That night, the girls from Hilltop House 2, Amy, Katey, Josh, and Chris went to Signature, the same club I described below. The club was absolutely packed full of people, probably due to Valentine's day, a perfect scene of and lovers and longing lovers alike. It was a great time displaying my protective dancing moves, and since there was such an influx of people in the small area, I must say that my excessive sweating from dancing deterred a few people (I never knew that my sweating could be helpful in social situations...trying to look at the bright side!). We were all having a great time, until we wanted to leave. Amy, from Hilltop House 2, and I both got jabbed by a couple of drunks that were engaging in a bar fight...so we all decided it was time to leave, only the bar fight made its way up the stairs and into the security area...leaving us to retreat outside, near the cabs to avoid any more unwanted and unprovoked jabs. As we, 4 girls, waited outside with our backs against the wall, peering into the expanse of cars up and down the avenue, quickly scanning each white car for our driver, we were approached by several men, yelling things and saying whatever came to their minds in english.
It is quite sad that each time a man wants to approach a mzungu girl, he will smile aggressively and say in a little kid's voice "Hiiii, how are you?" and then freak out when you give a response that is not the normal "I'm fine"...seems like some of them didn't get very far in English conversation classes.
As we were standing there, I being the tallest of the 4 girls and was standing on the outside of our line, was grabbed several times on the arm by men, who were all talking with one another, eyeing each and every one of us, speaking in Swahili, I am sure sizing us up and talking about which one they would prefer to take home. I felt like we were all for sale, and were just standing there, waiting for the biggest bid, one older man was acting as our salesman, pointing out physical attributes each of us had, commenting on each one, and other men who were spectating were laughing and pointing. We all felt extremely violated and were each yelling "Happana" and "Fuck off" in English, which only made the men more aggressive, enclosing in on our wazungu line, pushing us up against the wall. I could feel my anger and frustration not only with the men that would not leave us alone, but with our driver (who was called 20 minutes prior to this instance and said he was outside, only to find that he was NOT indeed outside our club, but a few minutes away). To one man who came up to me and grabbed my arm, I looked at him straight in his face as I removed his arm with my right hand, gripping his wrist tightly, I yelled "I WILL CUT YOU" and gave him my most aggressive look, which he then quickly retreated. Finally, our driver arrived, and we quickly jumped in the car to leave. Each of us were commenting on the ridiculousness that had just occurred, but I was mostly sitting silent, furious that we were in that position in the first place.
Saturday morning, Rachel, Amy, Megan and I departed for Lake Naivasha at 8AM. I had appropriately packed a half of a handle of Bombay Sapphire Gin, a litre of ginger beer, tonic water, and tons of dried fruits and nuts for road snacks, since our destination was about 4 hours away and approximately 3 out of the 4 passengers were hungover and sleep deprived. Megan, the only non-hungover individual, had created 2 music mixes, one mix had a designated song for each person in the car. My song was of course Whitney's "I wanna dance with somebody." Amy's song was a TLC song "No Scrubs," Megan's song was an Ellie Goulding song "Burn" and the best of all was Dr. Rachel's song, Beyonce's "Diva." Megan and I had deliberated for quite some time on which song should be Dr. Rachel's as we did not want to offend her by applying her character to a song with connotation such as HBIC, but she ended up loving the song and definitely fulfilled the role of Diva when we were being snubbed at a gas station later in the trip!
After a 3 hour car ride, we arrived at our destination, the Lake Naivasha Panorama Park Resort, which was situated just outside the gate entrance to Hell's Gate and was built into one of the cliffs of the rift valley. From the top of the resort, there were beautiful views of Lake Naivasha, although there was a highway in between us and the lake, it was still a nice little retreat, and we totally took advantage of the pool since it was about 95 degrees when we arrived.
