2/6/10; 2/17/10; 2/19/10; 3/2/10: BEST OF AMBOSELI

Jambo! Jambo bwana! Habari gani! Mzuri sana!

That is the first line of that “Them Mushrooms” song I was telling you about earlier in the . . . month. Sorry for being so neglectful! After we got back from Tsavo, we went pretty much directly into finals, which fried my little brain like a chapati (delicious East African tortilla-equivalent). And then we had to move out of our bandas to make room for the Tanzanians, who proceeded to invade our camp and defeat us by a very slight margin in the Olympics. And then I went to sleep and woke up in Tanzania with my hands tied with a bandana and covered in bees . . . luckily my classmates were with me or I’m not sure what I would have done. But that’s another post! Or several (also, that last part, the part with the bees, didn’t happen). Right now, since I’m in The Amazing New Zone of Almost coNstant Internet Access (T.A.N.Z.A.N.I.A.), I’m going to take this opportunity to show-and-tell you all about Amboseli National Park, the centerpiece of the Tsavo-Amboseli Ecosystem and probably, despite encounters in Tsavo and KBC and around the group ranches, of most of my memories of Kenyan wildilfe.

We went to Amboseli four times over the course of the semester, and I took a whole lot of pictures. So here are some of them, along with the stories that were happening when they were taken (the sad part is that, by necessity, the photographer misses part of the story because she is busy taking pictures so that she can better remember/tell what she saw of the story later. But hopefully between the words and the pictures some decent account will emerge, although of course you all just should have been here, and then none of this would be necessary, jeez).

The drive into Amboseli is about 45 minutes of straight red dirt road. The animals like hanging out in the park because it’s about 400 square kilometers of farmless and fenceless space (53% grassland, 22% woodland, 25% swamp! an oft-repeated fact and a favorite of Shem’s), but they don’t know where the park’s borders are, so the drive in is often interrupted by giraffes or zebras or elephants heading out into the surrounding group ranches, probably to try to eat some pumpkins or something. Like these guys:





We encountered all of them on our final visit, the elephant on the way in and the zebras on the way out. At the beginning of the program, our professors said at the beginning of the program that by the time we left Kenya we’d be so tired of elephants we’d never want to see another one again . . . halfway through, though, and they’re still bringing us to seatbelt-necessitating halts (I’ve still got a bruise from the slingshot maneuver Molly pulled when we saw that elephant, I think).

After the road, you get to the gate! Here’s where we get accosted by mamas and other hawkers. And sometimes . . . ACTUAL HAWKS!


This guy was wheeling above us for a while, and occasionally landing at the very top of acacias to survey his domain. By the way, he is actually not a hawk. He is a martial eagle. But! There was a pun to be made, and so I made it.
This was on our first visit and we were all very overwhelmed and excited. My dominant feeling (which I still sometimes get here) was that someone had taken over my optic nerve and was photoshopping amazing things into my field of vision. Even though we weren’t in the park yet, my friends here seem to agree:



(on the ground, from closest to farthest away: Becca, Suzzane (blue shirt), Coral (awesome shades), a mama accosting Coral, Clinton (with camera), and Sam. In the faroff cruiser, from the left: Ian, Jen and Olivia. In the closeup cruiser, from the left: Ryan, Amanda, Mambo, and Christine).

On that first day, we were ostensibly there to start a Wildlife Management exercise that involved keeping track of social organization and behavior of large mammals. Of course, we mostly ended up driving around and gaping at things and then remembering after the fact that we were supposed to write them down. According my notebook, that day we saw a lonely warthog, four elephants, some fighting impala, and a large colony of baboons, including one Mickey Mouse-eared baby:



Other highlights of that first trip included: when, in order to turn around in the rotary associated with a defunct lodge, Daniel drove us through a curtain of dangling electric wires at full speed with the hatches open (twice!); when Daniel’s car broke down (this happened so often over the course of the program that we started blocking time into field exercises for car repair . . . alright, I’m exaggerating. But it happened pretty often. “Maasai don’t need to know how to drive” etc. etc.) so we had to quickly disperse into the three other cars while Harrison, our mechanic, fixed it up in said rotary; when Jordan’s mammal field guide fell off the roof of the car and Mambo had to jump out of the car and bravely fetch it; and, finally, when we drove through the swamp and spotted a rare saddle-billed stork and my camera, in a spectacular show of encouraging me to live in the moment, ran out of battery. So you’re out of luck on that one. But if you google it I’m sure someone else has taken a picture at some point!

The second time we went to Tsavo was for Wildlife Management again, this time to do a mammal-counting exercise that led to lab analysis of species’ habitat preferences within the park. We split into groups, and each group was given a section of the park (also known as a transect) and instructed to count all the mammals while keeping track of the habitat types (because this is SCIENCE, it was slightly more complicated than that, but that was the general idea). Moses, who had taken a break from running the duka to be our driver, decided that it would be best to take on our transect by circling it clockwise and always counting out the right side. I believe we counted around twenty animals over the course of two hours. Meanwhile, on our left side, in another transect, this party was happening:



As you can imagine (and as my ratio of left-to-right pictures proves), it was kind of hard to pay attention to the correct side of the road.
Since we were not invited to the swamp bonanza, it was lucky that our group happened to meet one particular small carnivore whose ministrations were much more heartfelt than the fickle showboating of those big overdramatic grazers and browsers. Amboseli’s manmade water distribution system (necessary for rainy season drainage) has some culverts that necessitate the occasional small bridge, and as we were driving over one, we stalled out quickly to take pictures of a passing Grey-Crowned Crane:



A few minutes later, as we revved up the engine to start out again, the noise scared this guy out from under the bridge:



We all hung out for a while, looking at each other (sometimes, you know, words just aren’t necessary). Then, after we were done with our transect, we stopped by a few more times to say hi. He was always under the bridge, and he always ran out when he heard us rumble over. (except once, when we caught him picking over a pile of nearby bones). We named him Troll, after the story about the billy goats. I have a lot more pictures of him . . . he was an excellent model.
That was also the day we interrupted one elephant’s shower and got sprayed:



And, soon after, ticked off another elephant and got trumpeted at:



Maybe that’s why we don’t get invited to parties.

Trip #3 I actually largely described in my second-to-last blog post, as it was the day of the cultural manyatta and Serena Lodge. One thing I failed to mention about that day (on purpose! ha! SECRETS SECRETS ARE SUCH FUN) was our encounter with A LION:



Psych! That’s a concerned Cape buffalo (but I wanted to put that picture up just because. It was strange, during the incidental game drive over to the manyatta I actually took better pictures of animals than on either of the earlier, wildlife-centric trips). This is the real lion:



As with Troll, I have many more pictures of Neville Chamberlain (I named him this because we were all pretty sure he was going to attack a carful of German tourists). As we were driving to the manyatta, we found a large clump of cars all pulled over and filled with tiny gesticulating silhouettes sticking out through the tops. This is generally a good sign in a national park. It is also why, if you are a group of wanafunzi (students) who have a strange aversion to the very watali (tourists) who are keeping the ecosystems you have come to love alive with their extravagent spending habits (hint: despite efforts against these instincts, we are such wanafunzi), when you see something cool, you pull over very quietly, and point often and extravagantly at the sky, so that all the safari vehicles that come by think you’re looking at birds and move on.

