On the road

Beach, sun, swimming and very annoying beach vendors are all plenty in Mombasa. This is where we are now, close to the beach in an Internet cafe. But before our rattling on about vacation, let us tell you about the last month prior the vacation.

In the last month we were able to "secure" a different house. This house was there just for us. No housemates, no sharing and (sad to say) no funny stories at the dinner table. It was very nice to have our own place with the privacy we missed, but we made sure we saw our old house mates at least once a weak (mostly more). So we never missed them :-)

Nick (Kamau - silent warrior):
I finished my projects in the second to final week. I stopped teaching at RVA, drew my conclusions in the lab and stopped annoying my colleagues to give me samples from their hands to test on nasty bacteria. That was the easy part. After that, I became a nerd. I helped Nynke with her data entry and other computer things. My skills are a bit better than hers, so she recruited me as a wizzkid to help her out. I loved it, even though it was way to much. She works so hard, I don't understand how she does it all. Even her supervisor said it: "t's a lot more then I expected, but Nynke made it happen" (more or less a quote). Anyway, we were able to finish (whoo hoo) and are now intitled to a little hard earned rest.
Oh yeah: just a funny thing - I nearly chopped my left thumb offtrying to cut spinach (Thank you CJ for your good example - we went straight to the hospital). I had to get 40 stitches, fainted 5 times and had to get rushed to the casaulty room. I had to stay two nights... I'm kidding, I just got some nice meat from the top and it's healing nicely... :-)

Nynke (Nyawira - hard working):
Three weeks before we left, I stopped measuring patients (all good things must come to an end :-)) and I started cleaning up all the data. I finished reading through all the charts for the 2008 patients and it took a whole heck of a lot more time than I thought. During the last two weeks, whenever I was doing something, that didn't require a doctor's brain, I called Nick to help me out :-). So we made classifications of all the diagnoses, checked to see whether we had everything and custimized our data-entry program. In the last week, we decided to leave for Mombasa early, since it would fit better with our plans and had only 4 days left to enter 650 patients, pack our bags, say our goodbye's and such. So every day I was rattling off the data as fast as I could and Nick typed as fast as he could. He was a great help and without him I'm sure I would still be typing. But we managed to finish (Thursday 6 pm). Luckily, there are still some people in Kijabe who will help me with the last bit (a few patients in the ward that haven't gone home who still need follow-up).

We have lots to say about our vacation, but not now. Next time... Enjoy and see you in a month (or two, three, etc.)

Kwaherini (bye bye/groetjes)!