Kenyan Healthcare

My beautiful birthday cake

Taipei Layover

Toilet tourism!

My final leg on the 2-week, around-the-world adventure was a 24-hour layover in Taiwan. I arrived late in the evening and was really worried that I wouldn't be let in the country, despite having researched entry requirements three times. Why? Guess.

Luckily, I was let in without anything more than a sniff at my passport.

The train ride to Taipei from the airport was longer than I had expected, but it was clean and quiet (like much of the city), so I didn't mind much.

The youth hostel I stayed in was clean and quiet (and after the long trip I've had, I was looking forward to some quiet). One of the hostel volunteers offered to take me out to a night market nearby so I could try some street food before bed. I drank papaya milk and ate stinky tofu (I liked it) and a few other things.

Then I went back to the hostel and passed out for a night's sleep.

The next day was a whirlwind. My 24 hours was halfway over (thanks, sleep) and I needed to pad the end of my trip with an extra 4 hours to get to the airport in time for my international flight back to the US. I had to be very clear about what I was going to do for 8 hours in Taipei before I returned to the airport.

I wasn't that clear. Well, I thought I was clear, at first...until I went outside and felt the amazing heat early in the morning that was not mixing well with my stomach (I discovered after returning home that I was battling giardia). I improvised once I took notes on where I could be near toilets while adventuring (fortunately, that wasn't too much of a compromise).

I first hopped over to see some of the old temples around the Taipei Confucius Temple, which was also Confucius' original residence. Their toilet was very nice.

Right next door was the Dalongdong Baoan Temple, which was old and quiet and beautiful.

After the temple visits, I tried to hail a cab and go to some art village I had heard about. I never made it there; it seemed that it either wasn't open or was mythical because people had no idea what I was looking for and there appeared to be no English signs.

This was when I realized how disadvantaged I was visiting Taiwan without any knowledge of Mandarin. The signs were almost all hanzi character-based and many had no English translations or very poor translations that only confused me more. Also, despite many business people understanding English in the city, the cab drivers I happened to hail were not knowledgeable in English. With my inability to speak Mandarin, this led to a lot of confusion about wherever I was trying to go. Apparently there are translation services for situations just like this in Taiwan (it must come up a bit), and many of the cab drivers called a number, talked on the phone, handed the phone to me with a pleasant English speaker on the other line asking me where I was going to, and then taking back the phone with the other side of the line translating. In other attempts, I would show Google Maps on my phone to the driver to indicate the place I wanted to visit; this was only sometimes successful.

So here I was, with only a few hours left in Taipei, realizing I was at a real disadvantage to getting where I wanted to go. I decided to make things simpler and go to only big places that tourists were expected to visit and with easily-translated names. That worked!

So I walked around a few more temples and went to the Lin An Tai Ancestral House, which is an outdoor museum that educates people about older customs and living arrangements in Taipei back in the 18th/19th century. It wasn't crowded, which meant I got to take my time reading plaques, loitering bridges over ponds, and tastefully spying on a couple taking wedding photos.

The piece de resistance of my quick visit to Taipei - nay, my entire trip! - was the lunch reservation I had at a restaurant called Modern Toilet. The restaurant is, as you may have guessed, themed around toilets...and very tongue-in-cheek. The food was served in different kinds of toilet- and latrine-shaped containers and the food options were essentially curries and french fries (which means it looked like stuff that should actually be in toilets). And they had a little booth by the hostess stand that sold anything toilet or poo related - lighters, pens, erasers, legos, etc. It was kitschy, fun, and amazing. I had an absolute blast! The best part was the dessert - chocolate soft serve in a small squat latrine-shaped bowl. It was actually very tasty! And of course, was meant to test people's stomachs with its aesthetic. I saw another table order some monstrosity of a dessert with flan and jellies and all kinds of strange items - it looked like an overflowing toilet!

I've officially lived my best life.

After sating myself with toilet-inspired cuisine, I walked back to the hostel to pick up my stuff and head back to the airport. I passed by some popular-looking shopping areas. Amongst the shops included outlandish things such as penis-shaped pineapple cakes on sticks.

