Kwaheri Kenya

Two army troops accompanied us on the road northward to Lamu, for the purpose of security. In theory. I’m fairly sure they just protected us from corrupt police, who we met somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen times. After ditching them at the docks, a tiny speedboat deposited us on the island.

Lamu is the most relaxed, welcoming place I’ve been since arriving in Kenya. There are no vehicles except for the motorbike of the district commissioner. Instead, donkeys carry loads of people or goods between villages and through cramped walkways, squeezing past each other when they find themselves head-to-head. Idle donkeys throng along beachside walkways and in city squares. Mozambique- and Lamu-style sailboats, equipped with a single sail and manned by two people, crowd the water adjacent to the seawall and provide ferry transport between islands, towns, and the mainland. People are so nice. As we walked along the beach at sunrise, collecting coral and shells from clusters of rocks dotting the smooth expanse of sand, women approached with smiles and eagerly carried out jabbered conversations. Men said “Hello” in passing, then carried on with their business, unless they were stopping to make sure we weren’t lost in the twisting maze of sandy alleys.

Monday morning we wandered the streets of Lamu, trailing behind a tiny old man who pointed out 400-year-old doors and mosques and led us through the local market. Our guide decided we needed to get more henna, which the Swahili women told us would take a half hour. It took three. As he waited, Charles quizzed all the kids on their studies and bought the lot of them sodas, obtaining the good graces of their parents for all time. However, he abstained from mentioning that the bottle he carried contained a combination of coke, water, brandy and limes.

That evening, we boarded a sailboat. We crossed the straight between Lamu and Manda Islands before continuing seaward along the mangroves. As the deep orange sun sank into the horizon next to the tip of Lamu, the full moon rose directly across the darkening sky before we returned to shore. Although it was breathtaking, I have now decided that sail boats and small planes are the two most terrifying things on the planet.

Tuesday, traveling back to the mainland, we passed Richard Leaky getting into his boat outside his giant private villa. I didn’t even know he was still alive.

Today was all wrap-up. I took my parents to Kibera, we visited a ceramic bead factory and shop (where they’re supposed to give tours, but they’re closed for xmas), and we had tea with my host mom.

I am now on the plane to Addis Ababa where my Ethiopian classmate Adane invited me up to stay with his family for a while. However. He’s gone AWOL, so couch surfing (and a hastily-bought guidebook) has become my new savior. As the flight attendant so graciously informed us, “In the likely event of a failure of the air supply…”

Until next time.

Surrounded by Pineapples and Coconuts

Tsavo West is green. Like, crazy-long-lush-grass-and-shrubbery-everywhere-you-look green, nestled in sprawling valleys between dramatic, clear cut uplifts and cliffs that stand decisively in front of the setting sun. Looking into the distance, the thousand shades of green shift subtly to deep, mellow blues before the hills fade into the ever-present African dust. Above the whole presides Mt. Kilimanjaro, silhouetted against the west, its snowcap extending far down the ravines of its rippled contour.

The rainy season is winding up and winter migrations are taking place. Songbirds rose in clouds of thousands from the brush as we passed through, flying a few meters to settle among the upper leaves and branches of a single tree. Wydas chased each other, paradise-inspired tails trailing behind. Raptors surveyed the scene below from every bare perch in sight. Flocks of guinea fowl scattered like chickens. Dik diks presented themselves absolutely everywhere, bounding into the brush in twos and threes.

So, we visited Tsavo West. Amazing Animal Acquaintances included a herd of bad-tempered buffalo (when have they ever got a mild disposition??), a herd of elephants that decided to pop up straight in front of Kili, another family of elephants that started trumpeting and charging at a jeep when the smoking tourists contained therein used camera flashes after sundown at close range, a family of hyenas (with a cub), and a pride of lions that appeared out of the bush and elected to sprawl across the road in front of us. Oh, and we passed this crazy awesome tree with a strangler fig establishing its roots and slowly, steadily and creepily cutting off its blood supply for all time.

Tuesday we checked out the Sheitani Lava Fields, a flow emerging from a nearby cluster of cones, known by Satan’s name due to its emission somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 years ago and the undoubted witnessing and subsequent superstition by local tribes. Deep fissures ran throughout the crisp, rock as heat rose in waves from its baking black surface.

Under the rock of the Sheitani flow runs a river which emerges at Mzima Springs, a haven filled with cool, clear water, lined by cluster upon cluster of papyrus, and home to a large number of basking Nile crocodiles. And a ridiculously excessive quantity of fish, who congregated on the bottom of the river and stared at us through the windows of a nifty little underwater house.

Wednesday, amid hills engulfed in morning fog, we departed Tsavo West for Mombassa. If I hadn’t spend a semester in the Galápagos and a subsequent month in the Amazon very nearly breathing water, I would probably claim that Mombassa is humid. As it stands, the city is hot. It is busy, bustling, and noisy. Matatus and tuk tuks (open Indian-style three-passenger, three-wheeled taxis) cram the streets. Beggars abound, even more so than in Nairobi. And they’re more persistent, but that might be due to the big white safari van that broadcasts MONEY to a five-block radius. The vast majority of the population is Muslim, ergo my long pants and frisbee jersey once again made an appearance. Nairobi’s omnipresent food carts that impart the appearance of a farmers’ market scattered by a tornado are accompanied by stalls hawking cassava chips, fried fish and popcorn. And coconuts. The prominence of English in Nairobi is replaced almost entirely by Swahili, kind of making me wish I had put some more effort into that class.

We visited Fort Jesus, originally erected by the Portuguese, who sailed under the Christian flag and built the structure in the shape of their savior floating in the water on his back. And then the Arabs took it over, and I’m not quite clear on what happened from there. But, there were some really cool super-old walls (with spiky things on top), a moat, a very old, very dead Portuguese skeleton, and some wall paintings of chameleons and plundering ships and sacred hearts. And an artillery room connected to a crazy arched passage out to the water.

We crossed to the mainland on the Likoni Ferry, cars and people crammed into every open nook and cranny, adorned by giant signs banning photography. Because blowing up would be bad. Or something. We ended up walking through a Swahili village, following a man who owned a kiosk, winding through houses constructed of stone glued together by mud and covered with vaulted thatched roofs and surrounded by garden plots and mango trees. (One of the kids who waved at us from an adjacent soccer field wore a Blazers’ jersey, which pretty much made my day.) We came to a house where a woman sat out front, tossing balls of chapati dough from hand to hand as she floured and stacked them in preparation for sale the next day. Her husband disappeared into a shack, returning with fresh chapati to pass around the group before we headed home.

Thursday we drove north along the mainland until we arrived at a track leading off the road alongside a quarry, where a group of oryx had decided their day was best spent chilling out in front of the administrative buildings. And then we arrived at Haller Park, and realized that the oryx were actually part of a much larger contingent that made its residence in an expansive tract of marshes, ponds, rivers and woods reclaimed from aforementioned quarry. Oryx were everywhere. So were waterbuck, submerged to their stomachs in the mire, and vervet monkeys, who sat in a bush and placidly stared as a kid walked straight up and roared in their faces. There was a crocodile breeding program (behind fences or in sunken enclosures), a reptile exhibition (with green mambas and spitting cobras), hippos hiding in shaded sludge and giraffes who once again eagerly removed grass-and-honey pellets from our outstretched hands.

Following Haller Park we hit up Kenyatta Public Beach, a stretch of pristine white sand leading down to the turquoise water of the Indian Ocean, lined by rows of ramshackle vending stalls. Men and boys leading camels with super sketchy saddles wove between people sprawled absolutely everywhere, lounging or wading in rented swimsuits and tires. On the way back to the car a palm frond crashed down in front of us, missing our heads by approximately two meters.

Later in the afternoon we wound our way into a market, navigating narrow, twisting aisles of new and used clothing and emerging in an alley lined by boatloads (literally) of fresh watermelons, pineapples, mangoes, apples and oranges piled head-high. Fruit gave way to women selling fresh veggies laid out on cloths spread in front of them. Finally, we stepped into a shop lined in row upon row of sacks of beans, maize and rice. Swahilis busily weighed, packaged and priced little paper bags of saffron, paprika, pilaf mix, curry powders, tea spices, lemon salts and tomato powder that adorned shelves on the back wall. It smelled wonderful.

In the evening we wandered the streets of a secluded neighborhood, searching for an acquaintance of our local guide who did henna. A few phone calls, several U-turns and some rapid Kiswahili swapped with passers-by later, we stood at the front door of a mud-and-brick home. She was praying, so we waited. When she returned, she found herself occupied with other clients, so we waited some more. “It is a busy day,” they told us. “She is busy on Thursdays, because weddings begin on Friday. She is too busy.” And so we wandered the streets again, searching for her back-up. Eventually we arrived at the feet of an old, wrinkled woman sitting in front of the door to a bleak concrete building. “Yes, this is the place. My granddaughter is here, but she is busy. You will have to wait.” And so we waited. And then her granddaughter invited us in, squeezed henna into a tube, and covered our arms in intricate floral Swahili designs.

Friday, we drove northward to Malindi. The small city is situated along a stunning coastline, characterized by a large Italian population and culture and absurdly excessive numbers of guys hanging out on the beach, looking for hookups and money and preying on unsuspecting white tourists.

We detoured into the Gede Ruins- the remnants of a Swahili town abandoned in the 1600s that remained undiscovered until the late 1800s. Most noteworthy was the king’s palace, which contained his tomb and those of his four wives and as his own private bathroom (with two stalls). There were also baobabs, strangler figs and a new kind of monkey, who quite literally came up to us demanding bananas.

