Notes from Stephen, Wan, Kweilin, and Li

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Kampala, Kenya border, Eldoret, AMPATH

Today we returned to Kenya and are staying in Eldoret, the home of AMPATH, a successful AIDS program.

In the morning, I picked avocados from the tree outside our cottage with Mommy. She tied a coat hanger to the end of a stick. I hooked each avocado and Mommy caught it.

We stopped at the barbecue chicken roadside stand on the way to the border. The hawkers swarmed around our car again and they all recognized us. "Welcome back," they said. "You bought from me last time."

The drive to the border was again scary. We took a gamble every time we passed an oncoming truck or bus. Those big vehicles own the road. Several times a truck/bus swerved to avoid a pothole and forced us off the road.

City driving is similarly lawless. Roads have few lane markings and no stoplights. Sidewalks and medians are fair game for cars, so pedestrians had better watch out. Cars come within inches of each other but I have yet to witness a scratch.

With all the traffic jams and cutting people off and near collisions, I would expect fights, but I have yet to see any disagreements. People seem to accept the jostling as part of driving.

We had a much easier border-crossing re-entering Kenya than leaving Kenya. It turned out that Daddy's and Mommy's visas had *both* expired, but renewing them was easy ($50 each). An entrepreneurial young man helped cross again, but we didn't need him so we only paid him $2.

We arrived at the AMPATH compound in a little town called Eldoret in time for dinner. AMPATH is a 4-year-old program that takes a holistic approach to AIDS treatment. With 6,000 clients, it's the largest program we've seen. In fact, it's the largest program in the country, which is particularly amazing because it's operating in rural areas, not cities.

We had dinner with Joe and his 7 American staff at a local Chinese restaurant that has surprisingly good food.

I learned at dinner that Joe has been working abroad for many years. He started building a medical school in Afghanistan in 1970-something but got kicked out by the Russians. He worked in Pakistan for a while, waiting to return to Afghanistan. When it became clear that he couldn't return, he came to Eldoret and started working in a hospital in 1988. In his first year at the hospital, 85 people died. When he returned a few years later, 1000 people died that year in the same number of beds. The AIDS pandemic had begun. Joe started his AMPATH program in 1993 with funding from Indiana University (IU), where he was dean of the medical school. AMPATH stands for Academic Model for the Prevention and Treatment of HIV.

The IU compound, where we're staying, is quiet, clean, and spacious. There's internet downstairs and they feed us three meals a day!

posted by Li at 11:50 AM