My trip to Taipei was too short, but I still found it interesting even when I was confused and lost! I think it's a place worth inspecting more in-depth at some point. I hope to visit again so I can see the areas outside of the city center, too.

Update on Being Sick

There’s not too much report right now. After a week in bed with a really bad cold, I was in bed for about two more weeks with amoebas battling it out with my GI tract. I will simply say, being sick in a foreign country without anyone around me sucks. Lots.

I got out only a few times while I was sick.

One time was for an evening where I gave a talk about the history of toilets to a large group of nerdy expats in a fancy bar (I stuck to ginger ale). I shared with them my desperate plea for everyone to wash their hands and use the toilet always because of my amoebic afflictions and joked about Thomas Crapper and other fun trivial facts about toilets. People loved the talk and came up to tell me this before I uncomfortably made my way to the bathroom. Despite my abdominal discomfort, the praise was nice while I continue tackling complications with my health and research project (far too many complications to mention in a blog post...also, too discouraging for me to want to explain cogently).

Another time I left my bed, right before I made a second trip to the doctor for more stomach medication, I went for a little walk around one of the parks near the Riverside area of Phnom Penh. It was just after sunset when as I walked slowly down the boulevard, and the air was cooler. I heard a thudding of modern electronic pop music in the park and looked around to see a few lines of people dancing in relative unison with a semi-choreographed jig. I kept walking and came across another group of line dancers, this time mostly young adult men (with some young adult women), bouncing and bounding to the music coming out of the big speakers. I didn’t know it then, but apparently this is a normal ritual for physical activity in the city. It was a lot of fun to see them, but I winced at the idea of joining them in any active movements other than my slow stroll.

I also went out for a few hours to go to a Reiki circle with a great group of local practitioners. I loved getting to know some people through my preferred method of meditation, even if only an hour or so. The group helped me feel more supported than I have felt since I got to Phnom Penh. I don’t mean that my friends and family elsewhere are not supportive (they have been very much so there for me), but it is a different feeling to have people physically with me and being supportive. I really needed that.

I have figured out that there are four types of foreigners here in Cambodia:

• Tourists – People who are in hotels and passing through within a few days or weeks
• Short-term expats – Like me, who stay only for a few months for research or a consulting gig
• Long-term expats – People who have a year or two of a contract here, then leave
• Lifers – People who move here for an undetermined amount of time and stay for over 2 or 3 years

Being a short-term expat, it is hard for me to figure out my place. I’m here too long to feel inclined to partake in most tourist activities, yet I’m not here long enough for building meaningful friendships, which I want/need. I have a few friends here, of course, and those people are wonderful and fun to talk with, when we have time to see each other (and are well enough). And I rent desk space at the incubator Impact Hub so I can be around other people more often; I enjoy getting to socialize with the group of researchers and entrepreneurs when I work there every few days. But, I had been sick for about 3 weeks and did not really see many people during that time. Those few weeks have definitely taken its toll on my overall pleasant outlook.

I really do like Phnom Penh, and I am not feeling dread staying here like I did in another place I lived in the past. That said, I look forward to being home with supportive loved ones for a while, and being able to eat a gluten free fudgy brownie.

Field Work and Amoebas

Last week, while fighting a really nasty viral infection (in my nose), I got invited to join some development agencies and government officials on a field trip a few hours east of Phnom Penh to the rural areas in Tboung Khmum and Kampong Cham. The field trip was a way for national government guys to come and see how water and sanitation is working on the ground in rural villages (because guys working in Phnom Penh have little context of what’s going on), and talk about ways to improve the sector’s work with local governments. It is really important for national government figures (and researchers like me) to go out and see the action happening because sometimes it’s impossible to fully understand the picture when there are no faces to picture for policies and work being done.

What is your research, Kim? Well, I’ll tell you. The national government here has been giving more responsibility to local governments (read as: decentralizing) around water and sanitation. My focus is sanitation. The problem is that local governments here lack a lot of skills and knowledge needed to do what the national government is (vaguely) telling them. So, I’m trying to figure out what kind of roles the local government needs focus on for improving sanitation in rural areas, and what capacity is needed to do that work. Did you follow that?

