Q&A: George

We interrupt your regularly scheduled lack of programming to bring you this very special announcement: MSF house is pleased to report that the position of "Understudy to Mr. Mac" has finally been filled, after an exhaustive search covering most if not all of the dirt patch in front of Barclays bank. We sat down with the newest member of our Busia team for a brief interview and photoshoot this afternoon:

Meet George. George, who can count himself lucky for, among other things, the fact that I was not granted naming rights--"PC", "Cheese", and "Tosh" (wait for it...) were all just begging to be used--came to us last week from another family here in town who simply couldn't afford to give him the home he needed. He's been working very hard so far to establish his own brand of mischief, and we were lucky to break into his busy schedule for a few minutes to ask a few questions.

Savannahgrams: So George--can we call you Georgie? G-dog? Cheese? No?--so George, first we wanted to know...um, hang on, you know what George, we're actually going to need you to back off just a tad...

George: What? What? Sorry. Nervous. Back. Back. Here? Here? Here.

Savannahgrams: ...yeah, still a little close.

Mac: Pfft. Rookie.

George: Wait! Wait! Back. Got it.

Savannahgrams: ...um, yes, great, thank you George. So as we were saying, the first thing we've gotta ask is: how're you settling in to the new digs?

George: Oh yeah you know it's great. Greatgreatgreat. I've really been trying to make a good first impression, you know, working the cute li'l puppy angle pretty hard. All in the eyes, you know. Like this.

Savannahgrams: *Sniff* Yeah, um *sniff* we can see how that might appeal to, uh, some people, you know, somewhere. What other techniques are you using to make yourself stand out in a new environment?

George: Well, I think face time is definitely important, you know, the more I see of everybody, the better. The hardest part about that is getting into the house though--the folks inside, they've got this weird thing where they keep the doors shut on me, like, ALL THE TIME. So you have to think outside the box a bit.

Savannahgrams: Yeah, that one time you managed to hide on the living room couch through an entire dinner with no one noticing was pretty impressive. How do you plan to follow that up?

George: Well, you know, I'm having to get more creative every time, you know, just pushing the boundaries. I'm thinking my next attempt will probably involve an unattended mobile phone, some chicken wire, and OH MY GOSH IS THAT A CHEW TOY??

Savannahgrams: Um, no George, that's actually our camera case. If you don't mind, can we just...here...no, let me get that...really, it's ok, it's not food...

George: Hunggghhh? Hawwy, wy wow wi hiyya hu--

Savannahgrams: --yeah, all right, we'll come back to you. Mac, coming over to you, can you tell us a little bit about how you feel, having a new partner around?

Mac: Well, at first I was pretty skeptical, of course, you know, he's coming in with his weird smells and his black coat and I was actually kinda scared, you know? Like, threatened. No, legit scared. I mean, he's like scary fierce with those little teeth of his.

Savannahgrams: Yeah, Mac, you'll forgive us for not just taking your word on what might be considered "scary fierce", but we do, in fact, have evidence of George's masticating escapades. Let's go to the tape:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Mac: ...yeah. Not pretty. And just think, that coulda been me, right? But then I figured, hey, he's just a kid, I've got to be strong and take him under my paw, you know? If I'm, you know, nice to him or whatever, maybe he won't, you know, eat me or anything. And I'll be honest, there's just so much to teach him: the quickest route for running laps around the house, the best hiding places in case of frog attacks, what's food and what's garbage...

Savannahgrams: Yeah, that last one sounds like an important difference.

Mac: Sorry, difference?

Savannahgrams: Never mind. So let's go back to George now. George, what do you have to say about all this chewing business?

George: Hunggh?

Savannahgrams: I see.

George: Sorry, I'll stop.

Savannahgrams: Sure you will.

George: I will! Promise.

Savannahgrams: Will not.

George: Will too.

Savannahgrams: I'll bet you a whole day's worth of indoor couch time that you can't leave that ball alone for more than an hour.

George: Fine, and you know what? I won't touch the frisbee either. Bring it on.

Savannahgrams: Fine. See if we care.

George: Fine.

Savannahgrams: Fine.

George and Savannahgrams: ...