We joined the fray, followed everyone’s line of sight, and were treated to two lions, a young adult male and female, on some kind of first date under a big acacia. This was our second lion sighting, and our best at the time – during our second trip, Mambo somehow spotted a few lionesses and some cubs dozing at the edge of the woodlands much too far away for pictures. Through binoculars you could see the yellows of these guys’ eyes, so we were very excited. And then, when boy lion decided he’d had enough and got up and headed towards the road, we were very VERY excited. And then when he looked like he was about to rear right through the front window of the German tourist vehicle we got kind of scared. But then he just crossed the road, like he was in a bad joke or something, and proceeded to mark his territory on the other side. An even more effective message than an attack, in some ways. So that was our first male lion – check out that half-mane! – and our closest one as of then, and we chattered about it all the way to the manyatta, where the most exciting animals were donkeys:



p.s. that girl with the donkeys is the infamous Coral.

Then we went to Serena Lodge, home of the fearless hungry vervets:



In the backpack, teasing the monkey: Lia. In the background, reacting in various ways: Chelsea (in blue, acting calm), Olivia (in white, despairing), Sam (in maroon, ready for action) and Jen (in orange, shocked).

Our forth trip to Amboseli was techinically for a traveling lecture, but we ended up at Serena Lodge again somehow. Before that, though, we found ourselves on Observation Hill, where we ate our lunches/saved them from superb starlings, which look regal and shiny but act like their scrappy cousins. Here is one in flight!



From the hill, we spotted a hippo! So we went closer to investigate, and he found us rather boring, or perhaps tasty:



One really cool thing about seeing animals in the wild instead of in zoos: many of them hang out in large herds. On several instances we saw hundreds of elephants at a time, all shifting and blotting out the horizon. Here’s a smaller group, soccer-team sized and able to fit in my camera lens:



The first couple of pictures were also from that fourth day. And so is this last one, of Kilimanjaro, handsome overlord of all Kenyan parks and students, draped in one of many storms he sent our way that day:



Well, that was Amboseli. Someday I’ll go back. Next up, my week at Tsavo West, Amboseli’s older, tanglier cousin who has pet leopards. Depending on how long it takes me to upload this one, that next one might have pictures too! If it’s not feasible though I can just show you guys later. I miss you all!

p.s. the picture quality did not turn out so large or so good. So hopefully I'll get to show you the originals at some point because they are less grainy because my camera is (/my parents are) awesome.

3/3/10: WE HAVE NOT HAD INTERNET FOR DAYS AND SO TODAY I AM POSTING TWO BLOGS FROM A LITTLE WHILE AGO

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.

2/19/10 - 2/20/10: PLAYING TOURIST/PLAYING NATIVE

The most interesting, and contradictory, pair of days I’ve had here took place a little over a week ago, when we had two immersion activities back to back. Last Friday, we went back to Amboseli National Park, this time with our tourist hats on – rather than driving around counting wildlife or having lectures, we had a short animal-watching game drive, visited a cultural manyatta (a small Maasai boma set up within the park where visitors can go to learn about the local culture), and ate lunch/hung out at one of the tourist lodges. The next day, Saturday, was our homestay - we were dropped off early in the morning at the real Maasai bomas near our camp (by ‘real’ I mean the not-for-tourists bomas . . . the cultural manyattas are real too, people live there. But it’s different, in ways I’ll try to explain) and spent the day going native. I’ve had very few pairs of adjacent days in my life that were as different from each other as those two. In order to give you some idea of what I mean, I’m going to write out a comparative schedule, going activity by activity. Here goes!

~7:00 AM, FRIDAY: Wake up. Get dressed – t-shirt, shorts, sandals, lots of sunscreen. Breakfast at camp. Pack what’s needed for the day – notebook, camera, binoculars, more sunscreen, a bathing suit, Kenyan shillings, water bottle, walking stick.

~7:00 AM, SATURDAY: Wake up. Get dressed – skirt, sandals, nice shirt (= less dirty, with buttons). Breakfast at camp. Pack what’s needed for the day – water bottle, walking stick, Swahili notes, camera, and a plastic bag containing a whole cabbage, two juiceboxes of milk, a bag of sugar, a package of saran-wrapped butter, a bag of Nice brand corn flour (®), and two packets of tea.

~8:00 AM, FRIDAY: Pile into land cruisers for the drive to Amboseli. Go through Kimana and then northwest. The closer we get to the park, the more animals we catch sight of through the trees (mostly giraffes and Thomsons gazelles (aka Tommies), with some zebras and one elephant way far off).

~8:00 AM, SATURDAY: Pile into land cruisers and drive through Kimana to neighboring bomas. See lots of cows, goats and sheep (aka shoats), dogs that would get their owners arrested in America (Maasai don’t take care of or name their dogs, I’m not really sure why they even have them. But when Daniel saw Ian’s joke “Wisconsin Cow-Tipping Club” t-shirt, he was horrified at the thought), and scores of waving and yelling kids (we wave and yell back, as always).

~8:45 AM, FRIDAY: Arrive at Amboseli gate. Take the roof hatches off the car so we can stand up and look through them. Get swarmed by mamas selling bracelets and statues. Coral is from Puerto Rico and is used to haggling in Spanish, but her skills do not translate and she got ripped off like crazy last time (it turns out most of the crafts sold by Maasai at the gate are made at the home village of Moses, one of our staff members, and that the middlemen jack the prices way up) and is looking for revenge*. She finds the mama (Mama Manuel!) and they have a hilarious trilingual argument. Mama Manuel ends up helping us push our land cruiser when Daniel has to jumpstart it through the gate later, Coral buys another bracelet, and all is forgiven on both sides.
*note: none of us really mind getting ripped off by the mamas, but you’d be surprised what you find to make fake complaint-jokes about when you can’t find anything actually wrong with your life.

~8:20 AM, FRIDAY: Dropped off at boma with my partner, Coral. Given a walkie-talkie in case of emergencies, and a jug of water. Introduced to Mama Konkai (our host), her mother Mama Koko, her daughter, and her granddaughter. We enter the boma, a dung-and-branch hut about tall enough for me to stand in, and are seated on the bed, which is made of cowhide stretched over a wooden frame. Mama Konkai and Mama Koko sit on the bed opposite. We sit in silence and realize that we have forgotten every bit of Swahili we’ve ever learned, and then we realize that it doesn’t matter because Mama Konkai and Mama Koko speak pretty much exclusively Maa, the Maasai dialect. “Hello” in Maa is “Supa!” and the response is “Ipa!” so we do that a few times.

~9:30, FRIDAY: We drive through the park to the cultural manyatta, a Maasai village set up for tourists. Today we are “playing tourist” and so pretend to not know very much about the Maasai. We’re greeted with a welcome dance/warrior jumping contest and a prayer and invited into the manyatta. It’s much bigger than the bomas we’ve seen, and full of men and women in traditional clothing.

~9:30, SATURDAY: Mama Konkai brings us outside into the livestock area, which is an acacia-fenced clearing in the middle of the boma, to milk one of her cows. She does the actual milking (into an honest-to-goodness calabash!) and we are assigned to take pictures. A baby goat fights with Mama Konkai over the milk. We all look at the pictures for a while and laugh. There are no men in the boma (we’ll later find out that our six guys, who did their homestay with the warriors, spent about an hour shucking corn and then the rest of the the day walking around, ostensibly herding goats but mostly just hanging out) but there are women of all ages milking cows and getting firewood from the trees outside the boma fence. Maasai fashion is a really interesting mix of their more traditional skirts and wraps and jewelry and brand- and event-name American-looking t-shirts and hats (a lot of the little kids wear matching jeans and jean jackets, it seems to be a trend) and it’s all very colorful and cool-looking.

~10:00, FRIDAY: Our manyatta guide gives us a lecture on Maasai culture and then we watch them make a fire by rubbing together a hardowod stick and a piece of softer wood over dried cow dung. It doesn’t work very well, but eventually it catches. Later we’re shown into one of the huts, where a half-used book of matches is laid out next to the fire and a Nike hat is on a shelf next to the window.