Yesterday I dove the barrier reef just off of Watamu. It wasn’t as dramatic as the Galápagos, but it was still pretty freaking awesome. The water was for all intents and purposes a salty, tepid bath. Rocks were graced by four-ft. sea anemones (Like insane giant aliens! I didn’t even realize what they were until I backed up a ways…) and crazy corals growing everywhere. Lionfish lurked below overhangs, while mottled yellow and green leaf scorpionfish waited among beds of sea weed. Deep, brilliant indigo triggerfish wandered past, as did an unflappable puffer. Nudibranchs clung to the coral, backs striped vivid violet, orange, and black or bright blue. Bright violet feather coral swayed in the current. Blue-spotted stingrays darted away as we disturbed the water around them, and we wrote our names in the sediment layered on the back of a giant sea cucumber. Also, I managed to lose a fin, sending it wafting down to 25 meters, fully convincing my divemaster that I was, in fact, the world’s biggest idiot.

And then we all came back together as a big, happy family and visited a community woodcarving co-op, where (local) people have come together to make lots and lots and lots of pretty stuff that sits in a showroom, waiting for unsuspecting outsiders (that would be me) to wander in and amble aimlessly through the aisles and gawk and leave with a little less money.

This morning before departing, we cussed away the swarming boys and wandered down the beach and out into the sea grass exposed by the low tide, discovering bright orange coral, sea urchins, neon-blue fish, brittle stars and tubeworms.

And now I find myself in Lamu, but that is a story for another day.

Mountains, Mambas and Maasai

Tuesday evening, I headed out to meet up with my family in Maasai Mara. Traffic, rain and a certain pair of corrupt policemen lengthened a four-hour ride to six, and we arrived somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:15 AM. I wanted to go to sleep. “Let us take a late dinner!” Are you kidding? No, thank you. I’m not hungry. Seriously, I just want to go to bed. “At least warm your stomach!” Right. Whatever. I give.

Wednesday, we headed into the bush in the middle of nowhere (otherwise known as Maasailand) and got dropped off with two guides, a cook and three porters. We walked across the scrubby desert, found a tortoise, passed several houses and crossed a dry river before arriving at the outskirts of Naarasura, a small town situated at the base of the Loita Hills. Tents were set up in the front yard of the mud house of a family of seven: a mother, two daughters and four sons, the youngest of whom was named Lydia, nine years old, and in Class (grade) 5. Lydia, who was entirely grossed out by my nose stud, lives in a tiny shack in the yard constructed of burlap and several sheets draped over wooden poles. It contains a small bed, a fire, a pot and three stools. In addition, we shared the yard with a bleating goat tied to a post, a dog, and a corral containing three cows and a calf.

That afternoon we walked into town and found market day in full swing, the land awash in blazing red and orange blankets as Maasai bartered en masse and made their way home, decked out in layer upon layer upon layer of beaded regalia.

After dinner we lit the travel menorah with birthday candles and celebrated the eighth night of Hanukkah with Lydia, her mother (who spoke only Maasai and Kiswahili), and the rest of our company.

Thursday morning, Lydia and I traded earrings and a blue beaded bracelet before she left for school. We made our way through town and up into the hills, climbing through scrubby, thorny trees and over light orange rock sparkling with minerals under the sun. As we crested the first hill we looked back over the desert below us, stretching unmarred past Naarasura and its distinctive blue-roofed school into the distant haze. We descended into a valley and continued through sand and mud and planted plots, sharing the trail with Maasai warriors and women much more badass than myself, running marathon-plus lengths through the hills as part of their daily business or returning home bowed under the firewood stacked high across their backs. Oh, and convincing endless herds of goats and cows to Part the Red Sea and let us through. Please and Thank You.

When we passed through a manyatta that consisted of (according to Zach) 1 husband, 7 wives and 25-30 children, we picked up a tail of two men from the community. Who turned out to be something a bit akin to Maasai bandits. Because the Maasai believe the land and the road (aka barely discernable dirt track) are theirs. And we paid fees to cover passage in the nearby town of Narok, which were supposed to be distributed throughout the community. But this is Kenya, and the dough got stuck in a bank. And the community wanted their money anyway, and didn’t care that we had already paid, so as we walked a conversation ensued that involved excessive repetitions of the word “pesa” (money). An hour later when we arrived at a river teeming with tall trees decked in masses of vines, the warriors charged ahead of us, posted themselves by trees on either side of the path and shoved their spears into the ground. An elder arrived to contribute to negotiations, we sat down on a log to wait, and a geezer super drunk off of traditional brew (which commonly makes people go blind) showed up and started claiming that we all belonged to him. In Maasai. While shaking a traditional club decorated with dozens of bottle caps with the tops cut off in our faces. After another half hour, in which the conversation moved off to the side into the vines, voices were raised and the warriors’ pangas (crazy badass knives) appeared to be drawn, money changed hands and it was decided that we would camp on the opposite bank.

That evening around the campfire, we traded stories from our homelands with our guides. Simon, our cook, made phenomenal food over the fire. Peter, one of our porters, is the nephew of Ganisha, my guide on Mt. Kenya. Julius, our other porter, is possible the quietest person I’ve ever met.

John, our lead guide, is Julius’ brother. He told me he used to drink. Then he started climbing Mt. Kenya, and realized that in order to guide professionally at high altitude, he was going to have to cut the habit. Now, when kids from towns he passes through help him to carry things, he pays them the money he used to spend on beer.

Mwangi one of the most companionable people I’ve ever met, is from Nanyuke, a town to the west of Mt. Kenya. When I asked him what was the craziest thing he’d ever paid off a cop for, he told me a guy once decided to arrest him for walking across a street while on his phone. And because he was late to the airport to pick some people up and couldn’t take the time to go to central police station, he actually had to spit up the dough. And he told me about the first time he came to Nairobi and went to the bathroom, and had never seen a toilet, so he stood on it instead of sitting down.

Zach, our Maasai guide, is involved in a campaign to stop the tradition of female circumcision within the Maasai community. Apparently uncircumcised girls are viewed as childlike and unmarriageable, so they seek out the procedure in order to be attractive to men. He told us how, in our present day and age, the communities elders determine who will live a traditional life to maintain the culture and who will go to school to become a “Clever Maasai.” Those who maintain the traditional lifestyle then go into the bush for three years to survive on their own, following circumcision at 15. They kill a lion, transition into manhood, and are welcomed as something akin to heroes upon their return. Zach, however, asserts that he wants only one wife and 3-5 kids, so that he can pay for them all to go to school. He was astounded that I have the freedom to reject a man’s advances. However, he’s also grown up in a society in which, when a man wants a girl, he goes and steals her, takes her home, announces his intention to marry her to her parents, and then begins negotiations. He also explained the Maasai tradition of hospitality: if a man comes to a manyatta and there’s another man his age, the visitor is welcomed into the host’s house to spend the night with his wife. They stick a spear in the ground in front of the door to let the host know the visitor is still inside: simple and to the point.

Friday we walked down into a valley and followed a river through a forest called the “Lost Daughter,” named after a girl who ventured in with her father and never returned, passing below black and white colobus monkeys and scattering a group of baboons. After departing the forest and climbing a gentle slope, we emerged at the edge of a set of escarpments from which we looked down around 2,000’ to grassy plateaus and a flat acacia desert that merged into ridges and hills far into the distance. To either direction, cliffs rippled and folded as they twisted and turned in their sheer drop to the land below. As we continued through the heat to the beginning of our descent, my seemingly-ADD self became somewhat distracted and left behind when I decided that playing with a two inch chameleon would be the best use of my time. Which wouldn’t have been an issue, except that then I was somewhat alone in the bush, and the next thing I saw as I walked down the path was a sizable, sleek black serpentine head appearing from the brush to the side of the trail about four meters in front of me. Which turned into a good eight or nine feet of slender, glinting, slate-shaded freaking BLACK MAMBA slithering across the trail.  To which my reaction was an decidedly intuitive, “Holy shit, that is a Giant Black Snake!” And then it anticlimactically meandered its way into the shrubbery and disappeared among the acacias. 

We set up camp beside a river running at the base of the escarpments, next to another tiny Maasai town called Ngumu. I think. We soon picked up an audience of a dozen gawking kids, who instantly determined that my meager Kiswahili promoted me to “most awesome mzungu ever.” I subsequently passed the afternoon by jumping off ledges into shallow water, learning to swim “Maasai style,” playing kids’ games that dredged up vague memories from my childhood (but substituted with Maasai words), trading stories and enduring somewhere in the neighborhood of ten pairs of hands assaulting my hair at once.

Saturday morning we walked into town to await our ride. I passed an hour sitting with some old women selling tobacco and salt and meticulously beading jewelry beneath a giant tree that had scattered tiny, sticky fruit all over the ground. I spoke a little Kiswahili, the women taught me a word (maybe two) of Maasai, they laughed at me (a lot), and two of them bestowed strings of beads upon me- to remember them by.

For some yet-to-be-determined reason, we ended up walking several kilometers across the scorching desert before meeting our van. On the way back to Nairobi we passed through Magadi Lake. I’m sure at one point it was stunning, surrounded by crazily formed eroded rocks, banks crusted with dazzling white minerals. Presently, however, the body of water has been divided and sectioned. Entire sectors consist of muddy sludge, sucked through pipes to a processing plant where soda and salt are withdrawn and sent off by the trainload to be processed for sale. It is the epitome of living death.

Sunday we attended Sylvia’s (my host mom’s) nephew’s wedding. We found ourselves accosted by a girl from a small town upcountry who gushed ceaselessly about how she dreamed every night about the chance to go to America, and that her one wish in the world was to raise her children there. We then had five awkward minutes in which she asked for my phone number, I told her I didn’t have a phone, she stared expectantly between us, and we pretended we didn’t know she wanted us to get her immigration paperwork. Then my mom asked, “Which state would you go to if you came to America?” “Columbia or Mexico!!!” Uh huh.