Savannahgrams: I dare you to bite it.

George: OKAY! Wait...

Savannahgrams: All righty, thanks so much George-ito! We'll be sure to check in with you over the next few months, once we've finished up these pesky medical school applications. We've got a lot of stories we'll want your expert opinion on: trips to Malawi, Turkana, and Masai Mara...on-the-ground opinions about the East African famine and drought...fun games to play with Kenyan kids...important life lessons...some fashion advice, naturally...and--sorry, uh, George?

George: What? It just rolled closer on its own, I swear.

IPA in the NYTimes

I have mixed feelings about Nicholas Kristof and the way he portrays poverty and foreign aid in his columns, but I can't resist this blatant endorsement of two of my organization's longest-running projects, both right here in Busia.

And just for some Thursday morning giggles, here is Mac during last night's thunderstorm:

Announcement

I would hereby like to announce that rainy seasons suck, mostly because the rain comes every afternoon right as you were thinking "hey, today looks nice, I bet it won't actually rain today. I know, I'll go play soccer!". Exceptions: (1) when it's late at night and you get to fall asleep to the deafening sound of rain on an iron roof. (2) when you get super-bright rainbows every afternoon. (3) when you do not want to play soccer. Which is never. Disregard this exception.

On the plus side, I am now a proud investor in my friend Paul's new video shack, to the tune of two whole iron sheets for the roof donated in my name, which gets me free admittance to all English Premier League showings for life.

Actually, I just wanted to say that I am kind of tired of being so very bad at blogging, so I have decided to instead be bad at it in smaller, more frequent chunks. Hopefully three or five times a week, if you can stomach it. I am, however, not hip enough for tumblr and not ADD or capable-phone-possessing enough for twitter, so we are together stuck with this veritable dinosaur of an Internet-life-sharing format. If you would like to keep up with the things I am reading and thinking about on an even more frequent basis, I encourage you to follow me through your Google Reader, where I regularly share articles and posts about poverty & development that I find particularly insightful or well-written. If you need help setting up your Google Reader or figuring out how to follow people, go out to the road, find a car with no driver inside, and follow it until you get to someone who looks like they (a) know their way around a computer and (b) rather enjoy stepping on people's privacy rights. Or me. I can also help.

Finally, I would very much appreciate your prayers, thoughts, and goodwill right now for my good friend George Onyango. George is one of the guards who sometimes works at our house and office, and he has a great smile and an insatiable thing for reading--not a week goes by that he doesn't ask me for a new book to borrow, and he's worked his way through some long and heavy literature thus far (though the only one he ever told me he learned something from was "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"...he quoted Dumbledore to me verbatim over the next week or so). He's also an animated discussion-ist of all things Kenyan, societal and political, and he loves to give examples, in which the main roles are usually played by Mac (who has to this point represented the Ministers of Finance, Agriculture, and Education, as well as the Busia police chief and, in an unusual casting choice, a young Kenyan woman who feels forced to turn to prostitution to support herself). He's smart, friendly, dog-loving, and even a trained and qualified accountant.

I tell you all this to show you what kind of person George is, and to give you more context for the tragic place he finds himself in. George lost his daughter this week. She died suddenly and unexpectedly, and her mother, now separated from George, has placed the blame on him. He has taken it very hard, and has sounded sadly fatalistic in our last few conversations, expressing a desire to give up on advancing his accounting education and trying to find a better job. He took out a loan to cover the funeral expenses, and is now struggling to pay it back. I think if it weren't for his other children, he would be hard-pressed for reasons to get up and go to work each morning right now. Pray that he'll find strength and hope and comfort. Thanks.

April Fool's Day, WASH Edition

So it turns out that Kenyans love a good April Fool's joke as much as anyone. On Friday, the front page of the Daily Nation, Kenya's largest newspaper, ran an article suggesting that a new nuclear power plant was in the works for Kenya, which would supply all of the country's power at such a cheap rate that some industries wouldn't even have to pay for it, and the whole enterprise would only set the country back 950 Billion Kenyan shillings (about 12 Billion US Dollars). If only.