~10:00, SATURDAY: We make chai! We light a fire (with matches), boil the milk over it, and add sugar and tea from the bag we brought. We mess up about a million times but eventually form a fairly good hand gesture system with Mama Konkai. We say “pole sana” (“very sorry”) and “asante” (“thank you”) a lot. We discover that singing the few Swahili phrases we know is very hilarious to everybody, so we start doing it, and they do it back, and just like that we’ve got another (albeit limited) form of communication!

~10:30, FRIDAY: We’re brought out to a giant clearing where we are encouraged to buy things from the mamas. We are all a little depressed by the manyatta for various reasons. Amanda and I talk about how it probably seems to the Maasai like we’re acting skittish because we think their culture is strange, but really we’re acting skittish because we feel bad about paying a fee to be invited into their homes and intrude on their lives (especially when we’ve been actually invited to bomas many times before and it’s felt much better and two-sided and more relaxed), and we’re weirded out that the manyatta workers feel like they have to hide the aspects of ‘Western’/’modern’ culture that they’ve incorporated into their own.

~10:30, SATURDAY: We finish the chai, which is about 30000 degrees (Celsius) and Mama Konkai leads us outside again, this time to help reinforce the roof of the hut. The roof is made of a grid of sticks tied together with plant fibers; we are in charge of filling in any gappy areas with more sticks. Coral asks what the plant fiber is made of and I am able to tell from how it smells that it is made of maize leaves (thank you, summer at the Sunshine Farm cornstand!). We get pretty good at it and Mama Konkai walks by several times singing encouragingly.

12:00, FRIDAY: Lunchtime! We have been getting keyed up for days about eating at Amboseli’s Serena Lodge. You’d think we’d gone years rather than weeks without eating American food, but we are by far the most excitable group of people (bar maybe a European soccer team) I have ever been a part of or come across or sighted from afar, and when we have an excuse to froth over something, we are unstoppable. I wish I could describe the buffet and the things uttered through mouths full of it as it was consumed (we were upon it as locusts upon the wheat of Egypt, for real) but it wouldn’t make sense because on its own it really was just your average uppity hotel buffet with a surprising amount of curry-related food and some really cool African fruit (passion fruits are so awesome).

12:00, SATURDAY: Lunchtime! We are slightly better at making lunch than we are at making chai. Lunch is butter and cabbage (from our bag) cooked with tomatoes and onions (presumably from someone’s farm; a neighbor brought them over earlier) and a great big pot of ugali. Ugali’s the staple starch here, the equivalent of rice in Asia or spaghetti at 32 Mill Street. It’s made of corn flour boiled with water until it forms a bright white grainy sort of paste, and it doesn’t taste like much on its own but it’s quite good with vegetables over it (for example, cabbage, another staple food . . . Zu 2010, get yourselves ready for ugali and cabbage. U-G-A-L-I, YOU AIN’T GOT NO ALIBI). We ate with Konkai and Koko, and then Konkai’s daughter came in to take the leftovers to the men, wherever the heck they were while we were slaving over the roof.

1:00 FRIDAY: The rest of the day is dedicated to touristing it up. We go swimming, hang out by the pool laughing at/photographing/provoking the vervet monkeys (Amboseli’s fearless-city-pigeon equivalent), talking to the staff (everyone wants to know where I got my walking stick, and to make sure that I know it’s for an old man . . . as well as being the overall most awesome thing I have ever purchased, it’s probably the best conversation starter in the country).

1:00 SATURDAY: The rest of the day is spent alternating between work and resting/drinking gallons of chai. We were brought to a small pond to get water – Maasai women carry heavy things using straps that then go across their foreheads, but I somehow missed this piece of information, because when Mama Konkai tried to give me my container of water to carry, I offered my shoulder and my neck, which was pretty hilarious to the kids washing clothes nearby (apparently I was even funnier when actually carrying the water). The freight strategy makes sense . . . they have to walk very far, and this puts the weight on the back rather than more fragile and easily tired parts of the body. Later we carried firewood this way, too . . . first, Mama Konkai and her daughter chopped it off of acacia trees using a machete (Konkai’s daughter was holding her baby on her back while she did this . . . you have to really trust yourself in order to raise a baby on the African savannah and I guess this was just a manifestation of that). We rested for a while after the heavy lifting . . . the mamas sat on one bed and probably talked about how weird we were, and Coral and I sat on the other and talked about how the mamas were probably talking about how weird we were (it was not really awkward at all, though. They were very gracious hosts, and we tried really hard, and we spent a lot of the day all laughing together). In the afternoon, when it got cooler, we got to reinforce the cow dung walls using (yup) fresh cow dung. It’s interesting, you look at a pile of cow poop and you think “I don’t want to touch that” and then you think “you know, I am going to have to touch that sooner or later, so I am just going to do it now” and then you stick your hands in it and just tell yourself that it’s really really good soil. After we washed our hands, we cleaned out the hut . . . well, actually, Coral swept out the hut and I got distracted by the kids who kept peeking in at us through the air holes in the hut’s walls and went outside and played Lion Chases Gazelles with them (I was generally the lion). There were about 25 kids in the boma and soon they were all in on it, but then I started feeling bad for Coral and went back inside. But in the meantime, something had happened that possibly changed mzungu/Maasai relations in Kimana for all time . . . the mamas had somehow discovered that Coral can dance. She dances kind of constantly (because she is a CRAZYPERSON! Hello Coral, in the future, when we all get nostalgic for Kenya and read each others’ blogs) and is indeed very good at it and one round of joke-singing with the mamas had just been too much and she’d started busting moves, and the mamas were very impressed. Before I knew it, everyone in the whole boma was packed into our hut, singing traditional songs and the two popular songs we all knew (‘Jambo Bwana’, used to welcome tourists pretty much everywhere in Kenya and written by a band called Them Mushrooms, and an abridged version of Hakuna Matata) over and over while Coral danced and I drummed on my knees so as not to feel too useless. Every time a song ended, someone else would start a new one up. We did this for at least an hour and a half until Suzzane came to pick us up. It’s very safe to say that if any other Maasai celebrations happen while we’re here, we (or at least Coral) will certainly be invited.

So yes, those were my two days – each representative of a certain kind of distilled Kenyan exprience and both very very different from each other. I think in the end I would rather go back to the boma for a day than to Serena (especally if I could bring Coral). And it’s funny, when you know how someone leads her daily life, you’re slightly less likely to blame her for aggressively trying to sell you bracelets at the Amboseli gates.

usiku mzuri wote!

Carabash

2/9/10-2/14/10: A FEW TYPICAL(?) DAYS 'OFF'

Niaje! Sawa sawa? Sawa sawa.

Last time I managed to pull a post together, I told you about a typical school day here at Kimana Base Camp. Many of the days that have passed since that particular day have also passed in that particular way, give or take a few epic volleyball plays (I’m not sure how the volleyball itself is hanging in there, but it has somehow not yet suffered a thorny death. However, we have lost many players, may they rest in peace . . . just kidding, just kidding. only some limbs) and even more epic breakfast crews – Mambo and I were on pancake duty again the other day and surprised everybody by breaking out my secret stash of chocolate chips (thanks Mom!). As a result, we were elected temporary copresidents of KBC and earned ourselves several weeks’ supply of backrub IOUs (KBC’s economy is barter-based; staple goods include backrubs, half-hour chunks of internet time, AirTime calling cards, dishwashing-related favors, and sodas from the duka).

Fairly often, though, we do get days off, or we have special classes or exercises that take place outside the camp, and we get to drive through the gates to various places and have adventures and get terrifically sunburnt. So here are some examples of the things we’ve gotten to do on those days!