(Our room, with a giant mosquito net, that did NOT deter mosquitos from entering and biting throughout the night)
(View from our balcony, beyond the trees is Lake Naivasha)
After a few minute of pool time and a nap, we decided to try and find a place in the park to eat dinner. We tried to eat a place called Fisherman's Camp, which is on the lake and apparently has great views of hippos while you are eating/drinking, but the man who answered the phone was completely non-verbal...hahaha. He just repeated the same thing, which made zero sense, so we just drove around for another hour, and finally settled on a place called SOPA retreat. As we drove into the gates of SOPA, there were two giraffes that crossed our path, and just welcomed us with a little head wave and kept walking toward the trees. We knew we picked the right place if twiggas welcomed us upon entry! The food was awesome and there was even draft beer, although the place was a bit stuffy with European wazungu, we had a wonderful 3 hour dinner, full of laughs and stories and shared plates of cheeses and desserts. As we were leaving the SOPA, we ran into the same two twiggas, who again, acknowledged us and moved on, such an amazing sight to see giraffes up close and personal!
On Sunday, it had rained the entire morning, so we were concerned about our plans for bike riding, but decided to check it out anyways. We headed into the Hell's Gate entrance of the park and managed to argue with a park ranger for about 20 minutes about my and Rachel's work permit receipts, since the price discrepancy between "residents" and "non-residents" or non Kenyans is about 25 USD. With a work permit, we would technically be residents, and would have only had to pay 7USD, rather than 30USD, but the man was relentless and refused to use our permit receipts as proper documentation. He asked Rachel if she had ever been to Hell's Gate and she responded, "yeah, 10 years ago" to which he just laughed and said "wow you guys really do live here," yet never gave us the proper price point. Once we reluctantly paid our US prices, we got on our bikes and took off. The whole route to is about 14km, with frequent stops to check out animals, it took us about 2 hours for the full trip. It was a phenomenal and breathtaking scenery with the dark grass covered sandstone cliffs, and the animals that were an arm's length distance away. Each of us took our chances with dismounting our bikes and standing next to the packs of Zebra and warthogs or pumba. (Unfortunately my iphone camera didn't do this scenery much justice, but Dr. Rachel had her SLR camera and has some awesome footage that I will upload once I get access!)
(a pic of one of the cliffs of sandstone)
(one of the several Zebra that were just off of the bike path)
(beautiful scenery about halfway through the bike ride)
(a monkey with his florescent teal genitalia, putting on a show for us...you fancy, huh!)
(a few twigga as we drove by)
Following pics, courtesy of Rachel's working camera (mine is broken...womp womp)
(myself, Megan, and Amy...oh and le zebra)
(beautiful zebra)
(pumba checkin us out)
(baby zebra and pumba)
(beautiful sandstone and green backdrop, with a creeper zebra)
(Amy and I scantily avoiding a zebra stampede via our Tour de France cycling speeds (NOT!))
On Sunday night, we drove to Nairobi and checked into the Sandavy Guest House. When we arrived at the Guest house, the receptionist argued with me that I had requested a "quad" room with "three beds," but indeed I had requested a "quad" room with "four beds." She wasn't budging, so I told her either to find another bed to put in the room or we would take our business elsewhere. This seemed to have lit a fire under her ass as she quickly dismantled a bunk bed in another room and reassembled it in our "quad" room, which was more set up like a hostel than anything, with a shared bathroom and even a live in guest. Essentially, we ended up with one room (connected to the hallway where the live in guest slept) with bunk beds, and one room with two single beds. We drew names to decide which room we got. Luckily, I got the room closest to the bathroom (I'll explain later). After putting our things in our respective rooms, we decided to head to the Junction, where there is a large Nakumatt and some stores that are not in Eldoret. So, we bought some coffee at the Nairobi Java House, and then proceeded to a Kazuri beads store, and the Nakumatt.
