Good to the Last Drop

I love Edna's farm, and on Friday I got a chance to visit it once again before I left.

While we were out there, Edna saw her cow and we decided to try making cow’s milk cheese.  She got the boy who was herding them to bring her and the baby over to a field and milk them.

Then we emptied out water bottles and poured milk into them to take back to Hargeisa….

…and made cheese when we got home!

I spent my last morning in Somaliland doing one more round of mothers and babies.

This baby was almost 10 pounds and right after it was born we were a little worried that there had been some shoulder dystocia and that there might be a brachial plexus injury, but that didn’t turn out to be the case.

Here’s the woman who I was waiting on to have her twins.  No luck there. 

Then I said goodbye to Edna :(

I had tried last week to go to a school for special needs that Edna works with, providing medical care for the children once a week.  When we got there, even though they told Edna students would be there, there weren’t.  So we stopped on the way to the airport to see it.

It’s an interesting place.  It’s great that these kids have access to education, including vocational education, and somewhere to socialize and that their parents get a brake.  I was disappointed to see only two girls in the whole school.  They are usually just kept home to keep house, etc. I believe. It’s hard enough for a very bright girl to get a good education, so for a girl with special educational needs, I imagine it is almost impossible.  The class sizes were very large because several teachers were absent.  Hard of hearing and blind children with otherwise normal intellectual function were mixed in with children with severe mental impairment, which seems a little unfair to them.  But this school is making a really good start.  If anybody knows any special education teachers who would be interested in volunteering, I think spending some time here would be a remarkable, if challenging, experience. 

Also, the director of the school as this tremendous poster hanging behind his desk.  I didn't take this picture crookedly.

I got to the airport, went through customs, and got onto the plane, which actually managed to leave on time.  We had been flying for about an hour and a half when we began to descend.  That seemed more or less right from my memory of the flight to Hargeisa from Nairobi and I didn’t think anything of it, until I looked out my window.  I could see the airport we were headed to, and it only had one runway.

And was in the middle of nowhere.

After an extended announcement in Somali/Swahili, we landed, and everybody gathered their belongings and got off the plane.  I knew that I wasn’t on the wrong flight, because there was only one plane at the Hargeisa airport, and it was the flight to Nairobi.   Right? Right?  Using a tactic that has historically worked well for me, I, too, gathered my belongs and blindly followed everyone else off the plane, through immigration, got my Kenyan visa (transit visas are good for 3 days!), and watched all the checked bags being unloaded from the plane and searched, again (Every bag was opened for inspection a total of 5 times between arrival at Hargeisa airport and leaving Nairobi airport).  Then I joined everybody in a waiting room where we sat for about 20 minutes, and just as suddenly as we had gotten off the plane, we were herded back onto the plane and took off, landing in Nairobi 40 minutes later.  Yes, the smog is that bad.

I’m still really unclear what happened. I have pieced together that we were somewhere called Wajir, which is just inside the Kenyan border.  I assume this stop was for security purposes, Kenyan authorities not wanting to send a planeload of Somali rebels straight into Nairobi without their own security screening (ha. ha.).  When I googled "Wajir, Kenya", the first thing that came up was a link to counterterrorismblog.com, which refers to Wajir as "a strategic airstrip in Kenya" and suggests it is being used as a base for Ethiopia and the US to launch military incursions into Somalia.  Fascinating.

I had been waitlisted on a flight leaving that evening from Nairobi back to the US since my classes start Thursday and I hadn’t left myself much time with my original flight on Tuesday night.  But the last couple of days I had started to feel like maybe I wanted to stay in Nairobi for a few days to give myself a kind of buffer between a wonderful and pretty intense month at the hospital and throwing myself back into life in the US.  I was actually sort of relieved when Ethiopian told me the flight was full—I couldn’t quite imagine getting on a flight that night and being in DC the next morning.

So I got a SIM card, called a hostel, and 5 minutes later I was in a taxi headed for Wildebeest Camp  (rated one of the 10 best hostels in the world, according to...someone who ranks these things).  You can find me in a tent in their garden for the next three days.

P.S. This is why I love traveling:  After dinner (vegetables!  There were vegetables! I haven’t had a vegetable in a MONTH!), I was talking with a couple of guys and one asked if we wanted to play scrabble.  We said sure, and when he went to get the board, the other said, “I haven’t played scrabble since I was in Iraq.”  ME EITHER!