Back to the trip, I should point out two complications I had during those two days: (1) I felt like I was dying from the viral infection, as my nose screamed fire and throat scratched with all of the gross internal residues coming out of me; and, (2) I was the only non-Khmer (aka Cambodian native) person in this field trip, so the conversation was mostly in Khmer – some generous development workers took turns translating for me what was happening. So between my spacing out with delirium and translation, I’m almost certain I missed key pieces from the conversations that happened. That said, I did get a pretty good idea of some of what’s going on for my research.

We drove for hours down roads that were dusty and very dry. It is dry season here, but it was very clear that the drought the country currently has is taking a toll on agriculture; fields were charred and crackly with dryness, and gusts of winds blew through the open spaces, pushing dust into swirls in the air. The houses we saw were simple wooden structures, balanced mainly on tall stilts – presumably to avoid floodwaters that are currently unfathomable with how dry it was.

Going through the rural community we visited, I noticed that trash was strewn around the land everywhere; I saw debris in the open well, in the straw-like weeds near the village hall, in front of houses, and in the dried up waterways near some houses. This village also had about half of the population (of about 100 or so households) defecating out in the open, so wasn’t a surprise that trash management was not going too hot. Some people had bought the building blocks for a toilet, but many had the structure pieces lying in piles near their home, unconstructed and abandoned. Buying the toilet itself is pretty cheap – most of these people can buy a toilet for about $25…the problem is the structure in which to build around the toilet, which can be about $200. For a lot of rural families, that is half of a year’s income.

The people were brought together into the village hall so the local government could tell them about the benefits of buying a toilet and play games to highlight the consequences of going out in the open. I told Mr. CT Lawyer about this meeting in more detail earlier; based on his reaction to my story, I will spare you the rest of what was discussed.

I found it interesting that the demographics of the village at the meeting were mostly elderly people and little children. I saw this in rural Thailand as well; the younger people, including parents of babies, set off to cities like Phnom Penh and Bangkok to work in the factories in hopes to send money back to their destitute families in rural areas from their better-paying livelihoods. Grandparents raise grandchildren, and parents try to support families so they don’t starve. The livelihoods of simple rice and other kinds of agrarian farmers just do not provide enough for survival anymore in much of the world, especially as climate change intensifies.

We stayed overnight in the city of Kampong Cham, right on the Mekong. A few of the people helping me with my research and I went out for BBQ at a local restaurant. After BBQ, though I had thought we were done eating, the group moved on to another restaurant for rice porridge (they put salted eggs and fish in the porridge). Cambodians are thin people, but I (with my generous hips) could not keep up with the group’s appetite – I struggled with the porridge while some of them took seconds and thirds of porridge. I asked them how they could pound back the porridge so easily, and they explained that it was more for the socializing around the porridge they enjoyed. Apparently there are lots of restaurants in cities that are open until early the next morning just so groups of friends hanging out late can enjoy some porridge together. They had wanted to go out for Karaoke after porridge, but my ashen face was very clear to them and they (thankfully) put me in a car to go back to the hotel and crumble into my bed.

Many of our meals were held at some tables under a roof held up by a few poles that sat on the side of the road, and were given meals from pots on a table near the road, or from a kitchen hut in the back of the roofed area. For the days we were on this trip, I did not really understand what I was eating most of the time. A lot of it looked like stews or stir fries of some sort, but the contents were beyond my comprehension. My helpful supervisor, WASHy Virak (my trusty translator and key advisor while I’m here), would explain to me what was going into my mouth if he was next to me. When he wasn’t near me, I would squint my eyes and point at things with a look of confusion to nearby eaters. One thing I ate looked like mushroom stems but was much chewier than I had anticipated. I got adamant responses from other people like, “No mushroom!”, but not much explanation of what it actually was. A while later, Virak explained to me it was pig’s intestines. Another thing I thought were mung beans turned out to be squid. I clearly am not good at the guessing game.