1. 2/9/10: WATERFALL HIKE, LOITOKITOK, AND CLUB KIMANA
On our first non-program day, which seems like forever ago by now, we drove in the land cruisers waaaay South to a town called Loitokitok, which is bigger and a little more stratified than Kimana (think Northampton vs. Amherst). I happened to be in a cruiser with a lot of people who were very excited about our first day off, and who tend to ‘express themselves vocally’, so we spent much of the car ride singing. Our driver, Suzzane, cranked down the windows and encouraged us whenever we drove through a populated area, her rationale, which we adopted, being “everybody is staring at you anyway because you are mzungus, so you might as well give them some reason to”. She cranked the windows back up when we started singing Mambo #5, though – apparently it was banned in Kenya, probably for excessive lasciviousness, or maybe excessive trumpet. We picked up some armed guards in Loitokitok, then kept driving until we got to the edge of a valley much nearer to Kilimanjaro than we’d been before. Down in the valley was a maize field, and through the maize field was a small trail, and at the end of the small trail was a river and a waterfall! And in the river there were lots of parasites so we couldn’t go swimming. But we spent the rest of the morning climbing on the boulders and the vines, taking risks, taking pictures of each other taking risks, and having a picnic. My friend Amanda, who’s from Western Massachusetts and goes to school at Williams, comisserated with me about how until you noticed the vines and the strange bugs and how hot it was, it was easy to imagine that we’d somehow stumbled back into New England.

After that, we headed back to Loitokitok for a few hours, mostly so that three of us – Christine, Kayt, and Caity – could follow through with an idea they’d had earlier in the week. It’s very hot here, and the showers are cold, and we’re all hoping to take risks and to learn more about ourselves while we’re here, and due to all of those things, and the practical and spiritual considerations that arise from them, the three of them decided to shave their heads. Although none of the rest of us were brave enough to actually do it, we all had to tag along, and so, like scavenging vultures wheeling above a kill site, we followed our three lion leaders into Man Mix Salon and watched them get de-maned. Notable parts of the procedure: a. if you get your head shaved, and they do it a few inches at a time, you get to see how you’d look with all kinds of different hairstyles. b. there is a (very well-advertised) hairstyle called “The Beyonce”. c. barbers in Kenya use a cow tail to brush the snips off of your shoulders. d. if you’ve had hair for a long time and you get it amputated, you get phantom hair syndrome.

(TO MAKE THINGS PERFECTLY CLEAR: i did not shave my head. not even one tiny bit. I am getting all of this information from my friends who did. I need my hair here, for purposes related to camouflage)

After hanging around Loitokitok for a while longer and playing hackeysack with some salesmen, we piled back into the cars, mostly too tired and shellshocked to sing at this point, and made our way to Club Kimana, Kimana District’s premier social hangout. The proprietor is a former chief of Kimana, and apparently he likes to regale students with stories of Kenyan political intrigue, so I’m looking forward to that for future visits. This time, though, he just greeted us all very warmly, sat us at a few tables (round, outdoors, and with Kilimanjaro watching, as always, to make sure we didn’t get too rowdy) and made himself scarce (until it looked like we needed something, at which point he was always right there, somehow). And the drinking age is 18 here, so we students took the opportunity to get to know things about each other that we might not necessarily have otherwise thought to mention.

Eventually we headed back and had our regular end-of-day routine and I figured my ‘weekend’ was pretty much over, which would have been fine, I’d enjoyed it. But of course it was not, because the African wilderness always has something more in store! This time it was a ghost-headlamp and a couple of bushbabies. What happened was this: Mambo and I were hanging out alone in the chumba (because I’m still always the last one awake) when we heard a terrible shriek coming from one of the bandas. We sprang into action, which in this case involved Mambo running halfway down the path towards the sound, realizing he didn’t have a flashlight, yelling at me to bring him a flashlight, and then me catching up with him with the flashlight and us both making it to the banda within a minute and still somehow being several months behind four askaris, who had already assessed the situation and were checking the banda and weren’t even breathing hard (I’ve felt pretty safe here since that night). We figured out that it was nothing (a particularly scary nothing involving doors and wind and coincidences, but still a nothing) but Christine and Lauren were still scared, so Mambo and I agreed to hang out on their banda steps and talk while they tried to go to sleep inside.

We were stargazing and shooting the (nonexistent) breeze and just starting to think that the people we were making feel better were probably starting to no longer need us when we heard ANOTHER shrieking, this one more animalish. So Mambo and I again went running toward the sound, again had to retrace our steps for the flashlight (but this time, when I made it back to the steps, Christine, who was NOT sleeping, jumped on my back because she wanted to tag along but wasn’t wearing shoes), and managed to find the source of the sound – a couple of bushbabies wrestling in the grass a couple bandas down from where we’d been sitting. They didn’t care that we were there at all, and we were able to watch them yelp and jump on each other and scramble around for a good four or five minutes (in the meantime, we scared Sam to death, because she heard the sound and looked out her window to see a horrible silhouetted two-headed hybrid creature, which was of course me piggybacking Christine, but she didn’t know that until after she’d already had a small heart attack). And after that of course we couldn’t go to sleep, so we stayed up talking for most of the night and then when I finally did return to my banda, someone had locked me out, so I went back to Christine and Lauren’s and slept on the empty bed in my clothes. A different kind of roughing it than what I’d expected, but it works for me. And I think that still ranks as among my best nights here so far.

2. 2/13/10 – KIMANA WATER PROJECT AND MAASAI CIRCUMCISION CEREMONY
After our day off, we had several pretty rigorous days of classes, so we were all excited for that Saturday, which had been slotted for community service in the afternoon. And we were even more excited when we learned on Thursday night that we were actually cancelling morning classes and moving community service forward a few hours. Why would your professors do that when we are paying good money for tuition, you ask? Because we got invited to a party! And if that doesn’t seem like a good enough excuse to you, you obviously don’t remember your college years very well at all.

In all seriousness, it was a great honor to be invited to this party – one of our neighbors sons was getting circumcised, which is a very important event in a Maasai’s life, because it marks his entrance into the warrior age class. It’s kind of the equivalent of a bar or bat mitzvah, or a cotillian. The boy, who’s usually in his early teens, gets circumcised in the morning after taking a cold shower to cleanse him of past misdeeds. He then has his hair washed with milk and shaves it off. When he’s actually circumcised, he isn’t allowed to cry. If he manages to make it through without showing fear, he’s passed the test. In that case, his family throws a big party, and news spreads about it through word of mouth, so everyone within gossip’s reach tends to show up. The last time an SFS group got to attend any kind of real Maasai celebration was 2003, so this was an amazing opportunity.

When we got to the boma, we shook the mamas’ hands and they danced for us/with us again. Then, just like at any American barbecue, it was time to chill out until the rest of the guests arrived. The Maasai patio was a large clearing with a tree in the middle of it, right outside the boma. We were led over there and given chai tea, and Daniel explained some of what was going on around us. In the meantime, most of the people were staring at us, which tends to happen here . . . Kimana’s not a big tourist hotspot, so any foreigners are a source of great interest. It’s not so bad, though, because it gives us an excuse to stare back, and the staring usually leads to some kind of conversation, and then everyone learns something.

Eventually we were brought into another clearing and given some roasted goat meat! Again, just like a barbecue (seriously, one thing that’s been so interesting about being here is how similar everything is all over the world if you let yourself think about it that way. A Maasai party itinerary would look a lot like an American one if you abstracted things enough). I’ve been breaking my vegetarianism here whenever not doing so would mean missing out on an experience such as, say, eating roasted goat meat at a Maasai circumcision ceremony. The taste took a little getting used to, and I had to chew my small piece for about 10 minutes, but it actually got better as the time went on (Molly was saying that she didn’t used to like it but now she does, to the extent that she really looks forward to when the askaris have goat roasts. . . . I’ll keep you posted).

