The past 2 days I spent with Joe and Saruni among the Masai removed all the doubts I had about staying in Kenya or with ICROSS. I had the oppertunity first hand to see what no tourists get to see and it was truly a life changing experience.

On Tuesday the 6th of March Joe and Saruni were heading out to Nyonyori which had one of the first ICROSS outpatient centers built in 1986. For that we whould have to travel 1.5 hours South of Ngong passing Kiseria, (safe land - in Masai language) a town where the Masai women walk tens of miles to come and shop, and the men sell their goats.
The Masai are the warrior tribe of East Africa, they are fearlous people who live is extreme harsh conditions, consider the entire land to be their home, they are sheep and cow herders and will travel tens of miles each day with their animals. They can stay without food and water for a couple of days and just keep walking with little rest. I'm not talking about 200 pound grown men doing this, I'm talking about 70 year old women. They used to be expert hunters and you will hear countless tales on how the Masai Warrior would kill a lion with one spear and a shield. The Masai have been researched to have less than ordinary amounts of adrenaline in their system, a low than normal heart beat and muscle mass.(PICS ONLINE: http://picasaweb.google.com/alirzaidi)

At the Outpatient center in Nyonyori I was greeted by Mr. Johnson who is the nurses assistant at the place. The nurse was off for the day. Like all the Masai he had a big smile on his face when he shook my hand. A tall man about 6 feet, slim like all the Masai, opened up the center for me to view. Inside were 2 rooms one for the patients to wait in and the other for the nurse's examination. Johnson explained to me that the common diseases that were treated at the center were diarrhea, typhoid and malaria. They see an average of 10 - 20 patients a day and also provide vaccinations for polio and tetanus. There's probably a lot more he told me that I am forgetting cause of the my remarkable IQ of 55. This was the only Clinic within an hour driving distance in any direction. The Masai people walked 30 km to get to the clinic to be seen by a nurse, mind you this is not a hospital, there is one small room where the meds were stored and meds are supplied by the Kenyan Govt on a quarterly basis. If there is a shortage of supplies ICROSS chips in. Mr. Johnson is a trained health professional from ICROSS while the nurse is an employee of the GOVT. Just like in Nyonyori, ICROSS partners with the Kenyan Govt in most of these Clinics.

Johnson told me that he has seen tremendous progress over the years where training and treatment has led to the number of diarrhea and malaria patients decreasing greatly over the years.

ICROSS like hundreds of Organizations may not be running perfectly there maybe holes here and there but the work that I see them doing first hand in the remotest areas on Kenya where there is no REDCROSS, no UN or other major Non-Profit presence is tremendous. Even if I do believe some of the stuff thats posted in the comments for the earlier blog, how do I discredit the information, the joy that is displayed to me by a Masai who tells me how ICROSS has changed his life for the better.

It doens't matter if Mike Meegan lied about where he did his Phd from in a grant proposal, what matters is that he has been here for 27 years setting up a community health system, remember COMMUNITY in there, where trained locals are treating and improving the lives of other locals. The bigger picture is not what Meegan or ICROSS are doing, its the fact that there are thousands of locals who are helping themselves out and ICROSS is just aiding them in doing that. I will write about meegan and what he's done, again not just what i've seen but what hundreds literally hundreds of Intellectual minds have said about him, remember non of us are perfect, but this post is not about that, its about the incredible Masai.

We left Nyonyori at about 6 pm to head back for our 1.5 hour journey back to the base and on the way Saruni the wise Masai, sang Masai songs and explained to be what the background for each one was. He enlightened me with Masai war tales, on how they used to hunt lions and the songs that the women would sing when the men took the animals to higher pastures during the drought which hits every 10 years.
The next morning Joe, Saruni and I were planning on leaving for the Dr. Joe Barns Clinic in Longasua which is Masai land, about a 3 hours drive south, very close to the Kenyan - Tansanian border. Joe had advised me to take my camera as we would be seeing a lot of wildlife along the way. We left at around 11 am, picked up nurse Sylvia from Kesayria (the masai town from yesterday an hour away from the base) and a long sanitation pipe as a new bathroom was being built at the clinic. We got on the Great North Road which I was told runs all the way down to South Africa. On the way I took pics of the animals I saw on the sides of the road (pics online). We got to a town called Sibili which was about 15 km away from Longausua where the clinic was - here we had Nyama Choma (goat meat), the best roasted goat meat I ever had, tender enough to melt in your mouth. The diner was in a small hut where there were several Masai's eating. There were broken wooden benches, raggy curtains but there was also George Michael being blasted on a small color cable TV. We washed our hands with what was boiling water to me and then according to Masai tradition dried it with paper (thats what they told me but I think they were just trying to save on their TP budget). Then came the cook with the meat on a wooden platter, he cut the meat off the leg of the goat in front of us and we had the raw meat dabbled in salt which was placed on the four corners of the platter. I can't say this enough, but that was the best goat meat I have ever had in my life. After the meal we were now off to Longausua, another 15 km, shouldn't be too long I thought, wrong, it was all on a dirt road that was not fit for a bull to walk on, let alone a truck, but God Bless the Toyota company for getting us there. On the way we saw ostriches, antelopes, hiennas and the Masai, some of them dressed tradionally and others wearing uniforms. Sylvia told me that these are all kids who go to school situated right besides the clinic. This mean't that there were kids walking up to 30 km a day to go to school. Here is where you truely see the thirst for knowledge, we think we like to learn, we think we deserve things, tell me, is it us who deserves a college education or these first and second graders who walk 30 km a day to learn? It reminded me of how glad and blessed I was to be here and strenghened my resolve for spending the rest of my life trying to make things better for kids like these in the world. Their only fault was that they were born to a Masai family instead of the Hilton family, but then again who's to say that they want to be born to a Hilton family. Come to think of it they would hate it, the Masai's are said to be one of the most serene people on the planet with no depression what so ever, so maybe the Paris Hilton or Brittany Spears should have been Masai, maybe there'd be a lot less craziness in their lives.

To us who have lived most of our lives in the West or like the West even in third world countries, the end matters. It's always about the result, the score, the conclusion and never about the journey. To the Africans its about the journey to get to destination and not the destination itself, a concept that if we learn to appreciate or even understand we'll be looking at things from a whole new perspective.

Badae (later)