I’m in Healthrow airport in London, on the last bar of my battery power – both literally and figuratively. I’m on my way home at the tail end of a long Africa trip. For the sake of amusement, with a 9-hour layover, I’m sitting here crunching some numbers from this trip.
In all, by my count, I’ve been traveling for 81 strait days now. In that time I’ve had one day off with no work, 7 in hotels writing or on the road traveling all day, and 73 days of in the field work – out shooting photos. I’ve ridden in public buses, private planes, and one matatu in Kenya – a suicidal experience of public transport. Since June 29 I’ve shot, by estimate, more than 30,000 photos, and written captions for about 4,000 of those. I’ve recorded 7 1/2 hours of video tape, and written 45 stories, blogs, or interview write-ups. I’ve been to or through 7 countries – South Africa, three times, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Uganda, Kenya, twice, and Tanzania.
In the last 81 days I’ve seen an elephant shot on a hunt in Zimbabwe, had a hairy landing in a tiny Cessna on a wind-blown airfield in Mozambique and gotten sick three times – including now, in just my last two days of traveling. I spent a day with CDC staff tracking potential outbreaks in the slums of Nairobi, and saw drought withering eastern Kenya and southern Tanzania. I saw a one year old girl on Tuesday who weighs 7 pounds, a victim of malnutrition in Kenya’s drought-plagued east, and I spoke with women who walk as far as 16 miles a day to fetch water, which they carry home, on their back, each and every day of their lives.
I turned 39 – and figured out that I spent every single one of my 30-something birthdays overseas. On the way to the airport in Nairobi last night I saw a man get hit by a matatu –(he ran off, apparently fine), and have seen about 500 almost-accidents. I went to a dinner party at an old friend’s house in Kenya, where one of the guests spent the evening on the phone coordinating the drop off of ransom money for Somali pirates – apparently a family business of his, as his father was arrested and spent a few days in a Somalia jail a few days later, I was told. In the first four weeks of this trip I lost 6 pounds. In the last 53 days I gained all 6 back plus one.. I stayed in five star hotels 30 yards from the Indian Ocean, and I stayed in $14 a night hotels with no electricity, and lots of mosquitoes. I bought 6 pounds worth of gifts, if the scale at Jomo Kenyatta Airport is accurate, and logged, by estimated count, 24 flights with five different carriers, and one private Cessna.
And I remembered, amid all of that, how much I miss my life overseas, and how difficult it can be at times to return home to the suburbs of Baltimore, where almost no one outside my family and immediate friends knows I’ve even been away this summer. I don’t mean that in a ‘poor me’ sort of way. I suppose it’s just difficult to get even your head around it sometimes – the gap that exists between the lives you lead when you do this kind of work.
September 18th, 2009 | by David in Travel | 1 Comment
So easy to let days get away from you on trips like this, when they all sort of blend into one after a few weeks. I’m always amazed that bloggers can find time – and internet access – to update their websites every day on trips. I’m lucky if I can get to it once a week, between 17 hours days and days on end with no e-mail access.
Feel I’m in the home stretch now on this trip. Wrapped up a week with the CDC Foundation today, doing captions and stories. It’s my first time working with them and they are a pretty remarkable organization. Spent all week with Center for Disease Control staff here in Kenya, seeing how they monitor potential disease outbreaks. I always wondered. It is, in short, much more hands on than I imagined. In Kibera, the big settlement just outside Nairobi I wrote of earlier, they have 27 community interviewers who spend 5 days a week, sometimes more, going house to house in their areas, interviewing and tracking the dame families for years. They do this every single week, asking the same questions to fid out if anyone in the house is sick, or if anyone has gone to the clinic in the previous week. All of that information gets entered into a larger database so that CDC staff, and the Ministry of Health here in Kenya, can monitor any potential outbreaks, like cholera, that would quickly work it’s way through a densely-packed area like Kibera. It’s good to know there are people out there checking on that stuff. And they are a smart bunch.
September 6th, 2009 | by David in Travel
Stay updated regularly on David's trips, upcoming travel itinerary, useful photography tips and recent photographs. Sign up below.
All Material © 2008 David Snyder