Gotta Love It.

Home Free

I spent my second (and last) week with Carolina for Kibera researching grants.

In other news, my parents flew in Friday evening. My aunt was also supposed to arrive, but a combination of weather clusterfucks in Seattle and Paris set her back a day. Saturday, we visited the Sehldrick Trust, an organization in Nairobi National Park that take in orphaned elephants and nurses them for two to three years before they’re moved to centers for further rehabilitation in preparation for reintroduction to the wild. The elephants were awesome. After beelining for their keepers (who bottle-feed them every three hours and sleep together in their stalls) and guzzling milk, they proceeded to converge in a watery mud pit. Chaos ensued, involving splashing, fighting, full submersion, and failed attempts to return to dry land. Except for the smallest, a 1.5-month-old found down a well, who hid next to her keeper in the shade of the umbrella he held over her until she made her way along the rope line and we all reached down to pet her grizzly back.

We also glimpsed a blind rhino, taken in as a baby and unable to return to the wild, as he ambled around the back of his enclosure. And we were graced by lots of opportunistic warthogs.

Before returning home, we stopped by the giraffe center and found ourselves on the receiving end of lots of giant, dry kisses.

As of 15 minutes ago: Papers are turned in, finals are completed and seminars suffered through. And I, Thank You Very Much, am OUTTA HERE.

Trash is Cash

Kibera is Africa’s largest slum, located in the middle of Nairobi, with a population estimated between 300,000 and 1,000,000. You know how, when you see photos of slums, you think everything is made of corrugated metal? Yeah, that’s an illusion. The vast majority of buildings are constructed of mud-on-stick. Corrugated metal is erected on top of the main structure, if possible. If peope can afford it, concrete is applied to the outside of the mud, so passers-by don’t actually realize that’s what it’s made of and decide it’s easy pickings. There are perhaps one or two paved streets. Everything else is dirt, which in the rainy season turns into somewhat of a muddy clusterfuck covered in a layer of trash. Not that there’s any organization to the roads and paths that wind between buildings in the first place. Chickens, goats, and rangy dogs wander the streets, always underfoot.

I feel like, for some reason, media never imparts how industrious slums actually are. There are shops everywhere, selling anything from medicinal plants to fruit to phone credit to traditional wrap-cloths to bootlegged music to omnipresent hair extentions. Occasional pubs pop out between ramshackle buildings. There is a huge informal sector: streets are lined with food vendors, people welding metal gates, and men with hammers laid out on sheets. People wander the streets, arms laden with baskets and washing implements. Everybody is busy.

However, for all that goes on in Kibera, the government flatly refuses to recognize it as a settlement. Which means, among other effects: no real water supply, no sewage system, no trash pick up and no police service. Trash is piled absolutely everywhere: burning alongside the roads, in the gutters, along the train tracks and in huge mountains that stretch, at times, as far as you can see. Speaking of train tracks. They run straight through the middle of the slum. They’re relatively clean; people are paid to come through and remove trash with regularity so that trains don’t jump the track. Which has been known to happen.

Lack of trash, a straight path, and central proximity all contribute to the train tracks’ utilization as a popular walking route in Kibera. Unfortunately, people don’t always hear the train coming. Sometimes it whistles. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes people are simply distracted. So, Tuesday afternoon, as a coworker and I made our way through Kibera, we found people gathered on either side of the tracks. “What’s going on?” “The train hit someone.” Forty minutes later, when we returned, the crowd was still there. “They haven’t brought him out yet?” “No, look. That’s the head, over there by that green plastic bag.” Because, you see, in order for the head to be removed, someone would have to call the police. But the police are corrupt and untrusted, and they don’t really venture into Kibera in the first place. Not that there’s any real way to get a cop car down to the tracks even if they did decide to do something about it. And so the head still sits by the tracks, like a movie prop, and no one knows where the rest of him has ended up.

I’m in another internship, with a program called Carolina for Kibera, one of the largest and most-respected NGOs in the slum. It’s community-based; about a quarter of the employees live in Kibera. CFK runs several main programs:
• A sports program, which runs soccer tournaments, in which all teams are required to have members from multiple tribes.
• A community-based medical clinic and VCT (voluntary counsellng and testing center).
• A reproductive health and womens’ rights cemter.
• Taka ni Pato, an environmental program, which is where I’m placed.

Taka Ni Pato (Trash is Cash) has got some really cool stuff going on. In a place where the population survives on less than $2 a day, people aren’t going to be interested in picking up trash for the sake of picking up trash. So, CFK guides people in utilizing trash to make a profit. Some of the groups I’ve met are:

A mens’ group, who makes jewelry and other items from cow bones that would otherwise end up as trash on the streets. After bones are collected (retrieved from the butcher?) they’re shaped, dyed, and polished before being sold to visitors or at the market.

A womens’ group which makes a lot of different items, including greeting cards. You know how in elementary school you made paper by spreading a pulp across a screen and then flipping it over onto a surface to dry? That’s exactly what these women do, but they make the pulp by breaking down paper that would otherwise have gone to waste. After letting it dry and folding it, they embellish the cards with hand-drawn designs. In addition, the woman who appears to be the leader of the group has put together a school for children orphaned by HIV/AIDS. She takes them in, feeds them, puts them up and schools them until they’re old enough to return to relatives or care for themselves.

Another womens’ group, who crochets and sews handbags, hats, and earrings from plastic bags and tape that have been recovered from trash in the area. After collecting the material they clean it and cut it into strips before beginning to craft a final product.

Several youth groups who go door-to-door, collecting trash. From there, they separate out food waste, plastics, and true trash. Food waste is taken to be turned into compost, which will later be sold or used in a garden plot of their own. Plastics are taken to a recycling center, where an industrial shredder is used to turn them into material that can be resold for a profit.

Taka Ni Pato also has a large program in place in primary schools, running environment clubs. Environment clubs in Kibera, however, differ somewhat drastically from those in the states. Instead of focusing on tree hugging and conservation, they focus on the basics: Installing sanitary toilets in the schools. Making sure waste from toilets doesn’t find its way above ground, into the gutters surrounding the schools. Installing a tap next to the toilets. Educating students about food storage, waste disposal, hygiene, sanitation and hand-washing: making hand-washing mandatory after using the toilet and before meals. Because in an area with as many issues as Kibera, saving the rhinos is probably last on anyone’s to-do list.

For all the good that Taka Ni Pato is doing, there are definitely also some issues that have yet to be resolved. Youth groups remove recyclable plastics and food waste from trash. However, true trash is still left behind to be burned. Which continues to contribute to atmospheric degredation and health problems in the area, just like the trash being piled up and burned all over the rest of the slum. This progam does nothing to address the removal of actual trash. Even if there were a way to collect it all in a main area and dispose of it, it probably wouldn’t happen: people have been tossing trash onto the nearest pile as they walk past since they were born. What’s going to make them change their habits now?

The plastic shredding program is good in theory. Unfortunately, it’s based around an industrial shredder. Which takes a lot of power to run, and electricity is expensive. In order for the program to be worth running, a lot more plastic needs to be collected than is currently achieved. So, CFK indefinitely subsidizes the cost of running the shredder so that youth groups are able to make a profit. But really, net total, is anything actually being achieved? I doubt it.

Also, you can educate as many school kids as you want about hygiene, and washing your hands, and using sanitary toilets. But no matter how much knowledge you impart, that won’t change the fact that there’s likely no access to clean water, and more often than not two toilets serve a school of perhaps 600 kids. Without resources, there’s no way to convert knowledge into habit.

In other news, I found frisbee. Well actually, the onmiscient Facebook found it prudent to inform a Beloit alum, who happens to be in Peace Corps Kenya, that I was in the area. Nik, said Beloit alum, is one of the founders of BUFF (Beloit Ultimate Frisbee Family). After some conversation, we also realized we had a class together three years ago. Anyway, he introduced me to Nairobi Ultimate– a ton of expats who get together and play pick-up two times a week on the nicest fields you’ll find in the country (which isn’t saying much). And it pretty much made my month. And then, yesterday, this guy named Matt showed up to play, took one look at my shirt and said, “You go to Beloit?” “Yep.” “I graduated in 2004!” Crazy small world. Where Ultimate connects us all.

Also, one of Nik’s friends got slightly delayed coming into Nairobi. Something about her matatu trying to ford a river… and failing. Gotta love it.

Harry Potter came out on Friday. I bought tickets six hours early. There were five people in the theatre. Go figure.

Also, I’m suburned.

Psyche!!!

Why Kenya will drive me to insanity:

• The convergence of OCD tendencies and dirt. It’s an entryway, people. Get over it.
• Urination in public as the second-most-common form of socialization among male members of the species.
• People assuming I don’t speak English because we have different accents. (Ok, given, after they decided I didn’t speak my first language I switched to Spanish to get them to go away. But still.)
• People harassing me for money.
• Blatant pickpockets.
• Creepy men who drop all their shit and chase after me for hugs on sketchy paths.
• People who watch and laugh while above mentioned chase after me for hugs on sketchy paths.
• People who don’t listen. And then misinterpret. And then look at me like I’m stupid.
• Arrogant assholes who think I’m easy enough to pick up with a lewd line on the side of the road.
• People who point at a wall, say “over there” and expect me to infer “the yellow building out around the corner and a ten minute walk up the street to your right.”
• ADHD weather.
• Pollution.
• Househelp who washes (aka soaks in a tub) my shoes without asking. Including my silk tennies. Freaking hell.
• People who freak out when you accidentally leave on a light, but let the TV run for hours in an unoccupied room.
• Unbelievably crappy imitation reality shows and sitcoms. Think Days of our Lives and go ten times worse. Then add in abominable English.
• Staff who are more worried about my academics than my healthcare. WTF.
• Unclear expectations.
• Hospitals that won’t let me see my own damn file.
• Ugali. Look it up.