Anyway, not wanting to miss out on the fun, I decided this would be a great chance to pull something over on my team, who are all young and humorous and good sports about all the other strange things I ask them to do (like cross-dressing, for instance. Remind me to come back to that.). As you might expect of a project that has sanitation as one of its primary interests, we spend a lot of time talking about latrines and diarrhea and exchanging other toilet-related pleasantries. We've had our field officers inspect latrines, rating the smell and the amount of flies and telling us whether or not a child would want to use this latrine (hint: no.). We've had them ask people a lot of questions about latrine construction, maintenance, and usage. I think they pretty much expect us to put them in the most awkward, ridiculous situations possible at this point, but they've never backed down from an assignment. Yet.

So naturally, last Friday, I set out to find out just how ridiculous things could get before they finally said "Seriously Andrew, ain't gonna happen." What follows is the field assignment I handed out that morning, with the additional information that we were going to be doing this on Monday and I would be coming back for their feedback in a couple of hours. (For clarification, PLUM refers to Personal Latrine Use Monitor, an infrared sensor we use to track patterns of latrine usage. Soooo yeah, we're pretty creepy.)

---

WASH Team – Latrine Assignment

April 1, 2011

Objectives: Now that we have started to use the PLUM more and are asking more questions about what we can do to get people to use the latrine more often, it’s time to put our new qualitative research skills to work on learning more about people’s behavior when using latrine. In order to interpret our PLUM data properly, we need to know how long people are taking in the latrine, and in order to determine the suitability of slabs or other latrine improvements, we need to know how people feel about their latrine experience in general.

Assignment: This assignment will be a combination of a structured observation and in-depth interview, which will take place near the latrines of respondents. You will sit near the latrine with your survey, a stopwatch, and a camera, and record/ask the following:

Before the respondent enters the latrine, you will ask for their informed consent to ask some questions and take their photo. If they consent, take a “before” photo for our records, and start the stopwatch as soon as they enter the latrine.

While the respondent is in the latrine, keep the stopwatch running. At 30-second intervals, you should ask the respondent how things are going and how they would describe their latrine experience at that point. Probe for details (smell, comfort, etc.)

When the respondent exits the latrine, stop the stopwatch and announce the time to the respondent. Ask them how their experience was, what they liked and disliked about it, what they would do differently if they could do it again, how they felt about their time, and how it compared to other latrine experiences they have had in the past. Take an “after” photo for our records.

We think that this opportunity to get open-ended feedback while people are in the process of using the latrine will provide some really valuable information for us. With your new qualitative methods training, you should now be comfortable probing and following up on what respondents say to dig deeper and get at what’s really going on beneath the surface.

Next step: participant observation!

---

They bought it.

When I came back with Carson about half an hour later, they were in the middle of arguing over who would have to be the first ones to try it out in the field. They were also brimming with thoughtful questions for Carson and me. We were brimming with something else, which made it hard to keep a straight face.

"What is the purpose of taking their picture?" (Me: Um, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words, so we should get, uh, a lot of information about their attitude towards their, you know, latrine experience and stuff.)

"But what if they are very pressed for time and they are even running to the latrine, how will we take their picture?" (Carson: You just have to take an action shot. If we look at the picture later and just see this blur coming toward the latrine, that will still tell us a lot.)

"And sitting by the latrine, one is likely to encounter some unpleasant smell and maybe even germs. How will we avoid these?" (Carson: We'll be giving you nose plugs, so no problem.)

"But many respondents won't like us to sit next to their latrine for fear that we might see inside." (Me: Yes. That's why you will also have blindfolds.)

"But the respondents will think that we can still see through the blindfold." (Carson: That's why the respondent will tie the blindfold on for you.)

"And now, you are saying that we should be asking the respondents about their experience every thirty seconds. Many times people will be embarrassed, they will not want to speak." (Carson: Exactly. But you can still hear.)

This went on for an unbelievable amount of time. I don't think I've ever seen a group of people more relieved than when we finally told them it was a joke. And they weren't the only ones--all over the office, the other project managers all told their teams that half of them had to come work for WASH that day because we needed lots of people for this assignment, and they had to come up with their own method of choosing the unlucky team members. I heard everything being tried from making the least senior field officers do it to drawing straws to a Kenyan gambling method involving tossed beans and a lot of noise.

