Travel and Arrival

We are comfortably settled into our Nairobi digs for the week, so it's time for an update.

Airlines
Say what you will about the British, they know how to run an airline. After suffering through crabby flight attendants, lost meal requests, mysteriously wet seats, and a rather bumpy flight from Dallas to London on the aptly named American* Airlines, we navigated Heathrow Airport (still the same disaster as last year) and boarded our British Airways flight to Nairobi.

Here, from my journal, are some ways British Airways is better than American Airlines:

• British accents. Nothing more charming. I realize he isn't part of the airline, but even the security employee who searched me in Heathrow was polite, charming, and funny.
• Clean airplanes. Novel concept.
• Comfortable seats. Another novel concept.
• Decent food. When they lost our vegetarian meal request on the American flight, we were counseled in how to complain. When they lost it at British, they actually solved the problem and - gasp - apologized.
• They're British. Let's face it, Americans have taken a bunch of cool things from the British and totally screwed them up. When everything else goes sideways, at least the British can fall back on basic human civility. We'll have Sarah Palin and Glen Beck.

Fly British. It will cost a little more, perhaps, but it is worth it. The flight from Seattle to Nairobi is roughly 24 hours in the air, and the only part of it I dread is the 4 hour domestic leg between Seattle and whatever our launch pad in the states happens to be.

And the thing is, what truly sets them apart doesn't cost any money. The US airlines can complain about costs and charge for bags and blankets all they like and no one would care if the service were decent. Case in point: the in-flight entertainment on our British flight was broken, and because they were polite about it and kept us informed, no one really seemed to care.

In other news, our flight from London to Nairobi was deemed some sort of special flight, and we were supposed to be honored that some celebrities were onboard for a ComicRelief trip to Kenya. Call me a cynic, but these huge, expensive, high-profile "aid" events sure seem disingenuous. They raise a lot of money, no doubt, but they spend a lot to do so. I couldn't help but look around at all of the "Flying Start" and "Comic Relief" branding on the airplane and wonder about the cost of doing this humanitarian business. I'll have to ponder this. I'm sure some economist can point out to me the costs involved with my own personal philanthropic work...Also, I have no idea who the "celebrities" on our flight were, but the people in front of us sure wanted their autographs. Can someone explain to me the appeal of having someone you don't know sign something for you if it isn't a check? I digress.

But enough about that. We're here and we don't have to worry about American Airlines for 3 weeks.

Meanwhile, in Kenya
This year Hayden and I are here with a small group of folks, and since last year was a fact-finding trip to help us plan this one, we are visiting many of the same places again. On our first day - after our now traditional Tusker and crisps arrival dinner and a good night's sleep - we took the gang to the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, the Giraffe Center, and the Karen Blixen Museum. Evan and Linette made out with some twigas at the Giraffe Center, and we learned which items in Karen Blixen's house were original and which ones we "not original but were used in the film Out of Africa."

We capped the day of tourism and settling in with a light meal and a cocktail or two at the Fairview hotel next door to our more spartan accommodations. Rolling blackouts be damned, we're having a gin and tonic.

After a day of provisioning at the local mall on our second day (Tuesday) we will be making daily trips out to Cura to work with the teachers and staff and most importantly see the kids!


Some Things We Have Learned

• "There's virtually no line at the other security checkpoint" is the airline equivalent of "the check is in the mail." It's a lie. (Seattle, WA)
• Elephant farts are loud. (Nairobi, Kenya)
• The sushi is in the basement and the wine cellar is upstairs. (Fairview Hotel, Kenya)
• The road is open. Don't let the metal barrier or the armed guard fool you.
• Talisman Restaurant isn't open on Mondays.
• All journalists just lie to make you believe things. (This from our fearless driver, Malik)
• "We have run out of prawns" is apparently an important Swahilli phrase to know.
• "Tamambo," while it looks and sounds vaguely African, is not a word. In Swahilli or any other language we can find. It is, however, the name of a restaurant in Karen that caters to white people. Shocking. Good food though.

More to come! We're off to Gigiri today for some shopping and a bit of cocktail luxury at Tribe Hotel. Then to Carnivore Restaurant tonight, the vegetarian heaven. Err...

Pictures to follow. Right now I have to finish my coffee. Which is excellent, by the way. You should try it. Just follow the sign.


-g

*If American means "purely profit-driven, short-sighted, selfish, and obscenely arrogant"

Watch This Space!

We are headed back to Kenya here in a few days, so it's time to dust off this blog and get ready to share our adventures with all of you.