(Yes, I’m in a bad mood. How could you tell?)

Things aiding the retention of my sanity:

• Nutella.
• Pineapple.
• The synagogue.
• Cheap Ethiopian restaurants.
• 3G internet.

Oh. By the way. Harry Potter is coming out this week. Even in Kenya. (I think.) Check it.

Right. Anyway. Now that’s all outta the way, let’s get to the good stuff. I switched internships. I was supposed to go to a town near Lake Victoria and work with a group called CREPP (Community Rehabilitation and Environmental Protection Program) for the rest of the semester. And then I went into Nairobi Hospital last Sunday to find out what was up with this weird pain I’d been having in my stomach. Six hours, an ultrasound, and a bunch of lab results later (side note: damn needles to Hell), the casualty department declared I may or may not have appendicitis and referred me to a (Kenyan) surgeon. Who I saw on Monday, and who told me it was prolly appendicitis and he wanted to go in with a camera and take my appendix out. And sent me off with some painkillers. So then I saw this other (Indian) surgeon on Tuesday, who told me that Dr. Kenya was stupid, because it was really only a 5% chance of appendicitis. Oh, and yes, there was a mass in the area, which would keep them from seeing anything with a camera anyways. Dr. India sent me off with antibiotics, and told me to come back in on Saturday and we’ll see how it’s going. Actually, he inspired a lot more faith than Dr. Kenya. So I went back today and he told me that maybe the antibiotics were taking care of a subclinical infection, it was almost definitely not my appendix and most probably nothing more than a change of culture: aka, lack of exercise, fiber, liquids (guilty), and calcium. And sent me off with supplements and told me to come back to check in after a week, and to quit working toward giving myself a kidney stone.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Kenyan healthcare at it’s finest. Gotta love it.

Thanks a ton for all the well-wishes (This is me being sincere). Y’all can stop worrying now.

So now that I’ve missed a week of internship and am sticking around Nairobi (joy to the world), I’ve got this interview with the East African Wildlife Society on Monday. We’ll see what happens.

Reality Check

Once upon a time there was a girl who kicked around the idea of graduating, becoming a paramedic, and joining her honorary brother and his wife as they whizzed around Ptown in ambulances and then went off to save lives with crazy killer skills in the boonies of a developing country. She even designed herself a major centered around health in developing countries to help out. Too bad there was a catch, and too bad she didn’t give it credit. Those who know her really, really well are familiar with the story where it took three people to hold her down to put an IV in when she was seven. Well, she thought she’d gotten herself over that slight aversion to needles (going into herself or others) that had, several times, involved nearly passing out. And then she went to a hospital in the boonies of Kenya and realized with dismay that a certain traitorous sympathetic response still took up residence within her body. What? Oh yeah. That would be me. So, career option # 1, Paramedic: crossed off. It sucks, but that’s life. On the bright side, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the process of elimination at its finest.

We take for granted so many little tidbits of knowledge that come with being part of an educated population. A woman came into the OPD this week with malaria, complaining that the drugs given to her in January hadn’t been effective since she obviously still had the disease. Explaining that the drugs had in fact worked, and she had gotten malaria a second time, was futile.

For the frequency with which people come into the OPD with malaria, prophylactics would really be a cheaper option– especially at the price for which they’re readily available in Kenya. Unfortunately, people fail to recognize that the whole point is to take the meds before you start to feel like you’re going to die. Instead, the drugs are sought from the chemist and consumed without consultation after the individual has self-diagnosed. Too bad doxycycline and mefloquine don’t work after the fact.

People also have this really weird notion that injections will fix anything, even if nothing is wrong in the first place. They come in complaining of random pain. The doctors order an injection of saline, or a multivitamin, and the pain goes away. Gotta love placebos.

Honestly, the level of ignorance is astounding. A woman brought in her 2-year-old daughter with chicken pox, a temperature above 102ºF, and febrile seizures. It took ten minutes to convince her to admit her daughter to the hospital. I mean, really. Go up another 1ºC and your daughter’s brain is going to begin fizzling and frying to death. I know it’s expensive, but it’s still your kid. Or, does her sex factor into your reluctance? I know girls aren’t as valued as boys, but still.

Speaking of which. When women come in to give birth, their husbands drop them off, turn tail and run. Women go through labor and give birth alone. Because 1: Men are chickens. And 2: If the baby’s a girl, there’s a good chance the husband will end up mad. Never mind it’s his fault– he’s probably never heard the word “genetics.” When the baby comes out, the first thing the mother sees isn’t the face. They turn the baby around, pull its legs up and present it butt-first so she can see the sex.

Technology in the OPD is sadly lacking… or unbelievably oldschool. There’s one ECG. It attaches to the patient with clamps on the wrists and a bunch of little bell-shaped silver pieces that stick on around the heart. The nurses follow a chart to set it up, and half the time they get it wrong. There are no backboards, no heart monitors, one blood sugar meter (finger sticks are done with syringe needles), one nebulizer, and doctors share stethoscopes.

Handwritten patient records– those that haven’t fallen apart– are stored alphabetically by first name in cardboard boxes. Sort of. The organization doesn’t extend beyond the first letter, so finding a record more often than not involves flipping through dozens of pinned-together paper cards adorned with illegible handwriting. If, that is, the top half of the card hasn’t been decimated by wear and tear.

Intake forms do not ask for birth date or an emergency contact. They do include NHIF number (Kenya’s version of subsidized health insurance), names of subdistrict and village, names of headman and chief, phone number of the person who admitted you (if it exists), level of education, nearest primary school, and age (if known).

In other news: My host mom walked into the living room the other day clutching a chicken by the wings. “You eat chicken?” You know I do. “We eat this tonight.” Sure enough, the pot on the table that evening contained an entire chicken, feet, legs, and head included. The next day, she served leftovers: head and feet.

I’m in Nairobi for the weekend. Went to one of my Swahili professors’ weddings today. In the suburbs of Nairobi, I think. Kind of hard to tell where we were, but upon disembarking from the matatu we were led to the church by a guy on drugs and wearing a tarp as a skirt, who declared he was going to kill our boyfriends when we told him we were married. The ceremony itself was a really noisy affair, with kids underfoot everywhere and lots of yodeling.

And finally: Appallingly dubbed Spanish telenovelas will, without doubt, bring about my slow, painful, tragic death.

Mzungu How Are You?

If I ever decide to have kids, I’m going to have to get over my aversion to anything standing on two legs, with a voice box, under the age of 9. With maybe two exceptions. Mzungu. I hate that word. Literally translated, it means “traveler.” For all other purposes, it means “White Person.” As in, “White person, with lots of money, from far away, who’s super important and lives in a space-age futuristic world.” Coupled with “How are you,” the three words every Kenyan knows, and coming from every kid who sees me on the street and openly stares, it’s enough to drive me insane.

My host mom is a walking paradox. Keep in mind that she’s got both a degree in community health and in nursing, and works in the provincial hospital. The day I arrived, I ate a hard-boiled egg. Plain, just like always. Jacinta asked what I was doing. I returned a clueless look. Because according to local belief, eating eggs without salt will leave you with a distended stomach later in life. Then again, local tradition dictates treating burns with raw egg. So, there you go.

We got into a philosophical debate the other day about food, mainly because she insists I to eat somewhere in the neighborhood of three plus kilos a day… to grow. When I told her I stopped growing somewhere right around 15, she was appalled. So was her husband. “You stopped yourself growing?” “No, I just haven’t gotten taller since then. And I certainly don’t need to grow any wider.” Yep, I left them speechless. Don’t really understand why, since I bet they haven’t grown since they were in their teens either. I finally turned around and flat out told her that the amount of food she was forcing on me was making me physically sick. Which, by the way, it was. On the bright side, I now eat three normal-sized meals a day and do not find roasted maize, eggs, sugarcane, crackers, porridge and chapati shoved in my face on the hour, every hour.

My house help has officially pegged me as a dimwitted idiot. Probably something to do with teaching me how to do my laundry by hand and the utter nonexistence of my Kiswahili. Jacinta, on the other hand, is sure I live in some sort of world where machines do everything for us. “Come. I teach you how to wash dishes.” “I know how to watch dishes.” “Oh. You wash dishes in your place?” “Uh huh.” She holds up an avocado. “You know what this is?” “Yep.” “How about this?” She has a potato in her hand. And then arrowroot, and cucumber, and papaya, and a passion fruit, and… you get the picture. I mean, really, does Hollywood give us that bad an image? She’s also scandalized that I appreciate carrots and green beans raw. So now my house help thinks I’m an idiot and my host mom thinks I’m insane.

In some ways, the house is definitely different than in Nairobi. There’s no stove; cooking is done over the fire or a pot filled with coals. There are showerheads, but no hot water even though the house is apparently wired for it. So, showers are taken by mixing scalding and freezing water in a bucket, then splashing it over yourself. The power goes off when it feels like it. Half the toilets in the house consist of a hole in the floor. Oh, side note: I forgot to mention that the place also has papaya and avocado trees, green beans, peppers, and tomato plants scattered around and about.

Anyway. I’m stationed in Consolata Mission Hospital. And to whoever told me malaria doesn’t exist in the mountains: That’s a lie. It’s everywhere. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% of the people who come through the OPD (Outpatient Department, the kenyan version of the ER) are sent off with anti-malarials. They don’t even bother with blood tests– for most, the 30/= (35¢) is too expensive. I asked one of the nurses, Simon, how many times he’s had malaria. He looked at me and laughed. “I don’t know, once a month?”

