My new favorite job requirement: home sampling!

Me on the bike :P

For part of my time here I am managing a project that involves visiting our patients homes and taking samples to try to find environmental source of the fungus we are studying. Cryptococcus (crypt-oh-caulk-us, the name of the fungus) is found in soil contaminated with bird droppings and is also found growing in eucalyptus trees. For this mini-project, we travel to the patient's house and my team and I collect 50 samples of soil, plants, animal droppings, and dust from their home.

Yep, you read that right - I am a PhD with degrees in Molecular Biology and Biomedical Science and I get to scoop goat and chicken poop into a tube with a spoon :P  But I was SO excited to start this project - mainly because it means I get to leave the office/lab, ride a motorbike with my team out into the field, go meet the patients and their family, and go inside rural Kenyan homes and see how they live! The first step was "training" my team.

I use quotes there, because the protocol is just a pilot study, and I thought I had almost no real qualifications or knowledge that would be required to get my team ready to do environmental sampling. But we scheduled a day and I made the team pick a non-patient home (my research assistant's grandmother's brother...I think), and we all got on motorbikes and drove 25 minutes out of the super small village where my rural clinic is.  The scenery was so amazing - the roads are all a dark red clay color, and after a rain, the contrast with the blindingly bright green of the hills and vegetation is so beautiful!

Traveling in the green valleys

On the way, my driver and Research Assistant Milton, had to swerve around goats, cows, donkeys, sheep, chickens and children in and along the dirt road. We arrived safely to the homestead, which was a compound made up of 5 small houses and one main house. There was also an animal pen, a granary to store maize made out of woven reeds, and a huge chicken coop.   Upon arrival, we were greeted very warmly, with lots of hand shaking and formal introductions of the whole team and the older couple who lived there.

Me with my gourd of porridge

Before I knew it, I was guided to a chair, my hands were washed with a pitcher of warm water and bowl with soap, and I was holding half of a dried, empty gourd. Apparently, it is customary and practically required to feed all guests to your home, so soon enough my gourd bowl was filled with a steaming and large helping of porridge. I was told it was made in the traditional Luo manner, but was also seasoned with lemon and honey. I had just finished a huge breakfast, and the porridge was actually really good (like Cream of Wheat, but with lemon and honey :), so I successfully struggled to finish the whole huge bowl and be polite.

My porridge

Once we were finished eating, we talked to the homeowners for a while (they knew a bit of English, but most of what I got was translated later by my team), and then started the training. I taught my team how to use the GPS and record coordinates and elevation of the site, how to take the ambient temperature and humidity, and how to document the samples and pictures we would take in the event of a real patient. It was really fun, and I was surprised how much my previous biology jobs (working at NASA in college when I did beach mouse sampling) helped me know what to do. The lady of the house followed us around answering our questions and showing off her property. We learned about her kitchen and what she cooked, how she makes bricks out of the clay, and about the animals and vegetables they keep.

Goats eating dirt for some reason

The team enjoyed their day away from the clinic and lab, and we all went for lunch afterward. They gave me the most hilarious puppy dog eyes when the bill came for lunch and asked if I would pay since they were doing "such a good job" according to themselves :P I looked at the bill: all 5 of us got a meal with fish or meat, veggies and rice and a soda, and the whole thing wasn't even $10. Even though I should have pretended to be mean and refused to pay, I couldn't help it once I saw how low the total was and just caved. Also, one of my employees had seen a man walk into the small, dirty restaurant we were in and knew he was homeless, so he had ordered him a meal and paid for it himself, which I thought should be rewarded, too!

Getting a brick making demonstration

The next day we had an actual, real patient home visit, so my lab technician and my research assistant and I all got back on motorbikes and headed out early in the morning to try to avoid the heat of the day. The patient lived a solid 45 minute motorbike ride away from the center of town, but most of the drive was on a well-maintained tarmac road. We got a little lost once we got off the main road and had to stop at several houses for directions....but its because once you are off the paved roads we were literally just riding through people's fields and yards on small footpaths that wound through the rural homes. It was so cool (except for all the really spikey plants that scratched me up pretty well even through my pants while we were riding through the fields)!!

My team and I after training!

When we arrived we met the family, got the permission of the head of household to take samples from his land, and started our procedures! We got to go inside the home and sweep the dust from the floor, which was interesting to me because their chickens actually slept inside the house under an upside down laundry basket at night. I am definitely curious to see if we find fungus in the dirt from the chicken room!

Over the next few hours we took the rest of the soil and plant samples from around the compound: we took samples from their three gardens, a few samples from each of the 4 small houses, lots of goat and chicken droppings, and randomly swabbed any rotting trees with huge, scientific looking Q-tips :) I felt like I was working in a scene from a goofy TV show and we were the forensics team sent to find the murder's DNA somewhere in a crime scene. Except we were outside in blazingly hot weather, I don't have a hair and makeup team, and in the end all we had was a cooler full of poop and dirt samples in plastic tubes. Also, when I asked where the bathroom was, my two male colleagues just burst into giggles...I asked if that meant I should just "take a scenic walk" to "survey the bushes around the homestead" and they nodded through their subsequent giggles in response.

My view at the end of field day

Overall it was super interesting experience and a really great change-of-pace. I like getting to go out and see how people live and just being in the rural areas. The place I stay is an insect research facility in the small port town, and I don't mind staying in their dorms. The rooms are cozy (read: small, cramped, warm), the sunset views from their dock are absolutely fantastic, and they serve pretty decent meals. There are always a few other interesting people staying there and usually I try to strike up conversations at dinner in the common dining area. I've met people from the States doing work with orphans, people from India and Pakistan doing projects on agriculture and water purification, and a bunch of other health related scientists.

My room in the field...like a dorm

Field first aid: salt and soap thumb soaking

Sometimes its tough - the commute from the dorms to the field clinic is 45 minutes each way over a pretty bad dirt road. There are shuttles that leave at 7am and come back to the dorm at 6 or 7pm depending on how punctual everyone is at the end of the day...which makes fore VERY long, tiring days when I'm not in Kisumu. And there are no real stores or restaurants out there...and what does exist closes at sunset. I found myself with a pretty nasty little infection/mystery abscess under my thumbnail one day while out in the middle of nowhere, and I didn't get back to the dorms until pretty late. Since running down the block to the drugstore to grab some hydrogen peroxide and bandaids isn't really an option, I ended up concocting a variety of soaks to try to help get rid of it without taking any of my precious antibiotics I brought from the States :P

Sunset again :)

I managed to find a bar of soap, a salt shaker, a cotton ball and some tape....and after two days of hot soap/salt soakings and a bit of hoping I wouldn't have to self-amputate, I was as good as new! My boss looked at it when I got back to Kisumu and just laughed - she bet me I would lose my nail, but it healed up great and the nail looks totally better...and I didn't have to deplete my stock of prescriptions!

I know this isn't exactly a typical job, but the scenery is amazing, the work is interesting, the bednets are without holes, and the people I work with and meet are a lot of fun.

Volunteer little helpers unloading my field supplies :)

A video of the sunset over Lake Victoria from my field lodging :)