Mt. Longonot

It has been a very busy few days here in Kijabe, and we both have a billion stories we want to tell. The place and the people have just been amazing.

First of all, Dr. Trotter drove us down to Mt. Longonot early Sunday morning. The place was incredible. Isaac and I are still recovering from the 5-hour climb with half of it under the scorching African sun. One hour climbing up the side, another three all the way around the rim of the volcano and one more back down. And a good amount of scrambling up rocks with sheer drops on either side. Wanting to get air-lifted out definitely crossed my mind a few times.




We saw a couple families of giraffes grazing and running around, a few water bucks, and a car that we thought was a zebra. And a bunch of huge hawk-like birds. There was also a mini-volcano along the side of Mt. Longonot.


The whole area was littered with these plants covered in berry-shaped ant houses protected by spikes. Pretty weird.


We went with a few family medicine residents who brought a pulse oximeter along and I was satting 90% with a HR of 136 at the summit. We also ran out of water with about two hours of hiking left, which was kind of scary.


Out necks and arms were pretty crispy but somehow we survived. Praise the Lord.


Anyway, Isaac and I have been making friends. One is Givan, a security guard at Rift Valley Academy. He’s this tall lanky guy who is a Maasai warrior. It isn’t hard getting hired as a guard when you killed a lion with a spear at the age of fourteen. He says, “Oh it’s easy. I can show you.” He also invited us to the house he built in a Maasai village where he lives with his family. Unfortunately, it involves a 1-hour mutatu ride (recklessly-driven van with twenty people shoved into seats for ten) and a walk he claims only takes one and a half hours (the doctors said it takes thirty minutes by car). And they were banned from killing lions after the 90’s, so now they kill hyenas to protect their goats and cattle. We’re thinking about going this weekend. He says that we can slaughter some goats in the evening.

One of the doctors told us that when he went to visit Givan, they were driving along and saw a bunch of giraffes. Givan yelled, “Let’s get them!” and jumped out of the car with a club in his hand. He threw the club and barely missed the fleeing giraffe’s head. Now that is a man.

We've been in the hospital a few days now and it's going to be tough explaining what that has been like. We'll write more about it in a later post. Call last night was definitely as busy and crazy as I thought it would be. It was my second day at Kijabe Hospital and I have already had a baby die in front of me as I did chest compressions. But despite the hospital's flaws (like the power going out pretty frequently during surgeries) and limited resources, it's been amazing how much the Kenyan interns, residents and staff have welcomed me and Isaac.

Tomorrow I take a break from pediatric surgery and Isaac from anesthesia to drive with a team to a remote clinic in a town called Nduriri. We'll try to update more often, depending on whether or not our dial-up internet decides to cooperate.

Kwaheri.