The hospital, in a way is really interesting. The system here reminds me of photos of WWII or something. With a shit ton of beds lined up in one room that serves as the medical ward, and rooms where sterile procedures are performed ventilated by means of open windows that allow in outside air… and the flies and mosquitoes that come with it. And the lack of HIPPA, and the BP cuffs that actually measure systolic/diastolic in mercury that flows up a little tube. I had always wondered if using mmHg as a unit of measurement was a joke. And the clash between cultural beliefs and western medicine, like the woman who was convinced her son had malaria due to the manner in which she had given birth. And the fact that the institution, being catholic, is forbidden ton mention or distribute artificial contraceptives, despite being the largest hospital in the region. But I’ll come back to that another time.

When it’s not busy, it’s boring. Even when it is busy, sometimes it’s boring. Because even though I’ve got the training to do a shit ton of stuff that goes on here– honestly, a large majority of it is basic first aid– I’m not licensed in Kenya, so by order of program staff and my supervisor, I’m “strictly observation only.” The nurses and students don’t care. “Come on, help us out! Why aren’t you doing anything?” And I would, except that my little jaunt up Mt. Kenya resulted in a minor (and entirely unfairly imposed) situation we like to refer to as probation. AKA: If I screw up (i.e., touch a patient) and a certain someone’s head pops in the door at an inopportune moment, or someone else finds out, I will find my but back in my dear sweet Ptown without further ado. And, thanks all the same, but I’d rather not grace the boonies of WI with my cheery presence for an extra 3.5 months of hell. So, I tell the nurses “No” and sit back and watch as vitals are taken (in public), clinicians converse with patients (in Kiswahili), injections are given (the same ones, over and over and over…), and people stare at a white-skinned girl in a lab coat standing in the background and talk about her like she doesn’t understand the word Mzungu and wonder why she’s not doing anything. Such is the life.

I'm Married.

These two words are my savior and the bane of every Kenyan man’s existence. Also, I got my residency card. I am officially an alien within Kenya. Go me.

So, remember Big Brother, that reality show I mentioned a few weeks ago? The one where a bunch of people from various countries get stuck in a house for three months and the last one standing wins $200,000? Well, this guy from Rwanda won. The runner-up, Uti, returned home to Zimbabwe and promptly received a $300,000 consolation gift from his dear president Robert Mugabe, to stave off emotional trauma. Yes, I wrote that right, and yes, it’s half again as much as the prize money itself. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you corruption at its finest.

I moved out of Nairobi and to my internship site yesterday. As we drove northward we passed through an area that reminded me of cornfields in Wisconsin that stretch as far as I can see, except here it’s brilliant green rice paddies. Farther north, in the hilly country, slopes are covered by tea and banana plantations. Everything here is harvested by hand: I’ve seen a total of two tractors, both trundling down the road. Workers, no doubt many of them children, dot the fields with sacks slung over their backs. People drag entire banana trees over their shoulders. Next to the road men unload truckloads of heaps of bananas, all still clinging in clusters to a central stock.

I’m stationed in a small town called Nkubu on the NE side of Mt. Kenya, right smack on the equator. The area is stunning. I live quite literally in the shadow of the mountain, surrounded by banana and tea plantations. (Side note: I’ve eaten at least four kinds of bananas here. I didn’t even know four species of bananas existed.) The commercial center, if it can be called that, is a strip of stores along the main (two-lane) road. Not, mind you, that the road gets any bigger for three hours in any direction. There’s an outside market, a supermarket, a chemist (pharmacy), a couple banks, and a few miscellaneous shops. And the Nkubu Consolata Mission Hospital, which is where I’m stationed for my internship.

I live in a beautiful compound five minutes’ walk from the hospital. There’s a large garden with flowering shrubs and trees surrounded by a hedge. We have goats, a couple dogs, and a few acres where my host mom, Jacinta, grows bananas, maize, beans, arrowroot, sweet potato, sugarcane, some stuff I don’t recognize, and a certain hallucinogenic leaf that, although illegal in surrounding countries, is extremely popular in Kenya. Potted plants surrounding our entryway include daylilies and jade plants. There are flashy birds and lizards everywhere. I have a private room that consists of a sitting room, a bedroom and a bathroom. I feel sane again: maybe something to do with being back in the hills and mountains and breathing clean air, and the rain: yep, the rainy season hath come, and we’re on the ocean side of the mountain… however, it’s still warm. Take that, Portland.

In addition to keeping up the crops, my mom is also a nurse in the provincial hospital in the nearby town of Meru. My host dad, Sebastian, is a businessman. He claims he’s retired, but he still runs a hotel/bar/restaurant in town (aka. a five minute walk from the house). The bar is more often than not filled with guys who have come to watch soccer and drink. He’s a busy man: he rarely comes home at night, sleeping instead in the hotel. In addition, I have a younger sister living at home, as well as live-in house help.

Meals are special. Jaunia allows me to serve myself food, but then heaps more on my plate. “We live to eat,” she tells me. I reply that there is no way I can possibly consume that much food without being sick. She, however, has made it her mission to see me gain at least five kilos before I leave the place. I’m doomed.

The Borderline

My favorite taxi driver, Joseph, tells me driving in Nairobi is crazy. But that’s ok, because it’s the same everywhere in Africa. He mentions this as the car in front of us puts itself in reverse and almost backs into us, a bus trundles down the wrong side of the road (and yep, there’s a median), another car sits jammed perpendicular to the flow of traffic, motorcycles weave everywhere, vehicles idle inches apart in a near standstill, matatus cut each other off, and you can barely hear yourself over the din of horns. Speaking of matatus. They’re these 15-person vans where people cram into an absolute lack of legroom as they blare music and screech to a stop to load more people in from the side of the road. They’re all personalized with slogans, stencils, etc. My favorite is one adorned with the slogan proclaiming “SPREAD THE GOSPEL” and covered in playboy bunnies. Not that I’ve seen it more than once.

They say a Ugandan who drives in a straight line is drunk. Lanes, and sides of the road, mean nothing. Transportation within the city comes in two forms: matatus and these things called bodabodas. They’re how you get around, if you feel like reaching your destination before evolution brings about the return of the dinosaurs. So, I had my 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th motorcycle rides ever. In Kampala, at night, behind a stranger, speeding, helmetless, without traffic laws. Sorry, mom.

Kenyans are rude. They’re aggressive and don’t acknowledge the word “no.” The adults shout: “Taxi for you madam, Taxi!” They stare. They hit on you. They call out to you on the street because you’re white, and having a white friend is a sign of status. Or something. The kids spot white skin. They follow you in a swarm, holding out hands then bringing them to their mouths in the universal language. “Please, sister, five shillings for a banana, sister.” “Sina pesa.” I don’t have money. “Please sister, give me something, sister.” “Hapana.” No. “Please sister, I am starving sister.” “HAPANA.” Because you know that the kid harassing you, dressed in an oversized t-shirt, going through motions imparted onto him before he could walk, is simply acting. His father, or uncle, is without doubt watching from the shadows as his charge works the streets, all day, every day, instead of attending school. It’s exploitation of children, pure and simple, and it’s the culture here.

The moment I stepped through the shoddy gate into Uganda, it all stopped. Literally, like the gate was a giant brick wall reaching to the sky that wiped the cultural slate clean. I did not receive a single appeal for money. No one yelled at me. If a boda driver pulled up and I shook my head, he went on his way. Although the country is less developed than Kenya, people take care of themselves. They work, and– I don’t know why– they do not beg or harass. Children are not exploited. Teens don’t pester you when you refuse to pay for… oh yeah, nothing. People are polite. Even in the city: although it’s busy, Kampala was relaxed. I didn’t worry about who was behind me on the street, ever.

Kampala was also blessedly clean. There was no trash cluttering gutters, piled behind buildings, strewn along streets, heaped in the markets, sending up clouds of smoke into the night. I spotted public trash bins for the first time since I arrived in Africa. Roads were in good condition, throughout the city. All the way to the border, for that matter. Street signs were well-made and readable. No, Kampala doesn’t have the highrises and I’ve got no clue about other aspects of life, but in terms of sanitation and infrastructure, they seem to be kicking Kenya’s ass. Especially since, you know, 90% of Nairobi’s highrises are privately owned: the blatant result of a nice long tradition of rampant corruption.

But I digress. Saturday we headed from Kampala to the nearby town of Jinja, donned helmets and PFDs, proceeded down to the banks of the Nile and hopped into a raft to embark on a 35-km float. Although there were clouds overhead, the water was a blissful 80º. Monkeys clambered through the shrubbery covering the banks. Lizards lazed, perfectly camouflaged, in overhanging leafy branches. A reptile that may have been a 2 m. monitor lizard sunned itself on a rock in the middle of the river. We scared up a mammoth colony of supersized bats which proceeded to swarm around their island in a great dark, dense cloud, crawling up and over every trunk, branch, vine, and leaf in sight.

And between munching pineapple and cookies on the glassy water we navigated a bit of whitewater, including somewhere around seven class 5 rapids. Imagine the Willamette. Now imagine the Willamette, but whitewater all the way across. Now imagine hanging onto the raft for your life as you plunge spinning into the rapids, screaming bloody murder as waves crash over you and you pray you hit the upcoming wall of water in a manner that allows you to go over, rather than flip over. It was absofreakinglutely awesome.

That is all I have to say.

Operation Hug A Hippo: Successful... Almost.

General Notification to the Kenyan Public: Just because I’m white doesn’t mean I want a taxi. Get over yourselves.