And then our country director tried to convince us that there was this new dress code and we all had to wear official IPA attire every day, and no one really cared.

Happy World Water Day!

Yet another totally unnecessary post on my part--who in their right mind would be stuck in front of a computer screen on the only day of the year dedicated solely to our planet's most unique and valuable resource? Regardless, take a minute today to learn some more about water issues around the globe.

To help you along, I have gone to great trouble to devise the following March Madness: Water Edition bracket (not to be confused with March Madness: Kenya Water Project Edition, which is our official Kenyan bracket pool. The winner gets a goat. Which will then be slaughtered in their honor. Except for if our friend Conner wins, in which case the goat will probably get pardoned and we will eat beans instead. I do think that there are probably more differences between the two editions besides the prize, but I cannot think of them so they are probably not important.)

ANDREW'S BIG BRACKET OF CANDIDATE WATER TREATMENT METHODS FOR THE DEVELOPING WORLD:

1 Filtration vs. 4 Boiling

2 Chlorine vs. 3 SODIS (solar disinfection)

It's, uh, a pretty exclusive tournament. These were selected in a behind-closed-doors process from an original field of 5 entrants, so you know you're getting only the best of the best here. So do your research and send in your picks--match results will be posted here throughout the week (special bonus points for correctly picking upsets...cause, you know, I'm really unbiased and you never really know who's going to win and I do love a good Cinderella story...yeah, I'm gonna go hide all the Waterguard my project just bought now...)

Good luck!

Lake Victoria is kind of schizo

Apologies for the long delay between posts. Among other things, I've been having huge problems with my modem recently, as my computer has developed the rather nasty habit of crashing every time I try to connect using it. But don't worry, tomorrow I plan to sacrifice three chickens, a goat, and my co-worker's Blackberry to appease the technology gods and regain reliable internet access away from my office.

The other minor holdup giving me some semblance of an excuse is that my PIs have been visiting for the past two weeks to hold long discussions about tedious things like "Where do we actually want to do this study?" and "What can we do to improve people's sanitation?" and "If a certain water source has turbidity rating of 20 NTU in the rainy season and 5 NTU in the dry season and is used 8 months of the year by an average of 50 households, each of whom also collects rainwater 5 months of the year, what is its microbiological profile and what are the corresponding hypochlorite dosing recommendations and should seasonal supplies of coagulants be provided?" But now they are back in the States and we are still here, wondering 

Here's what you missed: Busia has been hot.

...

Yeah, that about covers it. Oh wait, also: dry. We have no water in our wells right now, so we buy it from traveling vendors on the street. Kind of puts the kibosh on our whole "Tuesday afternoon super soaker fight" tradition.

Anyway, apologies once again, and to make it up to you, I have 19 pictures, 1 video, and the shocking tale of two Jekyll-and-Hyde trips to one of Lake Victoria's most seductive and mercurial channels...

Trip #1: 

Probably oversold these stories a little bit with that preview, but that's what you get when I bottle all this blogging energy (blogergy?) up for so long without letting some of it burp out in African proverbs or development-related links. Here is some background information that is a little more, what's the word, honest?:

Mbita is a small fishing town on the shore of Lake Victoria, across a relatively small channel from where I live. To get there, you can take a ferry or hire a small fishing boat, or you can drive for 10 hours around the edge of the lake. This month, I had the chance to travel to Mbita twice within a very short period. These pictures are from a weekend trip I took with some co-workers. We had heard the place was pretty nice. We took the ferry. We stayed on the beach. After looking at the pictures, I think you'll agree with me that, as a description of Mbita, "pretty nice" walks that fine line between "gross undersell" and "downright criminal undersell": 

There aren't really any stories about Trip #1, because Trip #1 consisted pretty much entirely of sitting around and looking at this kind of stuff and wondering wistfully aloud about whether we would e'er again stroke such heav'n-sent shores (at the low, low rate of just a few hundred Kenyan shillings a day). It was pretty romantic.