It’s been a few days since the educative trip out in the field. Somewhere between there and the rest of my current visit in Cambodia I have eaten something that was unclean, most likely from having some kind of fecal matter on it and not washed off before I ate it. Last night I got a tuktuk to drive me to the International SOS Clinic to figure out if my fever and the amazing amount of pain was from dengue fever or something else. As they hooked me up to an IV drip and took blood and other samples from me, we discovered I am currently suffering from amoebic dysentery (read as: parasites, likely not from the rural trip). I’m glad that I don’t have dengue, but I cannot say that this amoebic infection is any better (nor do I want to find out ever). The doctors pumped me with medicines and handed me over a very fancy bag full to the brim with several different types of medication to help me manage and eradicate the amoebas from my body. I am currently in very close relations with my bathroom.

I told my Australian supervisor (Bronwyn) about this, and she replied with, “Ah yeah, I’ve been there.” I also got a few notes from other development workers recently with similar stories of sickness as a result of being in the field doing work. Dengue fever, malaria, tapeworm, food disease (been there), amoebic dysentery (on it), etc. It seems almost like a rite of passage for people working in development work to get super sick (often)…an occupational hazard. I keep thinking to myself, And we all signed onto this?! I love working and feeling like it makes a difference, I love learning about contexts I normally would never dream of, and I love how interesting it all can be. However, I have been so sick so often in my travels the last few months, I have my doubts about continuing this work for the long haul; I don’t know if my body can handle it forever. It is clearly an easy target for germs.

The Life of an Isolated Expat

I’ve been in Phnom Penh about two weeks now. I haven’t had much more to report about my experience here yet, as I’ve locked myself indoors to work on my research for my thesis and my social life here is close to nonexistent (except for my ever-patient roommate Shana). And because I’m currently battling a viral infection that apparently is going around the city. But here is an update.

I am not good at being an expat. This is mostly because I don’t particularly like bars or drinking. I had forgotten that expat communities’ social settings in some countries revolve around bars and clubs. This had been the case in Rwanda, and it seems to be the case in Cambodia, too. I have gone out for a few drinks in the last weeks, but I don’t go out as much as would be useful to help me build up my social network.

And I’m nursing a sore throat, so the idea of pumping alcohol into my body at the moment is about as appealing as volunteering for a mosquito-related study.

Also, when I am around people, it has been almost exclusively the expat community. Part of this I know is because I don’t speak Khmer, and not all Cambodians speak English comfortably enough to have conversations with people like me. The Cambodians I have talked to have been either teaching me Khmer in language classes or pleasantly chatting to me while I purchase a product or service from their business. It’s bizarre to me to be living here and look up from my rental desk at the local incubator and see a sea of faces like mine. To be fair, there are a couple Khmer at the incubator using the facilities.

I went to a Zumba class over the weekend to see if I could better socialize in active settings. The class was inside a mall, Aeon Mall, which was (to me) shockingly fancy and high-end. I kept thinking to myself, Aren’t I in one of the poorest countries in the region? How does this exist here? There were very nice brands (Mango, Yves Roche, etc.) being sold in shiny stores on 3 floors of shopping. It reminded me how palpable growing inequality is in so much of the world (the US absolutely included), where only a few minutes’ drive would bring me towards much less fortunate circumstances. I know there is a growing middle class in Cambodia, and I suspect these areas are built more for them and the ever-present expat communities here…but it still stuns me how many fancy places are built in the city when one in five Cambodians are still in poverty. In fairness, I guess I could complain the same way about many other places, like NYC...and cities are normally not a country's normal, anyway.

The Zumba class was fine, mostly expats wanting to sweat to some meringue songs, and run by a friendly French guy.

Also, I did not realize just how big Phnom Penh really is until this last week. I’ve been sticking to my little area within the city (mostly to save money on travel and get better acquainted with my surroundings). I did venture out a few times, though, and drive through long streets with shops and restaurants for much further than I had anticipated. It’s a far bigger town than I had stomached, and now I realize how foolish I’ve been for my initial analysis of town, and I’m a bit more overwhelmed than before. I guess it’s still vaguely like Queens in some ways, but parts of the Bronx and Manhattan are also mixed in a bit.

Shana invited me out one night to a bar to meet some of her German group of colleagues. The tuktuk ride swept down the long road Monivong and we ended up on the other side of town – scootering past lots of lighted shops and hotel areas to Lakeside. Lakeside was once the hostel backpacker central area and used to have a big lake, apparently, but a few years Cambodia brokered a deal with China for some high-rise development there instead. They filled in the lake and force moved most of the settlements by the lake to other areas of the region (without compensation). The lake is still wet, so no development has occurred yet, but we drove to the one village that remains in the area and has a reggae bar in the middle of many beautiful graffiti pieces on the walls of the surrounding buildings.