This year we are traveling with Hayden's oldest daughter, Evan. Also coming with us is Hayden's sister-in-law Linette and two former EdCC students Tammy and Tesha.

More soon, but for the moment we need to pack!

-g

An Update! Believe it.

I know we're not in Kenya anymore. Not in body anyway. I think we are both still there at least a little bit in spirit, and as the weather in Seattle gets steadily colder and the nights get longer, I know we're both missing life near the Equator more each day.

I wanted to post an update just to let everyone know where we stand with the work we started while we were in Africa and what our current plans are.

Teaching
One of the major moves for us this year is co-teaching a research writing course with an East Africa theme. Our 27 students are reading and researching issues that effect the region of East Africa and working toward a major paper that synthesize their research. It is early (we are only in the third week of classes) but already the students are learning a lot about a part of the world most of them knew nothing about on the first day of school. The class is also involved in some service-learning projects, including managing a Kiva loan to an East African entrepreneur .

Speaking
Since we returned to campus, there has been a lot of interest in our trip. We have give a couple of talks to small groups of faculty and plan to do a larger slide show and talk once we have a better idea how the next year will look for us in terms of returning to Kenya with students on a study abroad plan.

Planning
We are currently slated to meet with the people from International Student Services, the department on campus that awarded us a grant to help offset costs for our last trip to Kenya, to go over the logistics of a trip that includes students. Our goal is to take up to 10 students back as soon as June of 2010, and we aren't giving that goal up without a fight! But an interesting new wrinkle has presented itself since we've been home, and we are also investigating the feasibility of doing an initial trip with faculty. Several colleagues have already told us that if we set it up, they will go. Maybe this will turn into a hybrid plan in which we take a few students and a few teachers. At this point, we are open to many options.

Serving
We (mostly Hayden, let's be honest) are still working closely with Creative Visions and the people in Cura on a variety of projects. But it is so hard to do anything tangible from a distance. The time difference and the complications of communication make it hard to make quick work of even the simplest task. Being in Kenya makes getting actual work done so much easier that the travel time and costs seem increasingly worth it.

Dreaming
When we got home in July we were ready to head back. So we will both admit to spending a fair amount of our daydreaming time thinking about how to get back to Kenya and how soon we can do it. If anyone has some neglected frequent flier miles sitting around, let us know.

-g

A Humbling Experience

I came on this trip ready for pretty much anything, open to any experience, and hoping to learn something about a part of the world I had only read about and seen through the lens of popular culture. It has been an amazing, busy, and rewarding trip to be sure. I had a lot of fun and saw some amazing things, but as we prepare to make the trek to the airport to fly back to the states (where the real work of planning the program for the college begins), mostly I am humbled.

I am humbled by the kids at Cura and the people who work so hard to make their lives as good as they are. Nothing in the world could have prepared me for my time with those children, and when we left the village on our last day there, I felt a little helpless. All of the ways that we in the west imagine we can help - sending money, sponsoring a child, collecting books, donating to charities - seem almost ridiculous when you are here. When I was out playing "OK, Who Took My Hat This Time?" with the kids, it made me feel like there would never be enough we could do. So I guess we just do what we can.

I am humbled by the generosity of all of the people I have met along the way. So many people went to such effort to welcome us and make us comfortable here that I can't actually imagine what it would have been like if we were merely hopping from hotel to hotel like an average tourist. Everywhere we have gone we have been met by old friends of Hayden's or we have met knew friends who have worked hard to get us what we need when we need it. Jeff, Courtney, Paul, Gerald, Rose, Ole Kina, Lucy...thank you all so much for opening your worlds to me. I only hope that someday I have the chance to return the generosity.



I am humbled by the country and its challenges. I'm no expert in third world politics, but I can see that the rapid globalization of western culture has already made a radical imprint on this country in some very troubling ways. In Nairobi especially it is apparent that growth and consumption are outpacing infrastructure at a dangerous clip. Add a glacially measured government decision-making machine and the near future doesn't promise to get much better. The city is sprawling and growing vertically while the roads and systems are being patched together. And still? The people here are wonderfully optimistic, hopeful, and proud of Kenya. If you studied the issues and problems of Kenya on paper only, you might write it off as another hopeless third world country, but when you talk to people about their country, you can't help buy into their hopefulness. Things will get better here in part because the people want things to get better. In that way, I think Kenya has a better long-term shot than the US. The people here are tapped in, they know what is going on, they read the newspapers, and they actually engage in meaningful discourse about current events. So it might be slow and it won't look like it would in the west, but Kenya will figure some things out. I just hope they do it by importing less Hannah Montana and WWE and creating more of their own popular culture standards. But maybe that's asking a bit much.