Trip #2:

Fast-forward exactly four days. By sheer coincidence, my PIs have decided that the part of Mbita District lying further inland could be a promising area for our study, so we dutifully set off to retrace our steps. So there we were, trundling around in our trusty little WASH matatu, peering out the windows for latrines and advertisements for chlorine water treatment like we were on some dorky research safari (which we weren't...duh...) when we find ourselves right back at the ferry crossing to Mbita. After that it was pretty much just total chaos.

But first, here are some guys trying to load some couches onto a bus:

...yeah.

Anyway, basically we were kind of nervous about putting our vehicle on the ferry because there was kind of already this big oil tanker double-parked on the deck and we were going to be all polite and like "Excuse me, we were just kind of wondering if you could scooch a little bit and let us on?" but then we were like "Yeah, we're not really tough enough for that" and decided the next ferry might be more attractive from a buoyancy standpoint anyway and besides who needs the ferry when there are all these little fisherman boats here that can just motor us across right now?

This was all decided very fast.

So before we know it, we're all in a little motor boat wave-hopping across the choppy late-afternoon waters, spray in our faces, sun in the sky, and only the barest trace of a dark cloud on the horizon (this is called foreshadowing. REMEMBER THE DARK CLOUD.):

And it was an historic occasion! Moses, my project manager, right-hand man, and all-around life coach was aboard for his first ever boat ride. Turns out he is not really a "spray of the waves on your face" kind of guy and more of a "wear as many life jackets as possible and cling to the edge of the boat for dear life" kind of guy, but I have decided that I probably still love him.

In Moses's defense, I don't think any of us really thought that the motor would flood halfway across the lake and leave us floating dead in the water. In a leaky boat. With only a small plastic bucket for bailing. And no oars. Stuff like that just never happens in Kenya, I'm told.

A balmy 45 minutes later, our driver having exhausted his phone minutes on haranguing one of his buddies to sail out and give us a tow, we were back in business (no, wait, sorry, my bad, he used them on calling this girl he thought he might have a chance with while he was driving earlier. Seriously, my fault on that one, forgot. It was our minutes that he used to call his buddy. There we go.).

So now things are great, we're putt-putting along towards shore, where there appear to be cozy bonfires awaiting us. Maybe they have s'mores, we think!

Except then it kind of looks like the smoke is covering half the shoreline, so we're like "Huh, maybe this is actually bad smoke, like not the kind from s'more bonfires. But no, it's probably cool.":

And then there is this weird thin line of sky between the smoke and the horizon, and we're like "Hey, that's weird, but probably smoke has done weirder things, like that time on LOST where it was kind of creepy and mysterious for awhile but then turned out to just be some really old bitter guy, so it's probably cool."

And then the boat driver is like, "Yeah, so, you guys should all close your eyes and cover your faces with your hands." And so it turns out that the smoke was not cool at all and was not really smoke and was really a giant cloud of bugs that had all just hatched and were swarming above the lake surface in ginormous clouds and would get all up in your eyes if you didn't obey the boat driver like pretty much right away. We were all kinda bummed about that, probably more about the s'mores thing than the bug thing though. Except then someone said they thought they remembered seeing these bugs on "Planet Earth" one time and then we were all proud because we had experienced real nature that some guy with a British accent had once talked about and it was cool. According to the locals, these lake flies only hatch one or two days a year, so if you think about it and kind of tilt your head at just the right angle and squint real hard, we were really pretty lucky.

So then we did our best impressions of an 18-wheeler's windshield for about five minutes, and this is kind of where things stood afterwards (speaking characters, in order of appearance: Duncan Otieno, WASH Field Officer of shortish to medium height, also on his first ever boat ride; Phabian Agiso, WASH Field Officer, very tall, not on his first boat ride):

Then we landed and went to our guest house and I tried to take a shower and ended up coming out with more bugs on me than when I started because they were kind of not very smart and flew into the water and got stuck to me and I was all like "Aw man, 'Planet Earth' did not prepare me for this at all!". Dumb bugs. We didn't see the beach the next day, but I bet it was full of dead bugs.

The end.

A Visit to Mama Sarah

You know what the main problem is with working in a relatively peaceful, secure part of the developing world with no imminent crises or world-gripping, tear-jerking storylines?

