Today started as a fairly unremarkable day (other than having to write a blog entry for yesterday, of course). I got to talk to Brad over Skype, and that was pretty exciting, and then I ran for a little more than an hour (the original plan was an hour and a half, but I wimped out) on the treadmill at the hotel. Then after breakfast, I did a whole lot of vegging around until it was time to be picked up to head to the airport.
And, apparently, during my vegging and repacking of my stuff, I managed to leave my camera (well, the whole camera bag, but the camera was the important thing) in the hotel room. I realized this when I was on the plane to Kisumu and decided that I would take a picture of the airport when I landed, and despite checking everywhere (multiple times) in my backpack, it was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, when I gave the hotel a call, they informed that they found my camera, and I requested that they give it to COL Coldren when he checks in, so he could bring it to me tomorrow. If all goes according to plan (and COL Coldren doesn't also forget it in his hotel room), I will be reunited with my camera in the morning.
In the meantime, I still have my iPhone camera, so I did get that picture of the Kisumu airport.
Yes, it's that white building in the middle. That's the entire airport. Pretty exciting, huh?
My hotel in Kisumu isn't quite as nice as the resorts in Nairobi or Malindi, but it works. Here's a pretty poor picture of the room:
What you can't really see in the picture is the mosquito net folded up behind the headboard, which is now out and draped over my bed (I'll get a picture tomorrow night, if I remember). Even though I have air-conditioning and the windows are closed, they take their mosquito nets seriously, as well they should: everyone has malaria. That's not an exaggeration. The Walter Reed Project has a lab in Kisumu just to study malaria. They're doing malaria drug trials and vaccine trials here, which is pretty exciting. I'm hoping to hear about that tomorrow during my tour of the lab. During one of their surveillance projects, however, they went and tested about 200 people for malaria by blood smear, and all 200 had malaria parasites. They're so used to being infected with malaria that it doesn't really affect them.
Here's a shot of my view from my hotel room:
I don't know if you can tell, but there's a sliver of water at the horizon; that's Lake Victoria, which is a large freshwater lake and notorious (at least for those of us who study tropical medicine) breeding site for schistosomiasis, which is a parasitic infection that you don't want to get. Just in case you ever visit, swimming in Lake Victoria is a bad idea.
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