We stood in the pre-dawn glow of the streetlamps, greeted by intoxicated heckles from the previous night’s most diligent drinkers. A battered, extended cab Toyota Hilux pickup pulled up, carrying a mound of mysterious goods under a green tarp and bearing faded Ethiopian Red Cross decals on its doors.
Some of my toughest times growing up in Kenya were those spent on my way to and from the village river. I call it the village river because it was by and large the only source of water for my village. Never mind the fact that the river was four miles away and was shared among scores of villages along its course.
5:30am and still dark. But the rooster knows the sun is coming and his crow trills up past the sulfurous street lamps into the still night sky.
He’s woken the dogs, and suddenly their frantic howling seems to come from the top of every hill in Addis, making the city seem surrounded by their feral packs.
The sharp barks are soon undercut by the rising moan of the muezzin. He sings the same words that have woken me around the world, but his melody here is unique, more of a monotonous chanting than the sung declaration I’ve heard before.
Bill Freivogel, for the Pulitzer Center
Addis Ababa, Kenya
LWALA, KENYA- In 2006, NewsChannel 5 reported about a Vanderbilt University medical student who was the first person from his Kenyan village to fly in an airplane.
People back home sold their livestock to pay for his ticket to the United States.
Now they need Milton Ochieng back to save his dying village.
Every student at Vanderbilt Medical School encounters AIDS. But only Ochieng has been orphaned by it.
First his mother, then his father - he learned of their deaths through email.
"I don't think anything really prepared me for it," Ochieng said.
David Morse, for the Pulitzer Center
This was, for all of us, a big journey. Most blogs written from the saddle like this one just kind of stop. Though I can't provide closure for myself entirely, and expect that may be true for the others - the experience is still running through us - I feel some need to say goodbye or at least "See you later" to those who have followed our journey from afar.
Global health advocates are trying desperately to get your attention. They worry that statistics have lost their meaning. Who can wrap their mind around 6,500 Africans dying of AIDS every day, anyway? As the director of a global health advocacy firm in Washington told me the other day, "We need a story."
That's when I told her about Milton Ochieng'.
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