Last Wednesday, we had a fieldtrip. We visited the industrial section of the city, lined with assembly plants where people come looking for work each day, leaving (if they’re lucky) with perhaps 100 shillings (around $1.00) to return home and buy a meal for their families (and where security come make your life a misery if they even glimpse a camera). We also visited the informal sector, where a community of people who hadn’t been able to find employment has basically taken over a section of the city. They manufacture, by hand and out of recycled materials, pretty much anything useful that anyone would ever need. They’re creative, too. They have tools, but a lot of what they use for shaping is actually railroad ties. Apparently they’re making some decent money, compared to those who live in the slums. This is a community where people don’t try to steal others’ business and anyone caught pick pocketing is likely to find themselves beaten to a pulp and left for dead, if they’re lucky. Really good setup and concept, except that when you walk in it’s actually kind of appalling: It’s dark. The guys sit absolutely everywhere, on the ground. They’re covered in grime; They pound away as they make goods, without stop, seven days a week, to be carted off in bulk. There’s so much noise you can’t hear yourself shout at the person next to you. And you really don’t know what to say, because their lives are so far disconnected from yours there is absolutely no way to connect. At all. There’s a giant chasm between you, and you’re standing just a couple feet away. Kind of like watching a movie.

I came home last Thursday afternoon to fine no less than four power poles laying across my street, lines strewn over absolutely everything. Including gates. And the street. And cars. People simply stepped over them and continues on their way.

On Friday, I hopped into a van heading to Masai Mara for the weekend. My company included:

• A girl born and raised in India before she moved to the US for college. She now works for Kaplan University, and sincerely believes that giraffes live naturally in Yellowstone.
• A Swedish girl who took out somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 from the ATM, then proceeded to count it out loud in front of the entire queue.
• Four Japanese and Korean tourists who shouted at the top of their lungs every time they saw something exciting and ran after the animals. And found the best use of their time to be exploiting the street kids by upending buckets of chips into their hands, laughing as they snapped photos in their faces.
• Oh yeah. And me.

Anyway. The Mara was stunning. Rolling hills gave way to flat grassland as far as we could see, overshadowed in the afternoon by deep, dark rain clouds that blotted out the scorching morning sun, which then dropped, crimson, beneath the clouds to hang over a silhouetted hill before disappearing. Yep, I know where The Lion King was based on. Speaking of which. There were lions everywhere. There was a pride of a young male, two females, and six cubs. Another couple large males roamed, squatting as they marked their territory. And a an enormous male lazed sleepily in the shade of a lone tree, African wind blowing through his colossal mane. Meerkats dug viciously for insects in the ground surrounding the head of a giraffe who had been killed a couple weeks earlier by a snakebite. Topi, hartebeest, and dik dik grazed contentedly. A couple of cheetahs panted in the shade of dense shrubbery. A leopard settled itself in the grass at the base of a ravine. Another sat straight on a log in the brilliant late afternoon light in front of a distant rainstorm before hopping down and disappearing after one of my dear companions decided to announce its presence to the world. A couple of families of elephants got into a noisy, messy fight around a watering hole after the first had covered themselves with dust and mud. There were wildebeest everywhere, gathering as they grazed on the last of the green grass north of the river, procrastinating their deadly crossing, accompanied in their grazing by numerous zebras. I sear, these animals are some of the stupidest on earth– scared of their own shadows. Quite literally. Also, aren’t baby wildebeest supposed to be cute? Apparently not so much.. They’re just parental miniatures. Which, for your information, are ugly. Shame. Getting back on topic: hippos sprawled on islands in the river and giant crocodiles waited along the banks. And a giant herd of hundreds of buffalo came streaming down the banks of a hill, turning the golden grass black with their numbers as they surrounded our car.

Saturday night, a lightning storm lit up the sky, noiselessly silhouetting hills in the distance.

Sunday we journeyed out onto a huge lake in the middle of the Rift Valley called Lake Naivasha in a tiny boat. We got crazy close to hippos. And managed to scare one up out of the water that we didn’t know was there, resulting in a rather rapid evasion. By us. From a big, angry hippo. There were fish eagles on an island, and water birds everywhere. Flocks of cormorants sunned themselves, storks picked their way through the much, and huge flocks of pelicans floated near the shoreline. And then we got caught in a downpour. Two of them, to be exact. In the middle of the lake. And, just so you know. Kenyan downpours aren’t like Oregonian downpours. They’re preceded by some wind, and then the big, fat, giant, colossal drops start falling. Everywhere. It’s like getting pooped on by a bird, except it’s water, and it happens a lot more than once.

Anyway, we got to get off on the island and walk around, getting (somewhat) up close and personal with wildebeest, zebras, and baby giraffes.

And then we headed back to reality, A.K.A. Nairobi, passing a pickup which had managed to drive itself over the cliff as the road winds down into the rift valley. Go Kenya.

Getting High Like Planes

On second thought, I think 16,355’ is a little below cruising altitude. But still.

On the way out of Nairobi on Thursday, I passed a truck with crimson swastikas painted on it like logos. WTF.

We spent the night in Nanyuki. It’s a little town smack on the equator at the base of Mt. Kenya. Oh yeah, and it has a giant British army base. Which you would think was kind of bizarre, since Kenya’s been independent for decades and the Brits aren’t supposed to have any influence. As it turns out, the northern region of the country is all desert, which is perfect for military exercises. So the UK pays Kenya to let then build a base, and locals are employed as drivers. Soldiers in town for training buy souvenirs at jacked-up prices and go to supermarkets, pumping money into the local economy. And they marry Kenyan women, and leave behind half-white babies. So the whole arrangement leaves pretty much everyone happy, except perhaps the people living in the northern desert. Other than the army base Nanyuke was rather unremarkable, except for the woman I walked past carrying her baby in an American flag, with Obama’s face painted on it.

Friday, we started up the mountain from the park entrance at 7,930’, my guide and myself carrying packs somewhere around 20 lb each. Our porter carried somewhere around 70 lb. We started up through the cedars and olive trees, pausing to watch a group of black-and-white colobus monkeys. We passed buffalo, elad, dik dik and elephant tracks. Baboon poop was scattered everywhere. Somewhere around 2 miles into our 6-mile climb, a giant truck came lurching up the rutted road. “Hop on!” “Seriously?” “Yeah!” So we climbed up, hung on, and hoped with everything we had that the truck wouldn’t tip over as it climbed through bamboo forests, fields of head-height shrubby wildflowers and into the tropical highlands, navigating ditches, rocks, mud pits, curves and pitches, eventually depositing us at Old Moses Camp.

From Old Moses, at 10,830’, I could look down over the highlands and forest over the middle region of Kenya, to the distant shadowy hills of Samburu National Park, across towns and reflective plastic that gave away the flower-growing greenhouses erected at the base of the mountain. Wildflowers were everywhere among the rocks and grass, and twisting blackened skeletal shrubs leaked evidence of the fire that swept through the highlands several years prior.

Friday morning, we started climbing straight up the mountain in the bright, clear sunshine. Right around 11,000’, I started recognizing plants. Sage grew everywhere. There was a variations of the dandelion and thistles. Clumps of daisies lined the trail. And that little pom-pom-looking purple flower that grows from a bed of round dark-green leaves with a lighter streak through the center. And I swear I found a variation of Indian paintbrush. Anyway, I read this article last semester that claimed altitude and latitude have the same effects on diversity. So if you go up in elevation, you should see similar changes as if you traveled north or south. Which was exactly what was happening: All these plants that grow near sea level at home were growing at the equivalent elevation of Mt. Hood’s snowcap. The only difference was, they all come from different ecosystems at home.

We eventually arrived at a weather station (one of 14 at its elevation in the world) and turned to traverse the mountain’s slopes before turning into another valley. As we climbed, we passed through changing vegetation: most noticeably, giant stalks covered in feathery leaves which remain in place when they die, insulating the plant within from freezing nighttime temperatures so it can retain large amounts of water without vascular damage. Rock hyraxes, giant, shaggy marmots, clambered over rocks and moss. Eagles wheeled above us. The valley climbed gently upward past caves and cliffs to where it deposited us at Shipton Camp, nestled beneath Mt. Kenya’s peaks at 13,800’. Laying down in my sleeping bag, it took me an hour to convince my body that the world still contained oxygen.

We rose at 2:20 in the morning to consume tea and crackers before setting out at 3:00. We got lucky: the scree slopes froze overnight. Stars outlined the black silhouettes of the peaks above. Climbing under the familiar constellations of the Pleiades, Cassiopeia, and Draco was strangely comforting. We climbed straight uphill. I concentrated on the ground in front of me. Looking up was too daunting. In three hours, we covered 2 miles and climbed 2,555 vertical ft, arriving at the summit of Point Lenana just before sunrise. There were three items on top of the peak: a flag, a plaque placed there a few hundred years ago, and a concrete container with a smashed plastic window-top. Cause, you know, Kenya just voted to adopt a new constitution, and someone brought a copy all the way to the top of the mountain to be enshrined. And then another someone stole it. Which is really a bit bizarre, since I can get a copy on newsprint for casi nada down in the city. Bit of pointless effort there, don't you think? Anyway.

Ice crusted the rocks we stood on. Clouds swirled around us, obscuring the mountain and its peaks. Then, the crimson sun broke the horizon below and began to climb (Yeah, I looked down on the sunrise. How weird is that?). The clouds surrounding us evaporated, leaving us to look down the length of the mountain past the lower peaks, valleys, gorges and moraine lakes surrounding us. Behind me rose Mt. Kenya’s summit, alight with alpine glow, above a glacier flowing down the adjacent valley. Looking down to the East, we could see a tiny camp erected for climbers, containing the world’s highest toilet. And several men stripping to take a naked photo in front of the mountain.

And then we began our descent. Back to Shipton for breakfast, then all the way down to Old Moses, passing hyena tracks along the way. Once we passed below the clouds, it felt like all of Kenya was laid out before us.