Did you say "not enough celebrity sightings"? Because I'm sure disappointed with the lack of celebrity sightings. How are we supposed to fight poverty without celebrities? Sudan gets George Clooney, the Congo gets Ben Affleck, everywhere else and their mother gets Brangelina...who is left to shower western Kenya with their American celebrity fairy dust?

Thankfully, around here, celebrities are homegrown, not imported. And the grandmother of all celebrities in Kenya is, in fact, a grandmother. Her name is Sarah Obama. You may have heard of her son, Barack Obama Sr. Apparently she also has a grandson who is doing rather well for himself.

This past weekend, the Country Director for IPA-Kenya and his family decided to seek out this local star, who happens to live in the middle of Luo-land about 2 hours from Busia (Luo being one of the two dominant ethnicities in western Kenya, and the tribe that claims the current US President as one of their own brothers. Luos are among the poorest ethnicities in Kenya, with the highest disease rates and generally poor performance on a number of other basic poverty indicators. Luo is also a phenomenally difficult language to master, to the point where I have given up learning anything beyond "Thank you" (Erokomano) and "How is your afternoon?" (Idhi nade?)and "Uh, I don't know" (Okang'eyo). Luos are a generous bunch, though, so these phrases are usually enough to convince your average Ochieng on the street that I am versed in the "language of Obama". Most Luos have a Christian name and two tribal names, which could be inherited but more often describe the circumstances of their birth--whether it was in the morning or the evening, dry season or rainy season, near home or far away, etc. My own honorary Luo name, Jyaloka [a few creative liberties taken on the spelling there], generously bestowed by the IPA accounting office, means "born across the lake"--in Luo, "lake" always refers to Lake Victoria, but since it also represents the biggest body of water in the Luo language, the Atlantic Ocean also becomes "lake" when you put it into Luo.) Anyway, short story made way too long, I tagged along for the visit.

I'm not entirely sure how this never came up before on this blog, but just for the record: Kenyans are more than a little bit in love with Barack Obama. This is not some puppy dog crush. This is dancing in the streets when the US election results were made official in 2008. This is asking every American they meet, right after the obligatory "How are you? Fine fine fine!", about how Obama is doing that day. This is following Obama's approval ratings religiously and asking me about his chances for re-election whenever a new article appears about him in the Daily Nation, which is at least twice a week. This is genuine worry that America might turn its back on its first president with African ties, and in doing so, turn its back on Africa itself. Obama's name is on schools, shops, hotels, calendars, shirts, and, of course, beer. More on that later.

Obama's last trip to the region came back in 2006, while he was still a United States Senator. While here, he spent a good deal of time in Siaya, where my project does most of its work, and he donated the money for the secondary school pictured above. He did not, to my knowledge, donate the money to start brewing Senator beer, which made its debut shortly after this visit (if you walk into a bar in Kenya and ask for a Senator, though, you won't get one these days. In 2008, the beer's name was officially changed to President.)

For those who have not yet read any of our president's accounts of his time in Africa or of his father's journey from rural Africa to an education in the States, let me take this chance to highly recommend them, particularly "Dreams from my Father."

As it turns out, Mama Sarah herself is no slouch when it comes to community leadership and organization. As a matter of fact, she's pretty incredible. At 88 years young, she still runs an orphanage, a tsetse fly eradication program, and a collective on new farming methods in her area. Apropos of something, I'm sure, she seems very charismatic and strong-willed--I had been afraid that this visit was going to be the sort of thing where the Americans come in and gawk at the Kenyan living out in the bush who happens to have a famous relative, but it was clear from the moment we entered the compound that someone was in charge of the whole situation and it wasn't us. We got to ask her questions about her life, her family, and her faith (for the record, she is a devout Muslim, which is remarkable in an area of Kenya where the vast majority are Christians and the Muslim population is mainly Somali, but come on, Glenn Beck: even she knows her grandson isn't actually a Muslim, and thinks it's ridiculous that so many Americans consider that such an important question. I agree.) We heard Barack Sr.'s story, some more about Barack Jr.'s visit in 2006, and asked her if she ever talks to him these days (answer: yes, but she's sad because "it seems nowadays he is so busy, he only calls once a month." Combined number of times I have called my two grandmothers in the last two months: one, maybe? Well played, Mr. President, the bar has been raised. But come on, I'm basically as busy as he is, I'm sure.)

