Arrival in Nairobi: it's not Ethiopia

Another inauspicious beginning. Moody (Mahmood Qureshi, an eminent neurosurgeon here) had said he would meet me at the airport and accordingly I cancelled the arrangements for a hotel cab to pick me up. Unfortunately Moody was no where to be found. Again someone was nice enough to let me use their cell phone and I reached him in the middle of hospital activities.

The ride from the airport, 4 or 5 miles, to the Fairview Hotel took 2 hours -- apparently typical for Nairobi, but quite a nuisance. Fortunately I am reading a good book (Biography of Benjamin Franklin) and aside from the fact that I had by now been up for 30 hours, I survived.
The hotel is an oasis. High on a hill, no more than two miles or so from the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown Nairobi, I feel like I am in a park in some British protectorate in colonial times. One or two story buildings spread through a park with magnificent gardens; if it were not for the architecture you might think you were in Hawaii.

After locating essential items hidden beneath medical paraphenalia, I met Moody and his colleague Peter for a drink by the pool. They outlined the week for me . . . I hope I survive. This is total immersion in a life I had left behind. I'll be making rounds, seeing patients in the clinic, assisting the residents and attendings in surgery, running a cadaver workshop on a procedure for trigeminal neuralgia, giving grand rounds at the University of Nairobi, two other lectures to neurosurgeons, general surgeons, neurologists and orthopods, and doing three trigeminal neuralgia procedures. On top of all this tomorrow at 7 am I am driving with Peter to assist him in surgery at an outreach hospital two hours from here in Nyeri. We will stay overnite and then tour some game reserves and villages in the foothills of Mt. Kenya (2nd only to Kilimanjaro in Africa).

I have made contact with Jetinder Singh's brother here and he sound like a wonderful fellow. I'm going to have dinner with him Sunday night when I return from Mt. Kenya and he wants me to come to dinner at his parent's house sometime this week.
Nairobi is positively not third world, though you step into a different country no more than 100 yds from the hotel. More on that as the week goes on.

Love to all.