Monday we walked the rest of the way down to the gate. And we found a chameleon on the road, which pretty much made my day. It was tiny, with a hump on its nose, thus the name Rhinoceros chameleon. Here ends Gavrila’s Epic Journey of Mt. Kenya.

Lessons learned:

• I will love my boots with all of my heart and soul forever and always.
• “Step by step” has never taken a more literal meaning and has probably turned into my watchword for life.
• Oxygen is wonderful.

Elephants Absolutely Everywhere.

We ventured into The Side of Town Where Mzungus Do Not Go. Namely, a place called Eastleigh. Along the way our bus almost tipped over in the process of swerving to avoid totaling a car. It is a place where roads are a joke: buses and cars force their ways over cinderblock-sized rocks that have been dumped into the rutted dusty lanes between blocks. Streets are strewn with trash. Adane, an Ethiopian classmate, led our way through hordes of people and endless lines of tables selling everything from plastic bags stuffed with cookies to burkas. Because, you see, Eastleigh’s population is 95% refugees– from Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Eritrea. Not only was I the only white girl in sight, I was the only girl with her hair uncovered. My sweatshirt, which had come along as an afterthought, found itself zipped all the way up to my throat. Eventually we arrived at an Ethiopian restaurant where the owner informed us that, as they had run out of food a few minutes beforehand, they were no longer serving. We continued onto another place where we sat down to a stellar Ethiopian dinner for the equivalent of $1 each before proceeding back to downtown aboard a bus decked out in UV and laser lights, a giant HD TV, money and naked girl plastered to the windows, and blaring dance music.

My host mom’s mortification was priceless. “You went to EASTLEIGH? Even I am afraid to go there!” Yeah, but then again, all you see is a neighborhood lacking streets swarming with people in burkas, all of whom you assume are Somalis attempting to take over your city. You are entirely unaware that it contained people from a multitude of countries and cultures, and really cheap legit food that, contrary to your belief, was most definitely not the cause of the next day’s short bout of indigestion.

Wednesday, a field trip took us to a children’s home in a Nairobi suburb called Karen, a government-run farm where we visited cows, bunnies, goats, and chickens, and a wind farm on top of a huge hill overlooking the Maasai land of the Rift Valley. I’m fairly sure the company who manufactured the turbines is the same one that did those on San Cristóbal. Random, but interesting. Anyway, the day was brought to a close with Sukkot services followed by a ridiculous amount of food and wine in the sukkah. Again. Go synagogue.

They lied when they told us all of Kenya’s wildlife is contained in national parks. As Friday dawned bright and clear, 11 of us made our way south through Maasai land, past villages constructed of dung-and-stick or corrugated metal huts in the dry, desolate savannah. Mt. Kilimanjaro loomed out of the sky in front of us, discernable out of the blue only by a small cloud peering out from behind the summit and a finger of glacier extending down one side. It was colossal. It is effortless to conceive that tribes could worship Kilimanjaro as a god. Anyway, we eventually passed a few elephant butts staring out at us from a clump of trees between villages. And then we passed a giraffe, and then an ostrich took it upon itself to run across the road in front of our van. We then arrived at the gates of Ambroseli National Park.

Inside, there were elephants. Giant herds of them. Walking, eating, squelching through bogs, and engaging in mortal combat beneath the setting sun. Hyenas lazed in the sun, bloated with the morning’s meal. Cheetahs hid in the grass. (Yep, I saw cheetahs. Consider my life complete.) Warthogs snuffled through the ground. Giraffes grazed and dipped down on bent forelegs to drink from pools covered in emerald vegetation. Hippos fought within pools, jackal pups scrambled into the cover of dense shrubs, baboons invaded camp and zebra, wildebeest, and buffalo massed beside the road. Cranes, egrets, and storks flocked around water holes and chased elephants. Giant eagles claimed prime tree branches. A small hill looked out over a green strip of river extending into the distance, surrounded by cast, flat savannah, dust devils whirling in the distance in every direction. And Kilimanjaro watched over it all.

Saturday afternoon men, women, and boys welcomed us into a Maasai village with a traditional dance and jumping competition followed by a short prayer. The village itself contained a ring of houses, each built over the span of three to four months, constructed of cow dung on branches with grass roofs, all set within a massive barrier of dead acacia encircling the village. Tiny windows allowed spots of light to seep into the dark interior, which contained cowskin beds and a small cooking area. Within the houses another ring of acacia served as a nighttime corral for the village’s goats and cows. Fire making and traditional medicines were demonstrated and explained, as was the Maasai diet: milk (cow and goat), meat, and blood (cow and goat). Before leaving we visited the school, a small one-room wood building where kids, faces covered in mud, sat squashed behind wooden desks under a painted slogan: “YES WE CAN SAID OBAMA.”

Thus passed my weekend. It was fantastic.

Oh, random side note: No one here thinks I’m from the states. I don’t know how my Swedish, Russian and Polish ancestry combined to do it, but everyone (even those on my program) thinks I’m from Latin America or Israel. Except for one guy in the market, who asked if I was from Spain. Go me.

People, Places, and... Torahs?

I made guacamole for my host family. My host sister decided it would best serve as pasta sauce.

Kenyans are weird about feet. They have a pair of flip flops designated for use inside the house, to keep their feet warm and the floor clean (Does this make sense to you? Cause I’m lost). Mama Sylvia seems to be even more anal than most. Somehow I’ve managed to get out of this by wearing socks around the house, since apparently going barefoot is taboo. Mama Sylvia is also adamant that my feet be washed before entering the house, and then before going to bed… taking off my Chacos and leaving the dust on my toes after walking home from school is unacceptable. Which is funny, cause I’m pretty sure there’s just as much dirt on her feet as on mine; you just can’t see it. And I think maybe her flip flops broke or something, because in the last few days she’s taken it upon herself to adopt mine, full-time, without asking.

Monday after class we took a bus to the Giraffe Center, a place just outside of Nairobi that has a breeding center and sanctuary for Rothschild giraffes– smaller, endangered, and a little different-looking than the ones that prowl the savannahs. There’s a lookout tower where they have a giant bucket of pellets, and you take a handful and the giraffes come up and all the sudden your hand is all the way inside their mouth and you can’t feel any teeth, but there’s fuzzy lips and tongue wrapped around your palm and slobber everywhere, and half a second later you have an expectant giraffe head staring you down and trying to headbutt you into giving it more treats. In theory, they’re on a diet (“Two handfuls of food per person”), but the keeper kept telling us to go back for more. Oh yeah, and the food was free. Go Africa. Then we boarded the same number bus to return to town, figuring it would take the reverse route that we had come, only to discover (after dark) that it, in fact, trundled (sans suspension) among the cars of the nightly Traffic Jam into the opposite side of the city, through the industrial district, and into an unknown dimly lit bus station full of hundreds of matatus, lined with dozens of buses, and swarming with thouands of super-sketch people crowded everywhere. Oh, did I mention we were carrying two cameras, two phones, and a passport? This is why then invented brightly lit supermarkets and saintly cab drivers who come searching the city when we call: according to Joseph, “There is the good part of town, and there is the bad part of town. This is Moi Avenue. If you had crossed the street, you would have been in the bad part of town. Mzungus do not go there.”

Nairobi’s sole (orthodox) synagogue is located next to the university’s main campus, surrounded by 15’ walls topped by several strings of electrified wire and guarded 24/7 by a watchman. In order to gain access, you have to email in an visitor’s application and then show a copy of your passport when you get there. Across the street is a building in which the third and seventh floors are occupied by Saudi Arabian and Egyptian governmental personnel respectively, both of whom have the synagogue under surveillence. Anyway, I went to Kol Nidre services. It was a huge moshpot of people: a couple dozen Kenyan Jews, another couple dozen Indians and Latinos who may have been Kenyan, the Israeli ambassador, a Hasidic rabbi from the Chabad in New York, a ton of white people from all over, four ultra-orthodox Jews on vacation from Israel, and Amir: an orthodox Puerto Rican Jew who works for the US embassy doing maritime defense training and recon work in Manda (on the border with Somalia), who unearthed proof he was Jewish when he found his grandmother’s name in a list of members in a Siddur from an underground synagogue in Spain after his grandparents (who were Spanish nobility) fled the inquisition to Puerto Rico and died before they could tell his mother they were Jewish.

After services, I ditched the fast (Hey, I’m in Kenya.) to meet up with my classmates at a club in a place called Westland- Kenya’s version of the Strip, which consists of a couple blocks of higher end clubs. Except on the Strip, I doubt they pat all the guys down with metal detectors and waive the girls straight in without checking ID. And on the Strip, I doubt pickpockets are nearly as shameless (Yes, a chick leaned over me, shoved a cigarette in my face, asked for a light in French (???), then in English, then removed her left hand from my empty pocket and returned to her partner who promptly gave her a lighter). And on the Strip, I doubt close to a quarter of the people in the joint are hookers, blatantly flaunting their legs and doing business in plain sight. And on the Strip, I highly doubt that 50-year-old men in suits twist and shout on the balcony to music blaring from the dance floor, and you don’t have to shove your left hand with a ring on your fourth finger in a guy’s face to tell him that “No” means “No.” Yes, I bought a ring special for going out. Works like a charm.

In the morning I hit up the Maasai Market and managed to barter vendors down to the local price after convincing them with my minimal Kiswahili that I, in fact, was not a Mzungu and was not going to fall for their idiotic jacked up white-people rates. Funny thing, though– none of them are willing to negotiate prices out loud (“Hey, there are Kikuyus here!”), so out come pen and paper and pagefulls of scribbles ensue.

