Hello again! I’m still in Kenya! It’s still tongue-tyingly beautiful. So to get around all of that, I think I’m going to write about the things we’ve been learning for the past couple of days.
Our camp is pretty far into the bush, so there are not a lot of people around, but there are a lot of things that could potentially reduce our already small population. To that end, we’ve spent the past few days playing a lot of name games (I am now known to many as “Calabash Cara”) and watching a lot of powerpoints about how to avoid getting hurt, or, as one of our professors puts it, “diminishing your experience”. Some tips from the staff here, in their own words:
ON THE FOOD/BEVERAGES IN TOWN:
“You can be brave at market if you like, just be prepared to get sick. Oh, and there’s a local brew going around that causes blindness” – Molly Duvall, Student Affairs Manager
ON TRANSPORTATION:
“You are 40% more likely to die on the roads of Kenya than in the US so WOOHOO YEAH ALRIGHT” – Molly again . . . we were told this AFTER our 4-hour highway journey, probably for a reason. This statistic is mostly because of the matatus, VW buses used for public transportation. As Molly puts it, “they’re great fun to be in when you’re not fearing for your life, but usually you’re fearing for your life.” This all makes the PVTA look pretty good.
ON WILDLIFE:
“Many people have underestimated the speed of the elephant.” – Daniel, our Swahili/Maasai culture professor and an excellent teller of stories, including one about the time he was herding cattle as a kid and got chased down and horn-tossed by a buffalo, and one about the time he drank a gallon of milk in an hour successfully, which is supposed to be scientifically impossible (which he explained thusly: “Maasai can do it”). Despite these two impressive feats, he also told us a story about how the first time he had ice cream he chewed it and ended up screaming in pain because his teeth weren’t used to the cold, and while we were on our safety walk today, he was the only one who got hurt (he cut himself while showing us his sword). SO: he is a complicated man (also probably one of my favorite people here . . . I think you’ll be hearing a lot about him).
“If you see an elephant, the one thing you don’t want to do is climb a tree, because the elephant will knock it down and stomp you” – Molly. You’re supposed to back slowly away and then run like crazy, in case you were wondering. For a rhino, you do climb a tree. For a lion, you try to make yourself as big and scary as possible, so that they don’t see you as a prey animal. For a crocodile, you just don’t get near water, because they can slap you into it with their tails and then CHOMP. And if there’s an elephant to your north, a lion to your south, a rhino to your east, and a crocodile to your west . . . well, I asked, but no one had an answer for me. I guess you enjoy it? . . . !
“If you’re holding food in your hand, a baboon will come up and slap you and take it” – Molly, who has had personal experience with this. Apparently baboons are healthily afraid of Kenyan men and women, slightly less afraid of white men, and not at all afraid of white women. And you’re not supposed to slap them back. So much for feminism.
“One reason to leave your banda door shut is so that you don’t come in and find a black mamba under your bed” – Molly. This happened to a student once. Black mambas are one of the world’s deadliest snakes! Along with spitting cobras, which can get you in the eyes from 12 feet away, and puff adders, which are scary too. And baby black mambas are super-deadly, because they don’t have any control over their venom sacs yet and so give you a full dose regardless of whether they want to eat you or not (the adults usually start with a venomless warning-bite). Adorable! p.s. mom – in all the years SFS has been happening, no one’s ever been bitten by a snake. And I’m wearing closed-toed shoes. And I’ve been hypervigilant since that lecture – last night I saw something coiled up on the path and leaped directly onto the porch (it was a hose).
AND IN CASE YOU WERE FEELING BETTER ABOUT THE HERBIVORES:
“Even animals that are relatively safe can kill you when they freak out” – Molly. A giraffe can decapitate a full-grown male lion with a forward kick. . . . I’m learning a lot.
OR THE PLANTS:
“Azima thorns don’t look like much, but they stick to your skin and won’t come out without special tweezers” – Daniel
“DO NOT go for a layout during ultimate frisbee! Unless you want to end up covered in hook thorns” - Daniel
“Those acacia thorns can go straight through your shoes” - Daniel
“See that thing that looks like a cactus? No thorns!” (stop for cheers) “Right! But its sap can blind you” - Daniel
OR THE WONDERFUL LIFE-GIVING SUN:
“Some students have been so sun-sensitive that the skin on the back of their hands blistered” – Suzzane (medical/camp assistant)
TO WRAP UP:
“The joke is, if we called this talk “Things that Can’t Kill You in Kenya” it would be two minutes long” - Molly
“So what we’ve learned is: don’t touch anything except the spiders.” - Christine (astute friend) Despite everything, there are no poisonous spiders in this part of Kenya!
(if you are now questioning my common sense etc. etc., here are a couple more quotes, this time ones that explain better why I decided to come here and am beyond stoked to be staying:
“This is where you’ll go if you’re on cook crew and someone asks you to grab a pineapple or something” – Molly, pointing the electricity-free refrigerator/freezer during our tour of the grounds. I have not yet been asked to do this but I will totally let you know when I am. With caps lock on, probably.