After that, dancing! This part is very difficult to explain without pictures, but . . . well, I took pictures, so that’s good. Until I can get them to a viewable place, I’ll just do my best. Traditionally, a Maasai warrior’s job was to go on cattle raids in neighboring villages. Now, of course, that’s illegal, so most of the warriors spend all their time looking for parties like the one we were at. If they hear there’s a party, they’ll walk all day to get there, and stay there all night dancing and drinking and chasing local girls. They also grow their hair out long and are very attached to it, and when the warriors get too old to be warriors anymore and have to settle down and get married and start having kids and making a living (traditionally through pastoralism, these days more through agriculture or a combination of the two), they become senior warriors through a ritual that involves shaving their heads (apparently they usually cry . . . leave it to the Maasai to acknowledge the midlife crisis/get people over it all in one ceremonial blow). Daniel told us to look out for people who seemed sad and newly shorn, and there were definitely some men who were noticeably both of those things.

Anyway, what I was leading to with that explanation was this: Maasai warriors are basically rock stars, or wannabe rock stars. And when they started dancing and singing, it was very easy to pretend that we were at a Maasai rock concert. It was like a big mosh pit with walking sticks poking out among the heads, and they were trading off chanting and singing (Daniel translated a little and the songs were about how they belong to the most awesome age set, how they’ve killed many lions, and how they’re great singers and dancers . . . again, standard rock and roll) just like I read about for my improvised music paper this fall, so it was very cool to hear that in real life. Eventually, the song turned into a jumping showdown, and it was unbelievable. One of our askaris was by far the best and I felt a lot of hometown pride. Then everyone regrouped into a circle, including the women and the older men and little kids (who had been practicing their jumping on the outside of the circle), and us, and started into a chant with a tricky rhythm that we eventually managed to figure out. I got dragged into things by a mama who was a little tipsy and decided that she wanted to steal my walking stick . . . rather than give it up I held on and ended up in the mosh pit, and I was happy to be there – standing among the people, it was easier to hear what everyone was singing, and each person had a slightly different part but they all melded together so well and it was easily up there with any real rock concert I’ve been to. I would have stayed there all day if the mlevi mama hadn’t made another more concerted effort at my stick and I had to escape.

After the dancing, we thanked the family of the boy who the party was for (the boy himself was still inside, recovering – the mamas kept dancing around the house he was in so that he would know everyone was happy for him) and gave them a small gift. I was feeling pretty sick at this point (foreshadowing!) so I kept to the edges of the group and managed to attract the attentions of a boy who was probably about fourteen. He spoke very good English and told me that his grandfather wanted to meet me. His grandfather did not speak as good English, but he offered me more chai and we traded greetings. The boy could tell I was only pretending to drink the chai (it was scalding) and he called me out on it as I came back over, so I defended myself as best I could and we both laughed. Then my friend/fellow student Ryan came over. He assumed that if he talked in English I’d be the only one who could understand him (usually a fair assumption, but not always, especially with school-age kids) and the following conversation happened:

Ryan: “Man, I wish I had brought some bubbles with me. I’ve heard the kids really like bubbles.”
Boy whose name I never learned: “I don’t like bubbles.”
Ryan: “But I’m glad they like having their pictures taken so much, at least we can do that with them.”
Boy: “I don’t like pictures.”
Me: “What do you like?”
Boy: “I like you.”
at this point he blushed furiously and winked at me.

Sadly, I was rushed away with the group and never even got his name, let alone his number. And so ended my Maasai party, the same way most movie-perfect American parties end – with a missed connection.

Oh right! I forgot about the whole community service part of the day! Ok so in the morning, we worked for the Kimana Water Project, which is a community-run organization that is trying to bring water to the drier parts of Kimana so that people don’t have to walk miles every day for it (here’s where my instinct is to say “you can visit their website to learn more” but I’m thinking that would be a bit of a goose chase). My group dug a trench and mixed and poured cement in order to help build one of the main culverts . . . we worked for about three hours and by the end we’d only extended the culvert about ten meters. It’s amazing how much harder everything is when you only have a couple of shovels and wheelbarrows and your cement is made out of water and pulverized gravel. But every day the pipeline reaches a few more people, and there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of people who want to help with it. A lot of people had their livestock grazing nearby while they were working on the culvert, and some of the women just stopped by for half an hour or so while they happened to be getting water anyway. Nothing at all like construction sites back home.

So after that long day I actually got heat exhaustion! Apparently well chai-drated does not equal well hydrated (haaaa ha ha ha ha). But I am fine now, and glad to have gotten my obligatory “sick in a remote area of a foreign country” story out of the way (I hope).

3. 2/14/10 GIRAFFES! GIRAFFES!
The day after that was another non-program day, so I spent most of it recovering and finally getting some homework done. But in the middle of it I decided to buck up and go outside the camp gate with some classmates for a giraffe walk and I am really quite glad that I did. We don’t get to walk outside of the camp much, because there literally are elephants and lions everywhere, so by the time we’d gotten half a mile or so away, I was in completely unfamiliar territory. It’s mostly scrubland with little twisted trees, unusually green for this time of year, and littered with chunks of red volcanic rock and the occasional rocky outcropping (which, when spotted, always necessitates the spotter yelling “PRIDE ROCK!”). Perfect giraffe territory, luckily for us. Giraffes are browsers and eat leaves off those little trees, and they’re more comfortable in wooded areas than grassy ones, because lions and hyenas have fewer places to hide. Sure enough, after we’d ducked under the Kimana ‘electric’ fence (constructed by the government, without local input, several years ago to try to combat human-wildlife conflict in the area, and then given over to the locals to ‘take care of’ without any instructions as to how to do that, or funding to make it happen. So it’s been defunct for a while now . . . elephants knock over the pillars and waltz destructively right on in) and walked for a few more minutes, giraffes were suddenly everywhere, along with zebras and Thomson’s gazelles. The gazelles and zebras were a little skittish, but the giraffes seemed more curious than anything, particularly one very large male with a crooked horn. He let us get about 3 buslengths away from him before walking slowly and carefully away.

It’s hard to describe how strange it is to see a giraffe and be standing on the same ground as it. All the physical principals that allow you to move – muscle/bone leverage and ball-and-socket joints and gravity and friction and all those – are also powering this giraffe, but this giraffe is like a Caterpillar crane and you are like a bumper car. He has to squint to see you, and his head blocks out your sun. And you can stomp on the ground as hard as you want to and he won’t feel a thing, but if he starts running, little earthquakes happen all around you. He’s standing there and could kill you, but he doesn’t, and meanwhile, you’re helping kill him just by living the way you do. I’m possibly overthinking this, but that’s my job these days.
We reluctantly left the giraffes to their lunch and headed back to camp, where we did more homework until it was time for dinner. And then we had a campfire, and Alex (a fellow student who’s worked at Yosemite National Park for the past couple summers) and Daniel traded scary animal stories while we all listened. They both promised that they saved their best ones for Tsavo, when we’ll be camping out for a week in the middle of lion country in tents that Daniel described as being about the thickness of candy wrappers. Which just seems a little too convenient . . .

Thanks again for reading! I’ve managed to build up a surplus of cool things that have happened over the past week or so (that tends to happen here) so if you want to come back you’ll be hearing about Amboseli National Park, and about my yesterday, which I spent shadowing a family in a Maasai boma.

Salama!
Cara

2/8/10: A TYPICAL DAY ON

Mzuri usiku rafiki!