Love Hanoi, Hate Yoghurt

A few days before Christmas, I made my way to Hanoi. I admit I was nervous about going, since what I have ever really heard about Vietnam surrounded a gory history from nearly half a century ago. Upon landing, it became very clear that those stories of the country were no longer valid. I was disappointed only in discovering that I had not nearly enough time to explore the area as I had thought, and I’ll have to plan a future trip to fill in all of the gaps I’ve left there.

Let me start with some general things about Hanoi and the area. Generally, the French influence in Hanoi was palpable in the architecture, and a lot of the buildings were old but quite beautiful. The only way I could describe the look of the city is a very old, communist Paris.

Overall Madness: The best way to describe the atmosphere of Hanoi is that it’s NYC on speed. I mean this in the nicest way possible – Hanoi is just extremely energized and bustling at speeds trumping Manhattan pace by a lot. Half of the country’s population owns a motorbike, and it’s clearly felt as they rip through the streets all day and night. There are also 7 million people packed in an ancient city’s streets (Hanoi is a couple thousand years old), squirming around each other to get places. The stores stuff themselves between each other and brim onto the street with their merchandise, and cars/motorbikes take up a lot of the extra space on the road. I was staying in the Old Quarter, which is more packed and chaotic, but also more charming. Outside of the area, though, I would say the overall frenzy was the same, just more spread out on bigger streets. The biggest problem with this madness was the massive pollution everywhere. The air was thick with smog and I found my nostrils polluted.

Post-War Sentiments: I was nervous that the Vietnamese would not appreciate me, an American, visiting their country (I mean, we did kind of mess things up for them in an epic way). I was relieved to discover that the people seem to view it all as water under the bridge. They mention it in their country’s history, of course, since it was a big piece of recent history. But it was described as more of a piece of confusing history where they shrug and say, “Yeah, well, that happened.”

I went to tour the grim Hoa Lo Prison, where Vietnamese were killed and detained by the French, and American POWs were held during the war. The exhibits had a patriotic air to them, and talked of the countrymen’s struggles to be independent of tyrants….but I would feel much more uncomfortable as a French person there than American. The American section was seen almost like we were a silly irritant they tolerated while they struggled with the south area of the country.

With all of this, one odd thing I found there was that John McCain is kind of a big deal there. One tour guide talked about him as if he himself stopped the Vietnam War, and the prison tour had lots of pictures of him during and after being a POW, with his trooper outfits on display nearby. I found it surprising because I was not of the mind that McCain had too much to do with the war as a whole, other than fight in it….but that’s not the image I get of him there.

Christmas: I went to Hanoi for Christmas, thinking that I was going to be the sole celebratory person. How wrong I was. I would venture to say that Vietnamese in Hanoi put most Christian-centric areas of the world to shame with their splendor for the holidays. I went past one street in the Old Quarter with stores swollen with Santa outfits for sale. And people were actually wearing Santa getups in the city for days! Children and men strutted around in full red suits and women dressed as cute reindeer in heels. There were big balloon clusters of snowmen and Santas being floated around and sold throughout the town.

On Christmas Eve, I swear I was in NYC on New Year’s Eve! The streets were congested with so many motorbikes that they couldn’t move around each other. The town was glowing and buzzing with Christmas, and people were making their way to the big Cathedral in town. Curious, I went to the Cathedral with the mob, and found myself in a square where I heard on a speakerphone someone telling a grand story, and a JumboTron in front of the Cathedral broadcasting what was clearly the Story of Christmas (presumably happening in the church). Vietnamese people were there taking pictures smiling in front of the nativity scene and television, though clearly not paying attention to the story being told (I may not be a Christian anymore, but even I was feeling disappointed for the performers’ preoccupied audience). It was all about the celebrations, clearly. Walking back to the hotel, I heard musicians playing carols and restaurants along the area packed with diners and hosting bands playing more holiday tunes.