“You are going to see so many cheetahs that you will never one to see one again.” – Okello, Academic Program Manager (to me, during introductions. enough said!)
And anyway, that’s the cool thing about everything we’re learning about! Immediate (and occasionally urgent) opportunities to apply the lessons to everyday life.
We got one of those opportunities yesterday afternoon when we visited market day for the first time. Daniel armed us with two key Swahili phrases – “hapana asante” (“no, thank you”) and “sine pesa” (“no money”), piled us into the Land Cruisers, and let us loose in Kimana, or K-Town. If you’ve never been to a market and want to try to imagine it, picture a county or state fair, the kind with rides and booths and sideshows and things like that. Now take all the booths and replace them with big canvas tents, and take all the ride attendants and turn them into men and women hawking things – fruits and vegetables, sandals made out of tires, radios, soap, cloth, phone cards, machetes – very loudly and (I’m assuming) persuasively in Swahili. Instead of rides, picture donkeys (generally used for transport and thought of as such . . . my friend Jordan asked one man if she could pet his donkey and he laughed at her and said “why do you want to touch him? it’s like petting a bus!”), cattle (the cattle here are much different than the ones in the US, probably because they aren’t genetically engineered to be enormous and so look a lot less like barrels with legs and a lot more like most animals), the multicolored matatus (often with religious slogans written on them), and enormous construction vehicles smoothing out and digging up and moving giant piles of red dirt around (they’re building a paved road into Kimana, and have been for quite some time). And instead of cotton candy and popcorn, everyone’s eating mangoes.
And MOST IMPORTANTLY, instead of barkers, there are the local mamas, the reason for Daniel’s quick Swahili lesson and also the reason we all got to walk around the marketplace at least 6 or 7 times . . . if you don’t keep moving, you get swarmed. Basically, if you’re a tourist, the mamas will chase you around and try to sell you jewelry. If you are not enthused about the necklace they happen to be holding, they will reach into their endless bag of beaded things and pull out another and another, and if you say “hapana asante” as suggested, they will infer that you do not like the Maasai culture, and then you have to try to convince them that that’s not the case, and while you are flustering yourself trying to do that, they will slip said necklace on you and if you try to give it back they’ll refuse to take it and then you will owe them money and you will have a necklace that, ok, is pretty cool, but that you didn’t really want to spend 350 Kenyan shillings on. And then since you’ve bought from one of them, you’re fair game for all the others. This did not happen to me, by the way . . . I switched to “sine pesa” pretty early, which leads you down an alternate path in which you tell them that their jewelry is beautiful and that you’ll be back and they tell you their names and make you promise to find them again next time. All in all, I was blown away, but I’m still surprised that I got through generally unscathed, especially hearing some other peoples’ stories - my friend Coral happened to get introduced to a Maasai chief, mistook his gesture of greeting (which was an upraised hand), and high-fived him.
We met back where we had started just as the local school got out, and so we got to meet a lot of kids, which was definitely the best part of the whole trip. It’s surprisingly easy to communicate with someone who speaks a different language when you’re both willing to do it . . . a little English, a little Swahili, and a hacky sack, and before you know it a game has just sort of started happening. The kids also really liked our cameras, so I have a lot of pictures of them making faces, and then a lot more pictures of them all looking at pictures of themselves on other peoples’ cameras. We got to hang out with them for a while, because one of the cruisers wouldn’t start . . . if that happens in the middle of an expedition it’ll be a problem, but in this case it was kind of lucky!
This morning we had our first Swahili lesson. I haven’t ever really learned a new language before, at least not one you can actually speak, so I’m excited to wake up a new part of my brain. We learned greetings and pronounciations today, and we managed to teach Daniel a few English words too – igloo, karma, and Jeep.
In a few minutes we’re going to have our first heavy-duty classroom session – we’re spending 3 hours being introduced to the case studies that form the foundation of the academic part of the program. Everything we learn in our classes in Kenya is to build a base so that we can do directed research projects based on the case studies when we get to Tanzania. The staff (aka “askari”) and professors have been stressing how academically rigorous the program is and how hard we’re going to be working. I’m a little worried, but not as much as I was before I got here – now that I’ve seen the place I’ll be studying, I can’t think of much I’d rather do than help make sure it stays around and in good shape for as long as possible.
One good thing for you all, maybe – once I start having homework, I’m sure I won’t have time to write this much anymore. Hmm.
BRIEF SWAHILI LESSON:
I say: Habari? (News?)
and now you all say: Mzuri! (all good) Even if things aren’t all good, if a Kenyan asks you Habari and you answer “mbaya” (“bad”), he will be sad all day.
Mzuri (really, though!),
(Calabash) Cara
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Boy you're getting frequent internet time!
ReplyDeleteThe best thing to do if you want to get rid of the mamas is just not to talk to them... but that's probably also how to not have as much fun. If you ever do buy something, though, you'll probably have fun bartering. It's also stressful, so maybe you'd want to get a Kenyan friend to do it for you.
Matatus are fucking scary, man. I don't know whether they're safer out in the rural areas, but my friend's family would not recommend us to use them when I was there. Wait til Nairobi.. then you'll see the "Citi Hoppas."