Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Turkana Blog part 1

Hello all!!

As I write this I’m stuck at home with a stomach bug. Everyone else on our trip has had it, so I guess it’s only fair.

Lake Turkana was an amazing experience. In one week we got to see more of Kenya than most Kenyan’s will ever see. Every day we drove through amazing extremes, from lush forest to desert, from no man’s land down to the Rift Valley. Kenya is fantastic and beautiful.


We went with a group called Gametrackers, which leads a lot of different tours around Kenya and East Africa. We took what I think is a converted lorry, there was a separate cabin for the driver, cook and assistant cook (who were all amazingly sweet, and made delicious food too) We sat in the separate back area that had all the seats that we sat in, along with Steven our tour guide. To get to the back area you had to climb up a small ladder. All of our supplies for the week (including about 400 liters of water) sat underneath the sitting area.

The first day we drove from Nairboi north past Thika, across the equator (where I fell off the bus and got a beautiful bruise on my arm!) around Mt Kenya, which we couldn’t really see because it was cloudy, and up to Samburu National Park. Along the way we stopped in a few different towns for bathroom brakes and the like, and at one point our tour guide turns around to us and says, “this town is know for being the last town with paved roads.” And sure enough, it was in fact the last town with paved roads. Roads in Nairobi are often filled with pot holes and are known for being awful, and interestingly enough these roads were probably better off than some of the paved roads that we’ve driven on.

We stayed in Samburu for two nights. The first full day we were there we went on a morning and evening game drive, which was amazing. We saw so many elephants, zebras, giraffes, dik-diks, oryx, hornbills, gazelles, baboons, and a number of other animals. My favorites were the elephants. So adorable, plus they’re matriarchal, which doesn’t hurt. At one point we watched a few baby elephants play fighting. There were also a lot of really cool birds, including ones that are called suberb starlings.(or something) they’re bright blue with green bellies. It rained during our evening game drive, which was pretty cool because a lot of the animals came out after the hot day. We saw a cheetah with three of her cubs, and 2 leopards lounging in the trees, along with the usual assortment of other wildlife.

During the day we went to a local Samburu village that survives by having visitors pay money in exchange for a tour of the village and a few cultural dances (cultural tourism is fascinating, and is both frustrating and awesome…I’m still not sure how I feel about it, and we visited three villages that week….) when we got there the women from the surrounding clans came and put necklaces around us. First the moran (warriors, men between the ages of 19 and 29, or from circumcision until about 30) did the dance that they do about hunting and strength, which is combined with a few very high jumps, and then the women pulled our hands and made us join them in dance that the warriors dance with the young girls of the tribe. After that the women sang the welcoming song. We took a tour of the village, sat in people’s houses, saw the classroom, and the blacksmith’s workshop. The we were made to run the gauntlet of women and young girl trying to sell us way too expensive jewelry.

It was interesting to see that way that people decorate themselves. The Moran like to decorate their hair a lot, and we saw one man who had sewn plastic flowers in his hair as a Mohawk. It was awesome. It was also really interesting to see what life is like. The Samburu are related to the Maasai people, they speak the same language, with different accents, and look very similar. However, while the Maasai have largely stopped female circumcision (which was outlawed in Kenya in the last 10 years or so) the Samburu still practice it. A girl is circumcised on the day she is married, usually about age 14. Men on the other hand are circumcised at around 15, but not married until late twenties early thirties. Our tour guide Steven, was samburu, but despite living in Nairobi still wanted to marry a 14 year old circumcised girl. Girls younger than 14 usually are the girlfriends of moran, and are free to have sex with them…and people believe that girls this young can enjoy sex. The man who showed us around the village had also studied in Nairboi, and because of this he doesn’t want to marry a girl who is circumcised, but he knows that if he brings a girl from another village to his village to marry he can’t leave her alone because she’ll be circumcised while he’s not there. Very very interesting.

That next morning we work up to an interesting surprise. Right next to our outhouse, which was pretty close t o camp itself. Were huge piles of elephant poop. Apparently elephants walked right next to our camp, and none of us noticed.

There was also a family of baboons that keep trying to steal food from us as we were eating, and while we weren’t looking they snuck into our bus and stole some of our food. We’re still not entirely sure how they got in there.

