Fun With Bugs and a Very Tall Escarpment
May 2, 2006. Tuesday, 12:08pm.
I’ve been ignoring these fruit flies in my room for four days now. Well, not totally ignoring them so much as avoiding direct confrontation. I took out my trash. I did the dishes. I sprayed the room with Doom. This morning they were still around, going about their happy little business eating ripe fruit and sucking on old food particles stuck to things. No respect. It was time to get serious.
I went on a violent smashing campaign using a makeshift flyswatter. It was a decidedly un-Buddhist, uncompassionate assault with the goal of splattering their little juicy bodies to create as wide a diameter of pus stain as possible. I got at least twenty of them. Another fifty or so had died on my window sill, where for some reason most bugs in my house go to die, so I swept their shriveled little carcasses into the trash too. My garbage can is a fruit fly graveyard, with assorted cockroaches, ants, termites and unidentified hard-shelled species. Yum, time for lunch.
Yesterday I went to meet a community group located on the other side of the escarpment. Hillary had the brilliant idea to ride our bikes there. It was two hours of squeezing our brakes all the way downhill, a 2,000m drop into lush plains full of sugar cane. In the back of my mind I thought, the return trip is going to suck. But it was another gorgeous, Technicolor morning, about 70 degrees with a warm, friendly sun; the kind of day that makes you feel like nothing in the world could possibly make you happier at that given moment. Blue skies, white clouds, green farmland, wildflowers, and purple hills in the distance. We could see a light blue strip on the horizon – Lake Victoria. The village we visited was the most remote place I’ve ever seen in Kenya. Their land is extremely fertile, and sugar cane is the major cash crop. We could even see smoke rising from the sugar factory about 20 km away. Most residents have water gravity-piped to their houses, because of the scores of streams that flow down from the escarpment. But electricity is non-existent, there are no health services, and the one road through the village is full of potholes (okay, so even major highways in Kenya are full of potholes) and is only serviced by a few matatus a day.
The group we met wants to start a VCT in their village. The national body governing AIDS-related development activities, NACC (National AIDS Control Council), allocates funds every year for certain types of projects, all with convenient acronyms so you can always sound like you’re at a spelling bee. This year their focus has been named TOWA, or Total War on AIDS. They are targeting care of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) and people living with HIV/AIDs (PLWHAs), and moving away from awareness and prevention of new infections because a study shows that 97.5 percent of Kenyans know how AIDS is spread and how to prevent it.
But in this remote village the stigma and denial is still there, and access to services that de-stigmatize the disease are non-existent. There have been a few mobile VCTs that have found their way to the village, and there were always lines of people out the door waiting to be tested, so the demand is there. I told them I’d see what I could do. NACC funded the VCT I’m attached to, but there can be a lot of politics involved with successfully submitting a proposal to NACC. The group’s leader, David, went on a tirade about how the biggest problem in Kenya is lack of proper governance. (In other words, you-know-what.)
“We have the potential to develop this area. We have land, we have crops, we have water. The problem is that we don’t have political goodwill,” he said. “Politicians are only helping themselves and their families, not their people.”
Like so many other villages I’ve visited, it kills me to see how they are marginalized because of corrupt leaders, especially because their area is so rich in natural resources. Biking through the area, dwarfed by the sprawling acres of sugar cane, I thought for sure that with people would be doing well and sending their kids to college. David told me that people who sell their sugar cane to the factory often never actually get paid for it, depending on who’s in charge at the factory. “Fortunately the younger generation is starting to not accept this kind of system,” he continued. “But the change is so slow.”
I asked him if he had attended college or university. He has natural charisma and leadership abilities, and he’s passionate and motivated. David only smiled and shook his head, rubbing his thumb against his fingertips to indicate no money. “But it’s never too late,” he said. “You can always get more education even if you are looking into your own grave.”
I like this guy.
After the meeting, David and some other members of his group helped us find a route that would take us back up the escarpment in the shortest time. David kept saying, “You should just spend the night here, and go back tomorrow.” It was 3:30pm and if I had known it would be another four hours back home, uphill all the way like your parents used to say, I would have taken him up on the offer. We could see the rain clouds moving towards us across the plains below. The wind picked up. Hillary put on his jacket. We didn’t bother getting on our bikes because it was too steep and rocky. Mountain biking for leisure is fun, when you’re on Mt. Tam and there’s a bar with cold beer at the top. Mountain biking to beat the sunset with only a small bowl of ugali and beef stew in your stomach, is torture.
It started drizzling a cold, uninspired drizzle. It was nice of God not to make it a pelting hailstorm, I will say that much. Hillary kept saying, “This is the last hill,” and I kept chewing him a new b-hole for being wrong. It wasn’t the last hill for a long, long, LONG time. We didn’t reach my house until it was pitch black. Hillary helped himself to a glass of water and left in a hurry, eager to escape my grumpiness, the worst he’s ever endured. I took the most beautiful, steaming hot bucket bath I’ve ever taken in my life, splashing like there was no tomorrow. The euphoria I’d felt that morning coasting down the steep side of the escarpment seemed like a week ago, but at least I was home. Then I fell into bed.