Funny enough, whenever I wished a Vietnamese a Happy Christmas, they would shy away and say, “Oh, no, we don’t celebrate Christmas here.” Really? I could have sworn you very much did.

More onto the activities of the few days I was there.

My exploring was cut short because within my first 7 hours in the country, I drank a fruit smoothie with yoghurt that was tainted. I had food poisoning and rendered dangerously useless for a day or two. It got to the point where my fever got too high and I could barely stay standing, so I went to a medical clinic – thanks for the tip with that one Tessa! – that hooked me up to an IV drip and shot me up with antibiotics and other great drugs to make me stop getting sick everywhere (meant literally). Fortunately, the hotel I was kind and very worried about my health, bringing me bananas and rice and checking in to see if I was alive throughout the ordeal. Don’t worry, I’m better now – the antibiotics have been strong and helpful.

Because of the great care at the clinic, I was able to make on a tour bus a day after being treated so I could visit the famous UNESCO Site, Ha Long Bay. The drive was three or four hours long with crazy driving (thank you, anti-vomiting meds!), and with a strange pit stop in the middle at an art factory of sorts. Getting to the bay, though, to see just a glimpse of the whole place was totally worth it. I felt spiritually moved with the beauty in Ha Long Bay, and that’s even with it being packed of tourists! The limestone mountains jutting out of the water make a magical atmosphere where we were in a watery paradise that only existed for us, even if for a few hours. In the bay we also went to a cave to see the pretty internal stalactites, which was also a beautiful sight to see for a little while.

I was still dealing with food poisoning and didn’t eat much outside of steamed rice and bananas, but I also heard the food on the tour was great. Our tour guide was a sweet lady who was full of life and pleasant jokes.

I don’t know what else to say about Ha Long Bay, other than it was one of those places I will try to make to again in the future, just to admire the beauty a bit more.

When in Hanoi and not puking my brains out, I toured the city. I walked around the mythical Hoan Kiem Lake and visited the temple on it (Ngoc Son Temple), which is an extremely old reminder of the Chinese influence on the region. And I walked around the Old Quarter to see what kind of other strange shops may exist on different streets. I also visited the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, which was an impressive big box, and ended up meeting an older man named Chien who offered to tour me around the city. Seeing as his name in French translates to my favorite animal in the world (aka dog), I felt it should be fine to join him on his tour of Hanoi. He was a friendly guy who was interested in my family, and shared me stories of his family as well. He showed me as much as he could in a few hours, and was highly concerned that I was going to fall off of his motorcycle at any moment.

Tutting through Hanoi on a motorbike reminded me I was very much in a communist country. Pictures and statues honored hard labor, and the communist flag was flown from most streets we went down.

Chien took me to the Museum of Ethnology, which is a fantastic museum that showcases many of the 54 ethnic tribe Vietnam hosts with exhibits and videos. They also have a tribal house garden, which allows tourists like me to walk around and in houses constructed as if they are meant to be used by specific tribes. I realized about ten years ago in Wales that this was my favorite kind of museum – the exploratory kind that lets me feel what it’s like for a moment to live in a setting like another group of people. I was so happy to find myself in a museum like that in Vietnam. Very well done! He also took me to the Temple of Literature, a millennium-old university. It was a lovely campus, and swarming with tourists, but still peaceful and nice to visit.

On the evening of the 25^th, I bought a ticket to see a water puppet show. This is a very old storytelling method in the area, where they take light wood and paint it into puppets, then perform stories and myths on top of ponds of water. It was a really fun experience, though don’t ask me what most of it was about as it was all in Vietnamese and I somehow missed the pamphlet that translated what was happening. In any case, the puppets were beautiful and seeing such a unique form of storytelling integrating water completely was a real treat for the water-related graduate student in me. It became clear to me how important lakes and rivers are to the history of the people there, and how their lives have revolved around bodies of water in a major way for a long time.

Locals who would interact with me seemed really worried about me being alone while there. I felt safe while walking around (except for my stomach), but I think the locals were more upset about me traveling solo than I could ever have been. Honestly, I was fine. Even on Christmas Day, where I stomached a fancy holiday meal as much as I could, I was happy to be with myself in such an exciting and fun town.