She has one security guard. I think he must be provided by the Kenyan government, because he has an official police uniform, and there's no way a Kenyan police officer does anything just because a citizen asks for it (or pays for it, for that matter). He is kind of overzealous. And doesn't like cameras. Thankfully I am a sneaky photographer, if not exactly a skilled one.

The one photo op that is allowed is the obligatory "OMG look who I'm sitting next to!" tourist shot. Which, for me, was still pretty awesome. For the sake of my dignity and B-Junior's re-election campaign, I've left out the ones where we threw up gang signs and tried to dance the dougie.

On the way out, I snuck this shot of two graves. The father and grandfather of the leader of the free world, buried without fanfare in rural Africa. It blows my mind, but it makes me feel good about where we've come as a nation. And it gives Kenyans a reason to dream, too, and that's always worthwhile.

Savannahgrams, Round Two: Mac. is. back.

And he's finally found something worth conquering those fears for! Pathetic? Obsessive? Adorable? Borderline mental? You bet! All the symptoms are there: he's got it bad for that chew toy. He probably doesn't even remember what life was like before tug-of-war.

Soooooo, January, huh? Anybody else kind of completely miss the fact that an entire month just went by? I just gotta say, I'm sorry, but whoa--that was crazy fast. Also probably time to take that soul-sucking "Since my last trip to St. Louis" clock down, for my mother's sake at least. 

Having already been bumbling about back in Busia for a month now, my "to blog about" list is starting to look like something out of a Monty Python sketch. I mean, spoiler alert, but come on: "motorcycle procession", "in defense of chlorine", and "cross-dressing"? Tell me that doesn't scream of British humour (other acceptable responses were: "Awesome titles for a series of abstract expressionist paintings" and "Obama re-election campaign themes that didn't quite get past the brainstorming phase"). But before we get to that, let's take a look at what I missed while chugging hot chocolate back in the U.-S.-of-"Oh my Lord I forgot how cold this place gets"...

• ...no one had any fun. At all. In our first team meeting after everyone returned from holiday, Carson and I decided to start off with a light little icebreaker, ostensibly to put everyone in a good mood before we started on the boring stuff, but mostly to make them think that we are actually  good-natured, caring bosses. Hey, we thought, let's go around the room and have everyone tell us about the funnest thing they did with their holiday! Then we'll all have happy memories and Christmas cheer fuzzy-ing up our brains as we talk about diarrhea and project issues and the fact that we're all actually back at work. Well, always nice to start the year off with a big swing-and-a-miss. Not only did 75% of the team report having no fun at all over break (mainly owing to the fact that many of them spent most of it working on their farms back home, and the fact that Kenyans prioritize and value the concept of "fun" in a much different way than I do), two said they spent most of the time at funerals (which have been known to last a full week), and one had to have three teeth removed. Score one for cultural insensitivity! Thankfully, there has been no lasting damage to team morale (though the emergency infusion of a round of samosas and soda didn't hurt.)

• ...no one really did much brushing up on geography either. One of my first days back in town, I was walking down a path with my friend Thomas when we were approached by an older man. Bizarre conversation ensued:

Old Kenyan Man (OKM): Hallo my friends! From which continent are you from?

Us: Hi! We're from North America.

OKM: From America! So you have then just come from the military!

Us: Uh, no. They don't make you join the military in America. We're here to work on some development research projects.

OKM: Aha, no military, so then your country is like Norway!

Us: Not sure about that, but we're going with 'No.'

OKM: Not like Norway. Then you are like Australia!

Us: ... ... ... ... ... Yes. G'day.

• ...and the Mormons came to town! I mean, it's always exciting to see another white person in Busia, but two on the same day? Wearing matching short-sleeved collar shirts and ties? With helpful nametags that say "Elder Dan" and "Deacon Tom"? Well by Moroni, that's just too cool.

Stay tuned for more soon, as by this point I have in fact realized what month it is.