I’ve been ignoring these fruit flies in my room for four days now. Well, not totally ignoring them so much as avoiding direct confrontation. I took out my trash. I did the dishes. I sprayed the room with Doom. This morning they were still around, going about their happy little business eating ripe fruit and sucking on old food particles stuck to things. No respect. It was time to get serious.
I went on a violent smashing campaign using a makeshift flyswatter. It was a decidedly un-Buddhist, uncompassionate assault with the goal of splattering their little juicy bodies to create as wide a diameter of pus stain as possible. I got at least twenty of them. Another fifty or so had died on my window sill, where for some reason most bugs in my house go to die, so I swept their shriveled little carcasses into the trash too. My garbage can is a fruit fly graveyard, with assorted cockroaches, ants, termites and unidentified hard-shelled species. Yum, time for lunch.
Yesterday I went to meet a community group located on the other side of the escarpment. Hillary had the brilliant idea to ride our bikes there. It was two hours of squeezing our brakes all the way downhill, a 2,000m drop into lush plains full of sugar cane. In the back of my mind I thought, the return trip is going to suck. But it was another gorgeous, Technicolor morning, about 70 degrees with a warm, friendly sun; the kind of day that makes you feel like nothing in the world could possibly make you happier at that given moment. Blue skies, white clouds, green farmland, wildflowers, and purple hills in the distance. We could see a light blue strip on the horizon – Lake Victoria. The village we visited was the most remote place I’ve ever seen in Kenya. Their land is extremely fertile, and sugar cane is the major cash crop. We could even see smoke rising from the sugar factory about 20 km away. Most residents have water gravity-piped to their houses, because of the scores of streams that flow down from the escarpment. But electricity is non-existent, there are no health services, and the one road through the village is full of potholes (okay, so even major highways in Kenya are full of potholes) and is only serviced by a few matatus a day.
The group we met wants to start a VCT in their village. The national body governing AIDS-related development activities, NACC (National AIDS Control Council), allocates funds every year for certain types of projects, all with convenient acronyms so you can always sound like you’re at a spelling bee. This year their focus has been named TOWA, or Total War on AIDS. They are targeting care of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) and people living with HIV/AIDs (PLWHAs), and moving away from awareness and prevention of new infections because a study shows that 97.5 percent of Kenyans know how AIDS is spread and how to prevent it.
But in this remote village the stigma and denial is still there, and access to services that de-stigmatize the disease are non-existent. There have been a few mobile VCTs that have found their way to the village, and there were always lines of people out the door waiting to be tested, so the demand is there. I told them I’d see what I could do. NACC funded the VCT I’m attached to, but there can be a lot of politics involved with successfully submitting a proposal to NACC. The group’s leader, David, went on a tirade about how the biggest problem in Kenya is lack of proper governance. (In other words, you-know-what.)
“We have the potential to develop this area. We have land, we have crops, we have water. The problem is that we don’t have political goodwill,” he said. “Politicians are only helping themselves and their families, not their people.”
Like so many other villages I’ve visited, it kills me to see how they are marginalized because of corrupt leaders, especially because their area is so rich in natural resources. Biking through the area, dwarfed by the sprawling acres of sugar cane, I thought for sure that with people would be doing well and sending their kids to college. David told me that people who sell their sugar cane to the factory often never actually get paid for it, depending on who’s in charge at the factory. “Fortunately the younger generation is starting to not accept this kind of system,” he continued. “But the change is so slow.”
I asked him if he had attended college or university. He has natural charisma and leadership abilities, and he’s passionate and motivated. David only smiled and shook his head, rubbing his thumb against his fingertips to indicate no money. “But it’s never too late,” he said. “You can always get more education even if you are looking into your own grave.”
I like this guy.
After the meeting, David and some other members of his group helped us find a route that would take us back up the escarpment in the shortest time. David kept saying, “You should just spend the night here, and go back tomorrow.” It was 3:30pm and if I had known it would be another four hours back home, uphill all the way like your parents used to say, I would have taken him up on the offer. We could see the rain clouds moving towards us across the plains below. The wind picked up. Hillary put on his jacket. We didn’t bother getting on our bikes because it was too steep and rocky. Mountain biking for leisure is fun, when you’re on Mt. Tam and there’s a bar with cold beer at the top. Mountain biking to beat the sunset with only a small bowl of ugali and beef stew in your stomach, is torture.
It started drizzling a cold, uninspired drizzle. It was nice of God not to make it a pelting hailstorm, I will say that much. Hillary kept saying, “This is the last hill,” and I kept chewing him a new b-hole for being wrong. It wasn’t the last hill for a long, long, LONG time. We didn’t reach my house until it was pitch black. Hillary helped himself to a glass of water and left in a hurry, eager to escape my grumpiness, the worst he’s ever endured. I took the most beautiful, steaming hot bucket bath I’ve ever taken in my life, splashing like there was no tomorrow. The euphoria I’d felt that morning coasting down the steep side of the escarpment seemed like a week ago, but at least I was home. Then I fell into bed.
posted by Justina at 12:08 PM
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