The next day we drove up to Marsabit national Park, stopping to see a few different volcanic craters. It was really interesting to drive through the dry savannah land only to drive up a mountain and end up in a forest where everything is lush and green. We stopped by a place called Paradise Lake, which isn’t really a lake anymore, because there’s been so little rain recently. On our drive to Marsabit we drove by two mountains that are sacred to the Samburu..when it hasn’t rained in a long time people go there to pray and with in a few months it rains again. It’s called Blue mountain (I think). We also had our first experience “Checking the tire pressure” otherwise known as bush toilets, which became increasingly more hilarious as the week went on and there was less and less vegetation.


well this about covers the first third of the trip...i'll be posting again later this week with the rest!
miss you all!

Monday, October 15, 2007

i'm alive!!

Hi all!!
i just wanted to let you all know thati'm alive.
i'm still trying to get down my trip to Turkana in words, so here's an blog that i wrote before i left for you all to read.
miss you all!!!
African Picasso

There’s a phenomena in Nairobi called Maasai Markets. On Tuesdays it’s in the city, on Fridays it moves to Village Market (also known as UN market because of the people that shop there), on Saturdays it’s in a parking lot behind the Hilton Downtown, and on Sundays it’s at Ya-Ya center.

The markets are fun, with so many different things for sale: jewelry, bowls, picture frames, scarves and batiks. At every market there’s at least one person selling batiks who claims to be the African Picasso. They attack you as soon as you arrive in the market, asking you to please come and see their batiks, because not only do they make their own, but they’ve mastered the skill to achieve the same level as that of Picasso.
If you tell them that you’ve seen many other African Picasso’s they assure you that they are in fact the original ones. There’s a market nearby that’s open everyday, and a man there has a sign that says that he is the original African Picasso.

A few weekends ago a few of us went to the market behind the Hilton, which is huge, and the people there were so pushy that we got pretty frustrated pretty quickly. One man had been following us around since we got there (wamunzungu usually are easy targets they didn’t understand what things should cost, or how to bargain). When he first told us that he was the African Picasso, I was so fed up with everyone saying that they were the African Picasso that I kind of freaked.
“Why Picasso?!” I yelled. “Why not the African Monet, the African Matisse, the African Van Gogh, the African Renoir, why just Picasso?!?!”
They all kind of started at me like I was crazy, and a guy that walked by yelled “I’m the African Matisse!” at me.

We happened to walk past the man’s stall and he stopped us and he said, “look I’m the African Picasso, looking is free!” (they all say that, along with “touching is free, almost everything is free!!”)
I got a little frustrated, probably unreasonably. His artwork is was good enough, it just wasn’t Picasso at all. They were pictures of animals, and they looked like almost everything else around. I turned and looked at him and said, entirely seriously “Picasso was abstract, do you understand me, abstract.”
He looked at me and said, “Ok! I’ll show you my abstract drawings.”
“No, no,” I said, “he was a cubist.” This was met with a blank stare, to which I responded “you find out what cubism means, and then we’ll talk.”

I probably overreacted, but if you’re going to pick an artist to name yourself after, at least try to understand what their artwork looks like.

We’ve met some other really nice people at the market however. At Zebra market (which is nearby, and open everyday, instead of once a week) we met a woman named Eunice. I was with my friend Liz, and we told her that our names were Elizabeth and Mary (sometimes it’s just easier) and she looked at us and said “You’re sisters right, no cousins.” People are always mistaking any of us on the program for cousins, sisters, etc, so we weren’t surprised. After we told her that we were just friends she said, “No, in the bible!!” Kenyans have mandatory religious education, called CRE in the majority of the country (Christian Religious Education) although in the Muslim areas it’s called IRE (Islamic Religious Education). Kenyans know their religious texts. Eunice was so sweet. We didn’t even have to bargain with her or “her sister” (who knows if they’re sisters or not) who was in the stall across the way. They gave us amazing prices because we just chatted with them (we even tried to use our Kiswahili, which I think won them over more!). Since then my friend liz has gone back to visit her, and she asked where I was, which is so nice!! A good deal of you will probably get presents from Eunice or her sister.

Some observations about Kenyan and music:
American hip-hop is HUGE, especially that song Beautiful Girls (or as we call it, Suicidal). We hear that everywhere we go.

Classic Rock stations on the radio will probably only play hip-hop and R&B from the late 1990s/ early 2000s.