I went back to afternoon services to finish up Yom Kippur. And then the community broke the fast and almost everyone left and a few of us remained to break out the melon, pasta, chicken, challah, matzo, honey, really good Israeli wine and music and tell stories around the table into the night. Crazy that it took bringing myself all the way to Africa and being dropped into a crazy casi-bathe-in-the-blood-of-Christ-religious family to get me back into a Synagogue. And it felt wonderful. Crazy also that I always thought if I took up a third language it would be Hebrew, and here I am learning Kiswahili. But there you go.

Oh, also: “Hakuna matata” literally means “there are no problems.” Go figure.

Orderly Chaos

I live inside a concrete house with concrete grates or bars across all the windows. To reach the house I enter a compound through a large metal gate guarded by a watchman. I then pass through a spiked metal gate that protects the house and car, through a metal door, and finally reach our front door. All armed with the equivalent of multiple deadbolts. My house is the Nairobi norm.

My host mom’s name is Mama Sylvia. She’s 58, and a retired banker. My host sister, Shiela, is 27, a medical student, and works in her free time. Her husband died suddenly on his way home from a business trip three years ago. I have a host brother who I haven’t met, who lives elsewhere with his family, and another host-sister who studies in Russia. There is a woman, Ida, who comes three or four times a week to do the laundry, clean the house, and cook for the family. The family is Meru, a tribe closely related to the better-known Kikuyus, located near Mt. Kenya. They are also devoutly Christian. They pray any time any group of people gets together, no matter how large or small and no matter the occasion, once everyone has arrived and once the meeting is over. Sometimes the prayer is short (a minute or two). Sometimes I look at the clock ten minutes later and they’re still at it.

We had the whole Jew talk the first day here: “Do you go to church?” “No, I’m Jewish. I go to synagogue.” “Oh. What does that mean?” “It means that you believe the savior had already come, and we believe he is yet to come. So we believe in god, and there’s too much historical evidence to deny that Jesus existed, but we don’t believe he was the savior.” “So you don’t believe in salvation?” “No, not really.” “What about the bible?” “We have the old testament.” “Only the old testament?” “Yep.” “Did you bring it with you? Can I see it?” “No, I left it at home so it wouldn’t get dirty.” “Oh.” So now my host mom is appalled that I don’t attend synagogue every Saturday. (Sorry Rabbi Joey.)

I thought Jews had set the bar for keeping their guests well-fed. I was wrong. Because, you see, not having leftovers at a Jewish meal is somewhat of a sin. It means that obviously there was not enough food and your guests left hungry. In a Kenyan household, however, to have leftovers means that you obviously didn’t like your food and didn’t get enough to eat, and now said leftovers will be wasted. So, they pile your plate with enough food to feed a family and expect you to eat it all. And then give you more. Luckily Mama Sylvia has had other students in the past. “You Americans, you all eat so little!” she says, and lets me serve myself. Which is probably for the best, since my bodily functions decided to go schitzo on me somewhere during my first week here and have yet to settle down.

When I arrived, I discovered that the dress code in Kenya is pretty much the opposite of Ecuador. On the islands, I was dressed conservatively. By the end of my stay, I walking around town in ratty shorts and a swimsuit top. Here, I soon discovered that anything above the knees is right along the lines of sacrilege unless you’re going for a run or chilling in the house (without men present). If you’re a Mzungu (white person), all the better to keep yourself covered- you already draw enough stares. So much for the shorts and skirts I packed; luckily clothes in the market are about $2.

The TV is always on, even when no one’s watching. Usually it’s on a channel devoted 24/7 to a reality show called Big Brother Africa, where a bunch of people from all over Africa have been stuck in a house and each week one of them gets voted off (and into a barn) by the continent. When it’s not on Big Brother, it’s on Dr. Phil, cartoons (yep, they’ve got Looney Tunes in Africa), the news, or In the Name of Love, a horrible Mexican sitcom dubbed in English that’s all the rage.

Car accidents are the 3rd most common cause of death in the country. No wonder, since there’s no speed limit, most roads haven’t seen repairs in 20 years, and seatbelts are only hastily fastened if the car or bus is flagged down by the cops. There are no traffic lights outside of the city. Inside of the city, approximately 50% are functional (and wholly ignored). In addition, crosswalks may as well not exist. You simply step out into the traffic and place your faith in knowing that if a car hits you, the driver and its occupants will most likely find themselves burned to death by mob justice.

I read this thing a couple semesters ago that was talking about how well countries have done in developing national identity over tribalism. It said that if you ask someone from Tanzania who they are, they will say “Tanzanian” first and then give the name of their tribe. If you ask a Kenyan, however, the tribal identity will be mentioned first. Which brings me to the current situation in Kenya. Because, you see, the results of the ten-year census were just released, and the Luo are somewhat peeved to find themselves the fourth-largest tribe in the country. Their leaders have therefore issued proclamations that the Luo are to abandon family planning and have as many babies as possible in the name of embiggening the tribe and adding as many votes as possible. Never mind that the leaders earn millions of shillings a year while many people can barely support the one or two kids they already have. Oh, and the Muslims are pissed because it named them as only 4% of the population, complete with numbers that quite plainly do not add up.

Sunday, Mama Sylvia took me to a meeting with several other women who have formed a typical support group. These women are, for the most part, all of the same family. They’ve formed a sort of microfinance operation within their group: every month, they put a small amount of money into a combined bank account. From that account, they may take out loans. The close relationships that are valued within Kenyan families assure that loans are repaid. The money also serves to cover emergencies, like funerals, or large events, like weddings, that may come up.

Wednesday, Madeline Albright and Tom Daschel were in town to mark the passing of the new constitution and assert the States’ support and aid in implementing said legislation. We attended a town-hall lecture/discussion at the University of Nairobi, where we were promptly informed that our questions would not be called upon. Anyway, Señor Daschel gave an incredibly overrehearsed speech on the dawn of Democracy in Kenya, complete with anecdotes about our dear founding fathers and offensively slow well-meaning hand gestures implying we were idiots. If it was meant to be firey and rousing, it was an epic fail; then again, the last political talk I attended involved Obama on the campaign trail. Madam Albright humbly proceeded to restore a little of my faith in the US ambassadorial committee by skipping over the condescending blabber and focusing on the fact that we were in an academic setting, which she loved, because she was able to learn about the mindset of the country through the students and the questions they asked. Questions followed– How do we make sure everyone follows the constitution (corrupted leaders, anyone?), How do we get people to make decisions based on knowledge rather than on cash, How can we be educated when our textbooks date to 7 BC (Yo, you with the money. Give us better technology.), How can women gain more powerful positions in politics, Should we deal with terrorists outside the constitution like the US and Guantanamo, Should we use force to implement democracies in places like the US did in Iraq? I don’t remember Daschel’s answers. Obviously they didn’t make much of an impression. Madeline, however, was extremely sharp. She turned the demand for educational materials back to the students, telling them to elect the people who would put resources toward what they wanted (and kick them out if they didn’t follow through), and that if you’re studying history, books written in 7 BC are relevant. On the subject of female politicians, she declared there was a special place in Hell for women who didn’t help and support each other. And then she started doing her dance to avoid offending the higher-ups. She made it pretty clear that Obama was working on pulling out of Iraq and that neither of them had been on “the administration” that went in the first place, and left it at that. On the subject of law-abiding leaders, she simply told the audience that no one is above the constitution. Which left everyone kind of miffed, because she said nothing about the how-to or the what to do about it or the fingers that were being pointed. Which, then again, makes sense, since she was meeting with said leaders later in the day, and Hey: the US and Kenya just got to be good friends again since we have a Luo president. Long live the politics of using a lot of words to say nothing and offend no one and retain world peace.

Friday was the wedding of Mama Sylvia’s best friend Jennifer’s daughter Carol (also a Meru). In the morning, the women from the family of the husband, Mungai, (who is Kikuyu) came and formed a crowd outside the gates of her house, singing and clapping as they waited to receive her. Inside the gates, her family sang as they prepared to pass her to her husband’s family. Eventually the gates were opened and the families came together, forming an aisle and laying down scarves as a carpet so the bride’s feet wouldn’t touch the ground. She was escorted out to the car by her mother, and then we all piled into matatus (12-person vans) to drive to the church, up in the high country somewhere. About half of the guests arrived to the church after the couple exchanged vows, courtesy of several unexplained stops and a couple wrong turns by the caravan along the way. Upon our arrival, we found a tiny overflowing church with people sprawled on the surrounding lawn, waiting for the service to finish, vows having been exchanged some time before. The reception, was held close by in the middle of a golf course. Of the 300 or so guests, Meru were seated on one side and Kikuyu on the other. Giant plates heaping with food were served, along with additional plates of meat placed around the tables “to share.” Buffets were kept open for seconds, thirds, fourths… and then platters of fruit were served. I do not understand how Africans eat so much. Dancing ensued, by the women and then the men. Only after everyone had finished did the bridal party arrive. As they ate, speeches were given: who had come farthest, where the guests were from, what the union meant for the families of the two tribes, appreciation for the parents, recognition of Carol and Mungai’s accomplishments, and presentation of a honeymoon to Atlanta, with stipulations that the two nights in the Marriot had better be used to make babies, and they weren’t to receive visitors for six months because they would be too busy. Jennifer presented Carol with a basket to carry her baked goods in, a thermos for tea, and cooking spoons to keep her family well-fed. The behemoth 4-tiered cake was then cut: Carol first tasted it, to make sure her cooking was good enough to feed her husband. Then she fed Mungai, promising to always keep him fed. Mungai then returned the favor, promising always to provide for her. The second and third tiers were then presented to the parents on either side, and the rest was finally cut into bite-sized chunks and passed through the crowd. The bride threw the bouquet, a prayer was said to close the ceremony, and the afterparty began.