Habari siku everybody? I am doing pretty darn mzuri myself. Keeping a little busier than I’m used to . . . we have finals in a couple of weeks, and before that we are going to camp in Tsavo National Park (Proud Former Sponsors of Special Terrifying Sub-Breed of Man-Eating Lions) for five nights, so our professors are somehow managing to fit all of our classes and assignments into this small space of time. We’ve also been going heavier on the Swahili because more and more of our field exercises involve us going into town and asking the locals questions, and while we have translators, it’s always better to be able to keep track of things yourself, and we’re more likely to be taken seriously if we can at least get by conversationally. Today we split into groups and interviewed farmers and ranchers in Mbirikani Group Ranch, located slightly north of (and set up slightly differently than) Kimana Group Ranch, where our camp is located. Clinton, Jordan and I were led around by our translator, Titus, who is himself a farmer in Mbirikani. Titus was full of fun facts (did you know that elephants are completely crazy about pumpkins? if you catch one in your pumpkin patch, don’t try to scare it away, because it’ll charge rather than stop eating), made me think very seriously about certain phrases in the English language (he used “wow” as a conversational placeholder, rather than your standard “ok” or “yes”, and whenever he wanted to imply that someone was benefitting from something, he said they were “receiving the cake”), and had the only pen that didn’t give up the ghost when we got caught in a Kenya-style torrential downpour (Speedo-brand, go figure).
Right, by the way, it’s the rainy season now. It’s a hazily defined time period, especially in the past few years, as climate change has noticeably tossed up the weather patterns here. But personally I’m considering yesterday its official beginning, and I think I’ll remember the date forever because it was probably one of the best days I’ve ever had. The morning was pretty normal – cook crew, classes, bananagrams between classes, actual bananas during class to stay awake (the bananas here are little and green and covered in banana-scars and about ten thousand times better than American bananas) – and sunny, as usual. The nice weather carried over into the afternoon, which we had all put aside for the first round of the student-organized B.A.M.F. (Ballistic Antagonistic Mwana-Funzis) Volleyball Cup. The opening set (we play 3 games per set, 21 points per game) pitted the Totally Titillating Tomes against Shockingly Shem, and the first half was your average, albeit particularly adrenaline-charged, KBC volleyball game, except that all the students and most of the staff came out to watch, and we had a referee with a whistle and thrown-together uniforms. I decked myself out in facepaint made of sink-made mud, which was labor-intensive, because the soil here doesn’t hold water (if you are interested in why that is/its implications for the environment and effects on local livelihoods, ask me! we spent a whole class on it) but I should have just waited, because half an hour into the tournament, the sky fuzzed over, then got heavy, and then before we knew what had hit us we were all already drenched. But what kind of aspiring field scientists would we be if we let a few inches of rain drive us inside? Well, I’d tell you, but I didn’t get the chance to find out, because WE PLAYED ON. Thunder here lasts for straight minutes, and when you’ve got a storm cloud above you the lightning shows up in it over and over like a backbone. The askaris moved to the (covered) chumba porch and drank chai and watched us make hippos of ourselves. By the time my team, Daniel’s Destroyers (Of Your Political House), took on the Killer Kiringes for the second set, the court was a mud pit and my improvised warm-up regiment (mudwrestling, mud fighting, mud throwing, cartwheel attempts) had apparently left me looking like a Viet Cong member.
The Killer Kiringes managed to come back and eke out a win after we beat them in the first game, but no matter! We face them again in two days (kindly forget about everything that’s happening in Vancouver and focus all your sports-related luck-wishing in my direction). And more importantly, in two or so weeks, we face the Tanzania group in what promises to be an extremely competitive School for Field Studies Rainy Season Olympics (they’ll be at the Kenya field site for one day with us before our group leaves for Tanzania, and that’s how we’ve decided to spend it). So all athletic competition before then is just practice for that showdown, and that’s when I’m really going to need your mental support. I’ll let you know how it goes.
We’ve done all kinds of other fun things recently . . . we went and played soccer with students at the local primary school (well, everyone else played soccer . . . I ended up playing lion-chases-gazelles with about 40 of the kids. I was the lion. Shrieking, laughing, and roaring are the same in every language!), and we also worked at a mobile health clinic in Loitokitok. I gave out dewormers and sat with a volunteer doctor while he diagnosed and wrote prescriptions for patients – his name is Joseph, and he lives in Obama’s grandparents’ village. When Obama visited Kenya as a senator, he came to that village to speak about corruption, and all the villagers (including Joseph) were skeptical of him because they knew him as the little mzungu who used to walk behind his grandmother to the market carrying a sack of vegetables . . . and now he is the Mzungu-In-Chief! Joseph also taught me some tricks for riling up the lions in Tsavo, which I may or may not be using. I was proud that we were able to help out the clinic at all . . . it’s a wonderful institution; it travels around to rural areas in Kenya and gives out free vitamins, dewormers, and other medication, tests children for malnourishment (and gives out food supplements if necessary), and keeps tabs on AIDS in the area. It was well-run and altogether inspiring, and I haven’t read up on political news in the US recently, but if DC is still stuck on the health care bill I think they should hang out in the mobile clinic for a day to get their senses of purpose rejuvenated.
As I mentioned earlier, on Saturday, we’re going to Tsavo National Park for expedition, which lasts five nights and involves camping and hiking and field lectures and campfires and all kinds of other stuff that, although my time here is way too short to wish away, means we’re all counting the days until we head out (only two more now). So this is my last blog for a bit, but I’ll have a bajillion stories when I get back, and possibly fewer limbs, but hopefully not.
p.s. thanks for the comments and e-mails everybody! it is nice to hear from you all.
p.p.s. I have a lot of good animal stories from our our trips to Amboseli, but I think I’m going to wait to post about them until I get to Tanzania and can also (hopefully) put up some pictures. But they are pretty cool, I promise.
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