Reggae is huge, and is sometimes used to bring across a point. There was one we heard on a matatu the other day that had a chorus that went “Abortion is a crime, it’s not a human right, you would punish parents that kill there kids, so punish women that have an abortion.” A very interesting way to get your point across.

Our favorite radio station is called “Black Supremacy” and their tag line is “We’re taking over”

miss you all!!

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

It's october already?

I can’t believe it’s already October! September flew by with out me even noticing!! October’s going to go just as quickly I fear! Especially because we have two class trips planned. Man, it’s going to be December before I realize.

This last weekend was a blast! On Friday we went to the top of the Kenya International Conference Center to see a bird’s eye view of Nairobi. It was really cool to see how everything fit together, and to see the different parts of the city from up above. Afterwards we went to the memorial park for the bombing of the US embassy. It was pretty powerful.

On Saturday we went to Art in the Park, which is kind of what it sounds like. Basically in the middle of Ngong Forest Sanctuary a bunch of artists made really awesome art out of different things found in nature. A lot of the art focused on the need to protect nature, such as old tree trunks that were stuffed with dried grass to make smoke stacks called “global warning.” In general it was pretty awesome. There were a lot of school children that were running around the forest. It’s really interesting because people in Nairobi live around so much nature, but they never see it because it’s so expensive to get out to it.

Speaking of which on Sunday, we took a day trip to Lake Nivasha, which was fantastic!!! At first we were a bit skeptical of what the trip would be like because when we left the house (at 6:30 in the morning) it was raining and gross. It started clearing up during out hour drive to the park, and it actually turned out to be amazing, because the clouds made the day slightly cool which meant there were a lot of animals out and about. We did a walking safari through Lake Nivasha national park, called Hippo Lake. We walked through an open field, and through a clearing of trees, and all the sudden there were a ton of animals. No lie, it was like a scene out of the lion king. There were water bucks, impalas, giraffes, water buffalo, and zebras. We got pretty close to all of the animals (with the exception of the water buffalo. You don’t go close to those), and it was awesome. We then went to the lake and saw so many hippos. That was pretty awesome. We saw a baby hippo, baby giraffe, and baby zebra. We had the park pretty much to ourselves which was pretty cool, except at one point a group of about 8 small boys ran through the park. Totally random.

After the walking tour we took a boat tour of a different part of Lake Nivasha, and we saw more hippos, and we went by Crescent Island which is an island where animals are brought in to live, probably for tourists, and we saw more of the animals listed above plus wildebeest and gazelles, and pelicans. In general it was an amazing day.

It was really nice to get out of city for once, breath some fresh air, an see wild animals. We felt like such tourists, but considering how we spend most of our time, we didn’t feel too bad. It was so awesome to be around all of the animals, and so peaceful.

In other news...

I think to a large extent I can sum up my time in Kenya as such: I never expected to miss the US so much. (that may just be culture shock talking) This revelation has been hard for me, because my goal in life since I can remember has been to leave the US as soon as I graduate and not look back.

I also didn’t expect to miss AU in particular. For the majority of sophomore year I pretty much hated AU. I don’t even know the number of times I considered dropping out, or transferring, or taking time off. It was on a pretty regular basis. That all changed at the end of sophomore year, but it took me the entire summer up until now to realize that.

I know that most of you probably only want to hear what types of experiences I’ve been having, but for me it’s hard to separate the events of the past weeks with the internal experiences that I’ve had. For every experience that I’ve had in Kawangware, or at USIU or anywhere in Nairobi, I’ve had an equally important moment of self revelation. And as much as I want to tell all of you about all of those actual physical experiences it’s also hard because I know that there are so many things that I’ll leave out just because to me it seems normal. And frankly, life here is so completely different that, not to be mean, you’ll never be able to understand entirely what the experience is like. Maybe that’s a little harsh, but I don’t know how else to put it.

Every thing that happens here has a direct impact on the rest of my life, and frankly that’s exhausting. I’ve spent so much of this trip just being so so tired, and I think that I’ve finally understood why. My brain can’t process all of it, so it takes it out on my body.

I’m not saying any of this to complain. I hope that it helps you all understand, I can completely understand now how I will be a completely different person when I come back, hopefully a much better person.
Miss you all! See you in a few months!

miriam