Traveling to Kenya

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

It will have been a week tomorrow since I left the fair, internet-friendly shores of the glorious US of A, and hopefully I will be able to put this on the “internets”. I have made three disgustingly unsuccessful attempts to check my email since the free internet kiosks in the Dubai airport, and I only have 6 less hours of my life and 19 more grey hairs to show for it. Apologies to my family in case they thought I actually did fall off the face of the earth, but I am learning the hard way how slowly everything moves in Africa, especially the internet. Let me see if I can recap what’s been going on for the last week.

Much like my first trip of the summer to Israel last year (remember when the Hadassa lady told me I wasn’t actually Jewish as soon as I sat down on the plane? Yeah.), this one seemed destined to be interesting from the first second of my journey. Having been ladened with yet another thing to carry with me to JFK (no, not Jeff Griffiths-induced emotional baggage, rather a scanner that he asked me to purchase for the medical school in Nairobi), I was encouraged by my generous NYC hostess Catharine ‘Squatchface’ Sotzing to take a cab to the airport. We hail one and say our goodbyes, and then I’m off with my Nigerian cab driver. Sounds okay, right? Flash forward 30 minutes to haggling with said-cabbie who has tried to cheat me out of an extra 20 bucks. Ugly faces, pointing, yelling…is this what I have to look forward to this summer as one of the naïve-looking wazungu? That’s white people, folks.

Anyway, the rest of those two days of travel were something of a blur. Twelve straight hours of TV and movies on my flight to Dubai (looove that Emirates has 200 movies PLUS episodes of The Office) helped me survive being smack in the middle of a row, wedged between sleepy, leg-room hogging, non-deodorant-wearing businessmen. Free internet + randomly running into Mina Fung helped brighten the sleepy hours in Dubai, and then it was onto the next flight.

Before I left, I emailed my sister Julie and my parents copies of my passport and health info lest anything awful happen. It felt totally paranoid as I did it, but it also felt like the right thing to do. As I talked with the woman next to me on my next flight, I KNEW it had been the right thing to do.

Marilyn, a lovely Irish lady who had transplanted to Melbourne when she met her husband-to-be in a bar there 30 years before, seemed somewhat anxious as she plopped down in the seat next to me, and we started chatting away. It felt as if I was in Interviewing class all over again as I tried to get to know her a bit and figure out what was going on. Turned out that she was duly upset and a bit frazzled because she had jumped on the first available flight out of Melbourne when she got a call telling her that her 23-year-old daughter, Felicity (aka Flick), who had been cycling from Egypt down through Africa, had been involved in a hit and run in Burundi. Flick had been left for dead on the side of the road (the driver didn’t even stop—all her money and possessions were still in the two panniers that comprised all she was traveling with), and was spotted by an aid-worker some hours later. He immediately recognized the seriousness of her condition and took her to the capital, Bujumbura. This is where she was, in a “hospital” with no sheets, until someone took it upon themselves to look through her things, find her passport, and contact the embassy, who contacted her parents, who contacted Flick's travel insurance company, who contacted officials in Burundi and got her air-lifted to a private hospital in Nairobi, where she underwent neurosurgery almost immediately to relieve the swelling from the bleed in her brain. (Apologies to Marilyn if any of this is incorrect or difficult to read!)

Marilyn adopted me as a surrogate daughter almost immediately, asking me all about my life and pointing out similarities between myself and Flick (Felicity too has played the cello since she was 5, loves tennis and traveling, is tall, independent, good with names, and 23). When I finally passed out drooling on the tray table in front of me, Marilyn covered me with a blanket and warded off the Emirates flight attendants, who are driven by a grim determination to feed you every two hours (quelle change from domestic flights, eh?). Needless to say, we guided each other through the visa/luggage collecting/customs/money changing process before we split up. I’ve since been texting with her while I’m in Nairobi—she tells me Flick has come off sedation and is doing much better. I hope to have tea with Marilyn next week. In any case, I’m sure I’ll get to know the two of them better when I go to live with them in Melbourne and go the Australian Open, as I’ve been invited to do. As you know, I am truly my father’s daughter and as such really cherished this interaction, and I would like to think that her getting to take care of me made Marilyn feel a bit better as well while she itched to get to Flick.

Break for dinner. Long-winded as ever, aren’t I?

M