Meanwhile, I started to have severe abdominal cramping, pain, and a fever, which was quite strange. I thought it was from dehydration and potential heat problems from sun exposure, but the sun was pretty non-existent all day on Sunday! So, as the others proceeded to Nakumatt, I went into the adjacent bathroom and proceeded to talk my body out of puking. Rachel bought me a soda, and Megan went to the chemist and found pepto, and Amy had a Zofran or anti-nausea pill...I must say it pays to travel with doctors! I was then spared a few hours of relief from the combination of carbonation and pills. After shopping, we went to an awesome Ethiopian restaurant called Habesha, which is a favorite among all of AMPATH. The food was delicious, although I could only swallow down a few bites here and there, and took a few walks around the grounds to give myself pep talks of not embarrassing me and my colleagues with puking next to our dinner table. Again, my body listened appropriately! Whew!
That night was a horrible night full of abdominal cramping, cold sweats and fever chills, and puking. Monday morning, I started a regimen of antibiotics and pulled myself together for our trip to immigration. Rachel and I left Amy and Megan and headed to the Nyayo Immigration house situated in downtown Nairobi. I was familiar with the area from my 2011 trip, the Nyayo house is close to the outdoor market where we perfected our bartering skills with Erin and Lacreisha. The Nyayo house was quite a remarkably frustrating experience. Each of us, Dr. Rachel, Jordan Huskins, and I were shuffled from person to person, each with a different story of how to resolve our issues. Rachel had filed a work permit back in July 2013, and had received no indication of its status, I filed my work permit in November 2013, with the same result as Rachel and Jordan was there as a representative, filing paperwork for every long termer at AMPATH. The rules have recently changed in Kenya, making it harder for non-Residents or non-Kenyans to work in Kenya (even though our salaries are not tied to Kenya in any way). So, he was there mostly as a spokesperson for AMPATH and Moi University, and turned in everyone's paperwork. I was shuffled between 4 rooms, each person smiling with relief as they sent me to someone else to bother...and that was how they each approached the situation, we were just "bothers" to them. The idea of customer service was definitely not in the forefront of their policy...kind of like the DMV in the US. Each of us were tested of our threshold of patience, but I think we were each able to laugh at the situation rather than get too frustrated with it. I almost fell asleep on someone's desk, so exhausted from the previous night's GI struggle.
Every room I entered had about 5 foot stacks of papers, not filed in any specific manner. Papers with thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people's personal information such as passports and CVs and letters of appointments, just strewn about, in no order. Hundreds of misplaced passport photos covered the floors like confetti, of lost souls with no hope of having their documents processed. One man who was "helping" me, just looked at me and said "what is your issue?" and I said I filed for a workers permit in November and want to know its status. He then took out a log book and began to look for my name...only I had never told him my name. He flipped page after page, moving his finger up and down the page as if he were searching for my anonymous name. So I then said, "how about I look for my name, since you are looking and trying so hard, but you do not even know my name." He was pissed that I figured out his game of him "trying so hard to look for me" but really didn't want to do anything to help, and just tossed the book to me, where I started to look. This was the same guy who opened a random file, turned the page and found a pic of a girl from Czech Republic with long brown hair and said "look, I have found you." Simply laughable. There was no rhyme or reason to the organization of the names in the books, so I just looked for a little bit and then gave up. After three attempts of talking to different people, I found one man who remarkably found my papers, which were filed underneath someone's desk. There was a note attached to the file, which said that my "pupil pass" could not be filed because I did not have a copy of my passport...there are two problems with this: a) I didn't sign up for a pupils pass, and b) there were two copies of my passport that I turned in. So I frustratingly turned in another copy of my passport and he said to come back next week...um no!
The drive back to Eldoret was pretty uneventful. We picked up Michael Scanlon who had just arrived the night before, who works for Rachel on writing and other global health projects. I had 2 ginger ales to calm my stomach, but the cramps were relentless and I basically had my head propped up against an open window for "fresh" diesel-fume filled air. I was so exhausted from my lack of sleep though, so I just slept the majority of the ride home, missing most of the jokes and jams that were playing. It was honestly a very comfortable crowd; they were so understanding and helpful the entire time, so I was just glad to be in the comforts of good friends and an awesome boss for a 5.5 hour nauseated ride back to Eldoret.
Glad you made it thru the GI problems. It's good that you have so many friends there to help!
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