As usual, since we last spoke, I have experienced many firsts: my first good night’s sleep in Africa (that was nice!), my first Kenyan banana bread, my first “Mwanafunzi-of-the-day” day, my first day off, my first visit to Club Kimana (what is Club Kimana, you ask? Wouldn't you like to know), my first (semi-accidental) banda sleepover, and my first late-night encounter with a pair of mating bushbabies. Do you want to hear about it?!?!?! If not, I recommend you go here instead: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1648 and learn some fun facts about giraffes.

As I think I’ve said before, we don’t have ordinary weekends here at KBC. Like most institutions, what we DO have are acronyms, and lots of them. A brief dictionary: KBC = Kilimanjaro Base Camp (where I live); CWMS = Center for Wildlife Management Studies (more resumè-friendly name for where I live); SFS = School for Field Studies (the program I’m on); WM, WE, EP, and SSC = Wildlife Management, Wildlife Ecology, Environmental Policy, and Swahili and Socio-Culture (the classes we’re all taking); FL = Field Lecture (ex. climbing up Olosoito Hill and sprawling out around our EP professor, Tome, as he points off into the distance at the real physical mountain ranges and group ranches that the map on his portable easel represents . . . I like field lectures); FE = Field Exercise (ex. driving out to Amboseli National Park to work on large mammal count sampling/population estimation, which we’re doing as an WM assignment later this week); DR = Directed Research (the research projects we will spending almost all our time on once we go to Tanzania, halfway through the program).

Because we don’t get weekends, sometimes we get days off in the middle of the week (NPDs, or “Non-Program Days”). Yesterday (Tuesday) was one of those days, so I felt pretty lucky to be MOD on Monday, because it was a FRIDAY EQUIVALENT. I took it upon myself, as one of my less-(bordering-on-un)-official MOD duties, to remind everyone of that throughout the day. I am now also going to take it upon myself to describe that day in detail, and posit it as a typical day at KBC.

My more official duties on Monday started at 6:00, when I woke up to the gentle calls of the neighborhood ibis flock (these guys wake me up every morning. They sound, actually, the way that I imagine Tacky the Penguin sounds when he yells “WHAAAAAAAT’S UPPPPPPP” . . . I’m not sure if the Tacky the Penguin books have entered the collective consciousness yet, and I apologize if they haven't, but I really hope they have). I was very relieved when my alarm went off 10 minutes later. I got dressed (we had a field lecture scheduled for later, so I got to wear SAFARI CLOTHES . . . I look like Jane Goodall all the time here, with the addition, often, of a David Foster Wallace-style bandana). I tried not to wake up my bandamates, Chelsea and Lia . . . it’s hard because I sleep right across from Chelsea, and I have to walk by Lia to get out the front door, and I’ve lost the fight against the little thorns in the soles of my shoes so now whenever I walk across a hard surface it sounds like I’m tap-dancing. But I made it out, and across the dewy grass (I try to appreciate the dew here because it’s gone REALLY quickly) and to the solar panels, which I turned toward the sun (I’m not entirely clear on what the solar panels power, exactly, but I know that if I’m the one responsible for a lack of internet later in the day, I will probably be “accidentally left behind” in lion country at some point later on in the semester).

My MOD day happened to coincide with my day on KUKARU! Which is what I have started calling “cook crew” because that’s how Arthur, the head cook, says it and it makes him laugh. There are five students on each cook crew, and they’re named after tribes found in Kenya (I’m on Turkana Crew, named for a tribe from Northwest Kenya that raises camels and wears/fights with wristknives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Turkana-WristKnifeDemo.jpg) and they rotate through so each crew is on duty once every five days. So far I’ve had it twice – this time I made sure to be on time, because the first time (the second day here) I accidentally set my cell phone alarm for 6:00 PM and so overslept and had to be woken up by my friend/crewmate Becca, and Arthur glowered at me until I won him over again by fearlessly peeling scalding hot sweet potatoes with an enormous knife and my bare hands (he let me do it for a while before reminding me that I could run the potatoes under cold water first if I wanted to). My other friend and crewmate Max (don’t worry, all of you many Maxes in my life! This Max is short for Maximilian, and also we call him Mambo . . . name games again) had teamed up with me the first time and we made ridiculously good pancakes, so I was hoping we would get to do that again, but instead I was put in charge of cracking 160 eggs. I am now really good at producing perfect glistening shell-less (and shellbitless) eggs. Then Arthur had me peel the sweet potatoes again. I asked if I could use a wristknife, but he said no.

When we were finished, I got to ring the bell for breakfast. Which I did, of course, with great gusto.

Our cutlery-armory consists of a whole lot of tin plates and bowls, assorted silverwear (some with interesting things scratched into the handles . . . mostly acronyms again, mysterious ones), and about ten thousand white ceramic mugs. Most of the plates and bowls look as though they’ve been put into a cement mixer with a bunch of hammers and driven around for a while. And when everyone gets together right outside the chumba after breakfast to wash dishes (basin of hot soapy water with sponges -> basin of cool soapless water for rinsing -> plastic trash cans full of water-and-bleach for the dishes to hang out in until the next meal . . . it’s practically a dish spa), it sounds like . . . probably a cement mixer full of hammers and tin bowls and plates. I’ve tried to start a metal-on-metal percussion ensemble, thus far in vain.

The first class on Monday was a field lecture for Wildlife Ecology, which meant that Kiringe, our professor, wearing his signature lab coat (a student a few years ago made it for him, it has African birds drawn all over it in magic marker), led us outside and showed us all the places in the camp that we can “find science”, as he put it. That turned out to be basically everywhere, including an aardvark hole and the nest of a lesser yellow sparrow weaver, but most distinctly and memorably in a bowling-ball-sized piece of dried elephant dung (this week’s catchphrase: “do you know how much science is in this poop?”).
When we got back to camp, we had half an hour until Wildlife Management, so Lia and I gathered a bunch of different types of leaves and made a house for the hawk moth caterpillar she had found (http://www.wordsandpictures.me.uk/imag/img256.jpg). We’re not allowed to have pets in the bandas, so we decided that this caterpillar would instead be a “research subject”. He is doing pretty well so far and prefers acacia leaves. His name is Eli.

Wildlife Management was held outside around the fire pit, where our professor Shem taught us methods for estimating population counts of large animals from small samples. Then was lunch, which was exciting because I got to ring the bell again, and which tends to be similar to breakfast but with different food (usually beans and some kind of cabbage thing and vegetables and something with meat. Ok, I’m bad at describing food, but trust me, it’s REALLY good here . . . Arthur used to work at a 5-star safari resort, but we somehow snagged him. maybe because we’re so good at volleyball). And after lunch ANOTHER field lecture, this time for Maasai class, with Kiringe and Daniel. Daniel talked about how changes in Maasai culture have affected the environment, and let us know that once a Maasai man has passed his initiation, he traditionally introduces himself by saying “My name is ________ and I have killed a lion” (Daniel himself did not kill a lion, but only because it got away at the last minute. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it that much). Then they brought us around and told us about the medicinal properties of trees in the area, (and laughed at the fact that none of us had ever had worms, and described in graphic detail what it is like to have them. At which point we accused them of trying to make us lose our appetites for dinner so that they could have it all, which they did not deny). There’s one tree, Salvadora persica, which is nicknamed the Toothbrush Tree because you can use its mature twigs to clean your teeth (we are all waiting to run out of toothpaste so that we can try it). I also found out that my walking stick is made of the pith of an Acacia mellifera tree (or “Oiti” in Maasai).

