiny sprouts of broccoli, carrots, ginger, spinach, sweet red pepper and sugar peas. Another PCV gave me a little basil plant that he rescued from flowerpot death; I have fantasies of mozzarella and tomato drizzled with olive oil and fresh basil, but I may have to substitute paneer, which I can make for free using a bandana, vinegar and salt.

So all this and half of my plot is still fallow. I discovered an NGO in Eldoret that teaches workshops on how to start small agricultural and craft-making businesses. To compliment their agriculture classes they sell all kinds of not-so-local plants like strawberries. STRAWBERRIES! In Kenya! The cold and damp climate here has also spawned mushrooms in my shamba, but I’m told they’re poisonous. Disappointing. Apparently you have to forage deep in the forest to find edible mushrooms, and there’s already an army of locals that know all the secret places I don’t know. Fortunately there is another NGO near Kisumu that teaches farmers how to impregnate spores in cow poo or other favorable environments for growing edible mushrooms.

My shamba has also been my conference room. I think almost every half-decent idea, and lots of crap ideas, have come from a hoeing or weeding session with Hillary, debriefing each other on recent outreaches or meetings and exchanging ideas over clods of soil flying everywhere.

Not that working in the shamba is a constant high-powered strategic planning session. Usually we just say:

Me: Is this a weed?
Hillary: Yes.
Me: Is this a weed?
Hillary: Yes.
Me: How about this one?
Hillary: Yes.
Me: I should pull these weeds.
Hillary: NO! THOSE ARE YOUR CARROTS!

The AIDS Club Visits

I’m working with a group of high school girls who have formed an AIDS Club at their school. Their patron, Mr. O, teaches religion at the school. Mr. O lost a brother to AIDS a few years ago and got involved with the AIDS Club to help his students get all the information they can about HIV/AIDS, and hopefully spare themselves and their families a similar fate. But he also teaches religion at a Christian-sponsored girls’ school.

So Hillary and I found our presentations being interrupted periodically by Mr. O’s reminders:

“As Christians you say NO to sex.”
“None of my girls here are infected, let me assure you.” How do you know? Have they all been tested? “No but they are all good girls.”
“I don’t want to see any of you putting those condoms into your pockets. You don’t have any reason to use them.”

There was definitely the usual tension among the students – of not wanting to ask every question that came to mind because the teacher was there – but Mr. O insisted on a STRA-TA environment, where everyone is expected to engage in STRAight TAlk and students are encouraged to share openly in exchange for being given honest answers.

I am becoming a fan of all-girls schools because I’ve found that the girls I’ve met who attend all-girls high schools are more confident and outspoken than their counterparts in co-ed schools, and most have a sense that they are as smart as, if not smarter, than boys, and entitled to the same educational opportunities.

Most of the time when I ask students for questions about AIDS I get asked the same things – how long can you live with HIV/AIDS, where did AIDS come from, what do you do if you find out you have HIV?

This crowd had no shortage of probing questions I’d never gotten before.

“Can a pregnant woman have sex?”
“Does lesbianism spread HIV?”
“Can a virgin use a female condom? How about a pregnant woman?”
“Why do women get AIDS more often than men?”

It was interesting insight into what teenage girls think and worry about. Lesbianism? Who knew? In co-ed schools where students feel that they are being watched and judged not only by their teachers and principal, but also by peers of the opposite sex, I rarely sense any willingness from students to reveal their true concerns about AIDS, and by default, sex.

Hillary also opened the discussion about whether women had a say when it came to sex and contraceptives. Half the group said Yes women can always say no to sex or tell their partner to use a condom, while the other half shook their heads No.

“What about a married woman?” he asked.

“No,” they all said. “A married woman can’t tell her husband No.”

Mr. O said, “This is why we want you to know all there is to know about AIDS and sex. So you can choose a good husband who will respect you when you say no or when you want him to use a condom, instead of choosing an idiot.”

Score one for Mr. O. He’s on my team! Even though some of the things he said gave me the shivers (“Keep in mind that if you get HIV, you might cause your parents to divorce. Your father will blame your mother for not educating you about HIV and he’ll leave because it’s the mother’s responsibility to teach girls properly.”), he has an open mind and knows he doesn’t know everything. I’m finding that it’s not enough for me to talk to girls about gender equality and empowerment. It’s nice to have female role models and peers for hatin’-on-men sessions, but for women to gain equality men have to buy into the cause as well. And it’s also nice for girls to see that not all men are rotten, that there are men who support and encourage their growth as individuals and as a collective group, which is why I keep Hillary around when I speak to girls and womens’ groups.

It was also a myth-busting session. Hillary was reading statistics on HIV prevalence by province in Kenya, with Nyanza Province having the highest infection rate by far, due mainly to cultural practices, and a fishing industry that depends on migrant workers. Everyone turned and giggled at Mr. O because he’s from Nyanza.

Quite keenly, I thought, Mr. O said, “You may think it’s just a Luo problem because we Luos are all living in Nyanza, but many of your relatives go to Kisumu to work. Many of your relatives might travel to Kisumu to be tested for HIV because they don’t want to be seen at a VCT near their home. So those numbers could include your people, the Kalenjins, not just those other tribes you normally think of who get AIDS.”

Score two for Mr. O.