After that, class was over, so we all did some homework and milled around the grounds and logged the things we’ve seen that day (part of an assignment for Shem) and generally just killed time until the mood was right for our thus-far-daily series of volleyball games. We all expected to play soccer here, but a very Kenyan combination of ball-killing thorns, visibility-killing dust, and brain-cell-killing lack of treeless space (we’ve had a few bad man/plant collisions) shifted our attentions early on to the volleyball net over near where the vervet monkeys live. We are getting pretty good, I must say. Daniel, Arthur and some askari often play with us, and there’s no better way to get riled up than to have a Maasai warrior in an environmentally-themed T-shirt yell “now you all die!” or “now we are getting serious!” or (my personal favorite) “we will now mess up your political house!” at the other team (or at your team. . . . but I try to be on Daniel’s team). Arthur had us convinced for a while that he had never touched a volleyball and that he was too shy to play, and we kept asking and cajoling over the course of several days, and then one day he ran out in his chef’s uniform and grabbed the volleyball and ran back nearly to the treeline and arced a perfect serve straight past the sun and into the corner of the other side of the court (by the way, ‘court’ = largely dethorned sand and ash pit, every time the ball lands in it we get a big plume kicks up and I think about how that asteroid killed the dinosaurs by blocking out the sun with dust). Now he’s trying to convince us that he used to play for the Kenyan national team, but Tome says that’s a lie too, just in the other direction.

After volleyball I usually go for a run around the fenced perimeter of the camp. I usually have to stop to look at at least one cool thing . . . today something unidentified and furry ran across the path in front of me, and I was hunting around in the bushes but couldn’t find it, and was disappointed until I looked up and saw a hornbill staring right at me (Zazu! which just means that the furry thing was probably Simba, too bad I missed him). Those floral and faunal distractions, and all the Maasai walking their goats around in the surrounding rangelands, who for SOME REASON tend to laugh and yell “Jambo” at the weird mzungu with the Maasai walking stick running around in circles next to their grazing land, make up for the altitude and the heat, and the fact that the path is only a mile, and this is totally the greatest place in the world to go running.

And then I go back to camp! And by this time my body temperature’s finally up enough that I can think about taking a shower. The showers are about the only cold thing here. They, and the bathrooms and laundry sinks, are housed in a couple of little thatched structures called chus, one at the end of each line of bandas (the camp is set up vaguely like an open square, with two lines of 5 bandas each facing each other, with a field and volleyball net and a couple of fire pits between them, and the chumba laid over the top, and the chus in the corners. I wish I could put a picture up, but I don’t think I have enough bandwidth). Showering is a difficult endeavor and there are many obstacles, including the water temperature, the fact that we’re all dirtier than we’ve ever been almost every day (the dust is a high-caliber infiltrator . . . you could stand around in one place in rain gear all day and you’d still probably get a good anthill’s worth out of your boots that night), that we all bought quick-dry towels without really thinking about how “quick-dry” describes a property of the towel itself rather than any skills it might have in relation to, say, a shoulder-length head of human hair, and that the thorns are almost as sneaky as the dust and any time you even hint at having bare feet they attack you for your insolence. But there are always a few people attempting to get clean at the same time, and so we shout war cries and moral support at each other over the partitions (which reminds me, I should learn how to say “this is freakin’ cold” in Swahili, and also “that is a huge spider on my bar of soap” . . . every little bit of practice helps).

After I showered, there was dinner at 7, which we somehow all managed to eat despite the earlier worm conversation. Then at 7:30 it was time for more special duties – every day the MOD leads something called RAP (= Reflection, Announcements, Presentation). For reflection, we’re supposed to talk about something that happened that day, or read a poem or a quote or tell a story or ask the group a question . . . I decided to bring some Marsh CoffeeHaus over to the equator and write a song about the stuff we’d learned over the course of the week. It went over well, and then there were some announcements, and then for the presentation I taught everybody how to play that game everyone has different names for where you write a sentence and then someone draws it and folds the sentence over and then someone else writes a new sentence etc. etc. Which turned out hilariously, as always (eventually I have to do an academic presentation, but I did not feel like doing that this time). After that I was able to finally relax and just be a regular student again . . . no more special duties. So I did some homework and some writing and hung out with people in the chumba, and then, since it was a FNE (= Friday Night Equivalent), we watched Donnie Darko on the projector in the classroom, and then I lay in a hammock and looked at the stars and watched everybody trickle out of the chumba and go off to their bandas and then I went back to MY banda and crawled under my mosquito net and fell asleep pretty quickly, for once.

Now hopefully you know a little more about what it’s like to be a student at KBC. The next few days look to be a lot like I just described . . . I don’t think we have any field trips until Saturday or so. So next time I write it’s going to be about Tuesday, our first non-program day, which was crazy in some ways I expected and even crazier in many ways that I did not. Stay tuned for those bushbabies . . . it’s a good story, I promise.

Miss you all,
Cara

2/4/09-2/5/09: MONKEYS WHO KNOCK, SCHRODINGER'S GOAT, AND ACCIDENTAL FEMINIST STATEMENTS

Three or four days in and we’re settling into a bit of a routine . . . hard to believe it’s only been that long! Maybe because of those four days, I’ve spent at least three and a half awake? But I’m not tired and I don’t know why that is, either. It’s probably the mountain air drifting down, or the constant invigorating scent of chai . . . Kenyans drink a lot of chai. a LOT. Also a lot of Cadbury Coffee-Carmel Luxury Powdered Drinking Chocolate (With Free Spoon) . . . we’ve gone through at least three containers since I got here (I know because several plastic purple Free Spoons have appeared among the regular silverware).
Soon, when I’ve lived through a few more of them, I’ll try to write up a runthrough of a typical day in my program. Normal things (showering, laundry, walking) tend to be pretty interesting here. For now, though, I’m just going to give you some highlights from the past couple days!

First of all, my list of sighted wildlife keeps getting longer! Last night Alex spotted a baby black mamba, that most unintentionally deadly of snakes, on the side of the path, so of course we all had to gather around it and peer (its head was underground, so we felt relatively safe, though in retrospect I’m not really sure where our heads were). Less exciting, but still notable, was a fairly average-looking toad who decided to chill out in one of our frisbees. We agreed that we’re all getting jaded – any toad at all would get some attention if we ran into it at home, but here we all just felt let down by its lack of exoticism . . . it didn’t have horns or funny colors or anything (UNTIL IT TRANSFORMED . . . only kidding).

Daniel leads nature walks nearly every morning at 6:30, which tends to be the morning commute hour for wildlife. Today’s got progressively more exciting as it went along. We started out looking at some plants and some giraffe scat (which is surprisingly tiny, in case anyone would like to know – being constantly surrounded by people who are rabidly interested in such things, I no longer have any idea whether or not the average person is). Then I saw a stickbug that looked EXACTLY LIKE the plant it was on, which was very exciting for me. Dad, I think you would like to have a pet stickbug, or maybe a pet robot stickbug. Next, we got a pretty good binocular’s eye view of the troupe of vervet monkeys that live in the yellow fever trees at the edge of the bandas. Mom, I think you would NOT like to have a pet vervet, but they are very cute. Daniel then took us across the small stream that runs underground all the way from Kilimanjaro to where we are, and then asked us if we heard “that sound.” There are a LOT of sounds going on all the time here, so we were all ready to be affronted that he expected us to only be able to hear one of them, but then we heard it and we understood. It was kind of like a laughing monster and it was very difficult to ignore, and it turned out to be the call of the Verreaux’s Eagle-Owl, two of which Daniel quickly found in a nearby acacia. THEY WERE GIANT. Apparently they are known to drop out of the sky and carry off dikdiks (little antelope) for dinner. The occasional SFS student has even been lucky (?) enough to see one scoop up (and, soon after, tear up) a cat. After watching them swivel their heads most of the way around until we got the uncanny feeling that they were watching us and sizing us up, we got out of there and headed towards a small hill, where we found dikdiks! We tried to follow them in order to get a closer look but were distracted by another unignorable sound, this time an impressively deep hoot (the animals don’t follow the rules, Dad). IT WAS BABOOOOOOOONS!

Daniel’s lived here his whole life and even he still gets excited about baboons. So he teased them by imitating their “go away” call, and we all got scared and moved backwards and then got excited and moved forwards again etc. etc. for a very long time while the two giant male baboons swung around and yelled at us, and the three babies wrestled with each other and ate fruits and to all appearances quite enjoyed the attention (there were probably more baboons there, but the rest were hidden in the trees). Daniel told us about how smart baboons are and then demonstrated by putting his walking stick up to his shoulder like a gun and aiming it at one of the males, who immediately hid behind a branch. It was cool, but if you think about what must have happened around that baboon in order for him to know to do that, it’s easy to understand why he wanted to keep all of us humans away from his babies.

I got a sort of vindictive thrill out of storming the baboondocks because of a situation they (unintentionally and indirectly) got me into the other night. Because sleeping’s been difficult, I’ve been hanging out in the chumba (the classroom building) a lot late at night so I don’t keep my roommates up. I was heading back from there to my banda, fairly freaked out because even though it’s a really short walk it’s easy to let your imagination scare you late at night here, and looking forward to getting under my mosquito net and staying there until after the sun was up. A hitchless and reasonable plan . . . OR SO IT APPEARED. My roommate Chelsea had woken up a little earlier and needed to use the chu (bathroom), so she walked over there, got herself all freaked out, compounded the freakout on the walk back (it’s very hard not to), re-entered the banda, became convinced that baboons and/or vervets were climbing all over the banda, became also convinced that I was in my bed (or, understandably, just didn’t think about the fact that I might not be), locked the door in a bit of a panic, and lay in bed letting that panic simmer around for about 15 minutes until I (or, from her point of view, Something Outside) started trying to open the door. At which point the panic started to bubble. It reached full boil when I knocked on the door. Luckily, although her first thought (she reported to me later) was “MONKEYS CAN KNOCK!?” Chelsea retained the presence of mind to make an inquiring noise (which she insists was some kind of normal question, like “who’s there,” but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t) and I said “I think you locked me out” and she got up and let me in and I don’t think anyone has ever said “you’re not a monkey!” with such relief (at least not to me). Then we laughed for about nine million years. So yes, the surrounding primates have caused me all kinds of trouble.

For the record, Chelsea’s concern was warrented. The line between “outside” and “inside” here is pretty thin, and animals cross it a lot. She and I and about 1/3 of the rest of our group relearned this lesson the other day when we went to visit a traditional Maasai boma, or homestead (it was a real privilege to be able to visit a real boma . . . there are a lot of fake bomas people have set up as tourist attractions, but our Maasai neighbors actually live in this one for most of the year). I’m going to save writing about the boma itself for later . . . at one point during the program we’re all going to be split up and sent off to different bomas to live as a Maasai for a day (hopefully I’ll know more Swahili by then) and after that I’ll be a lot more qualified to talk about it (though still not very qualified at all).

I am EXTREMELY qualified to tell this story, though, because I was there. The mamas decided to show us the interior of one of their houses. Each house is probably about the size of an American bathroom and has walls made out of hardened cow dung and a roof made of a mixture of thatch and scrap materials like metal and wood and plastic. The houses are used primarily for sleeping, so they’re very dark inside and most of the room is taken up by two large beds, one for the father and one for the mother and children. When the mamas led us inside, we couldn’t see anything, so they sort of politely forced us down onto stools or the ground or, in the case of my program-mates and friends Ryan and Coral, one of the beds. These particular mamas could speak English, so they began explaining some things about the house we were in. Although I can’t say Ryan and Coral were visibly uncomfortable because I couldn’t exactly see them, they did seem kind of restless and I wasn’t surprised that, when one of the mamas mentioned that their pet dog sleeps under the house, Ryan (very politely) interrupted to ask “does that dog happen to be in the house right now, under this bed?”

“No, the dog is outside,” the mama reassured him. “Nothing is under the bed.”
Ryan: “There is definitely something underneath this bed.”

Mama: “You’re just feeling the dog from outside.”

Ryan: “I don’t think so, because whatever it is, it’s chewing on my pant leg.”

Well, we’d just spent several days learning about all the things that can kill us while we’re over here, so at this point everyone got pretty actively nervous, and nervously active, and it’s a good thing that cow dung makes for really strong walls. Eventually one of the mamas got through the ruckus and pulled a baby goat out from under the bed, at which point everyone in the house started laughing (laughter is turning out to be a theme of the trip). And the goat went outside and so did we and we milled about quietly for a little while thinking about the unique challenges that arise when you’re required to (and want to) be respectful and give the benefit of the doubt to your hosts even in a potentially dangerous situation (Coral summed it up best: “It was licking my ankle the whole time, but the mamas said there wasn’t anything there, so I believed them.”) THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING!

The rest of the boma visit went really well, too . . . the mamas decided to greet us by doing a traditional Maasai song and dance. It was really beautiful and we all ended up dancing with them. In return, we’d prepared a traditional American song and dance – an exceedingly well- and efficiently-choreographed and arranged version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, with two-part harmony and a rap breakdown in the middle (“TELL ME WHAT KIND OF JUNGLE?” “THE MIGHTY JUNGLE!” etc. etc.). It went over very well (if you don’t believe me, it will definitely be on the internet soon. yup, me and the Maasai, breakin’ it down, on youtube). After the house tour, we got to practice our bartering. Now that I know more Swahili, especially the numbers, I’m much better at it. Most of what I got is of course a SURPRISE but I do want to mention my new and hard-drivingly-bargained-for walking stick because a. it’s the greatest thing in the world, I feel like I have regained a limb I didn’t even know I’d lost and b. by owning it I am, according to one of the askari whose name I don’t know yet, “changing the culture single-handedly” because Maasai walking sticks are supposed to be only for men. Which I did not know at time of purchase. But there is no turning back now because everyone who isn’t calling me Carabash (“Calabash Cara” has been appropriately abbreviated) is calling me “walking stick girl” (hey, when you get nicknames, you know you really belong! now we’ve got to hope I don’t confuse the two and bash anyone with the walking stick). And I asked Daniel and he told me that it isn’t disrespectful for me to use it (the askari said the same thing, pointing out that a decade or so ago it would have been unthinkable to see any woman in Kenya in pants).

Tomorrow is one of the many Days We’ve All Been Waiting For . . . we’re off to Amboseli National Park to see all the big charismatic things that made us want to come to Africa when we were kids. We’ve been learning about how the park is in decline, so I’m going to try to keep three parts of my mind active at once – the tourist part can go crazy for the lions, the scientist part can look for signs that the lions are dying out (or, as we’ve started saying in class, “the Mufasas are going over the cliff” . . . our camp’s common language is supposed to be Swahili, but for now it’s effectively Lion King references), and the politician part can look for the ways in which the government and the park are trying to hide the fact that the lions are dying out. And the blogger part’s probably going to have a figurative field day as well as a literal one, just to warn you.

tutaonana kwa leo,
Carabash

p.s. this was written several days ago but I just got internet now . . . amboseli was pretty great, and today we had our first field lecture. also, tomorrow I am . . . wait for it . . . "MOD", aka MWANAFUNZI OF THE DAY! "Mwanafunzi" means student; I have no idea why the rest of the phrase is not in swahili, i did not make that decision. anyway, i get to turn the solar panels and ring the bell for meals (the bell is a rusty bicycle wheel that we hit with a slightly less rusty metal stick whenever anything important is happening) so stay tuned because i'm sure i will have at least six pages of things to say about it.

RISK MANAGEMENT ORIENTATION (aka how not to die in Kenya) & MARKET DAY IN K-TOWN (aka how to have a great time getting suckered in Kenya)

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