I am humbled by the environment. Our safari in the Maasai Mara was an experience I will never forget. At one point I compared the mechanisms of it to the whale watching enterprises in Puget Sound (the game drivers communicate on radio to tell one another where the animals are, for example, just like captains of whale watching boats do) but from there the comparisons simply crumble away. I don't know what I was expecting, exactly, but it wasn't the nonstop game viewing that we had. In the promotional materials sent to us by the tour operator, it was mentioned that we would not be able to walk from our tent to the main camp without an askari to guide us. I thought this was at least partly for show: have the Maasai tribesman make the wazungu feel safer and give them a photo op. The lions just outside of our tent on the first night convinced me.

From there to the island village of Lamu was a radical change of venue, but Lamu was no less amazing. An island with no roads, a town where donkeys are the primary form of transportation, and a living, celebrated history that goes back to the 1500s. I wasn't tempted, but I can see how westerners would show up in Lamu and never want to leave (anyone thinking about it should get a good look at the managers of the Peponi hotel to see what the long term effects of living there really are...yikes).

But places are nothing without the people. And as I get ready to pack up, it is the people that are on my mind: kind, generous, interesting, successful, strong people. Thanks to everyone for making this such a wonderful trip.


But mostly thanks H, for sharing this part of your world with me.

-g

Back in Nairobi, by the way

Just for clarification...

We're back in Nairobi now, after an uneventful flight back from Malindi and a quick stop, for old time's sake, at Carnivore. We've been struggling with internet connections and mourning the loss of MJ, of course, but otherwise all is well!

We head to the airport tonight (mid-day your time) to start the trek home. Back in touch then, of course!

News (Finally) from Hapa

What have we been up to since my last post?? Well...


We flew from Nairobi to the Maasai Mara on 28 June, where we were met at the airport by James, our charming and able guide for our two-night stay. On the drive from the Ol Kiombo airstrip to the Kicheche Bush Camp, James spotted three snoozing cheetahs… which felt like a very good game-viewing omen for the upcoming two more days! We felt even better when I spotted four more and James declared me "at least half-Maasai." Mmm hmmm. I was actually more excited about spotting a rock-shaped, rock-colored tortoise in the road and about the familiar music of bells on the cattle grazing in the distance.

Our tented camp was luxurious and largely unoccupied, so we got royal treatment! Larry and Francie, the New Zealand couple who shared the camp with us, were good company, and the nearby lions entertained all of us throughout the night with their impressively raucous mating.
Our early morning drives resulted in all kinds of game sightings, including, on the last day, lions over a fresh kill. We also saw herds of elephants, water buffalo, zebras, giraffes, hyenas, jackals, hippos, all manner of antelope-looking beasts, countless birds… I’m missing a lot on this list, I know. But even absent James’s excellent tracking skills, it would have been worth it just for the lushness of the landscape: the grasses were door-high to our vehicle, and the golds and greens and blues all around us were breath-taking.

Our "sundowner" cocktails were pretty good, too…

















Two days was enough, though.


So we moved on to Lamu! We flew back to Nairobi to change planes, then had a somewhat bumpy ride out to the coast, on a much larger plane than I remember ever making the same trip on before… The Manda airstrip was unmistakable and familiar, though, as was the choppy crossing from Manda to Lamu on a low-slung wooden boat (which, by the way, had the same motor as the one in OUR new/old boat, making conversation impossible at anything but a shout).


















We stayed at a gorgeous old house in Shela called "Fatuma’s Tower," named for a Swahili woman who lived there alone some centuries ago, but now owned by a lucky Italian couple that now also makes Shela home. The place is set at the back of the village, so the dunes and the accompanying trees were our view out the back windows, but the top of the "tower" afforded views of the whole village, out to the water. The whole place had an open-door and open-window policy, so the breezes kept us cool and we lived large, Fatuma-style. We had private breakfasts and dinners each night, prepared and served by the immensely talented Saidi---and I succumbed to the temptation to decorate my feet, old school.
















We walked to Lamu town, of course, and I had incessant sensory-memory flashbacks of making that trek several times a day… We dropped in at the post-office, where the telephone booths I once used to call my parents (collect) now constitute a communications graveyard in the front walkway. Sigh. We strolled through town, visited the donkey sanctuary, marveled at the Hapa Hapa’s enduring presence at the waterfront, and were generally kept busy responding to all of the cheerful greetings and inquiries about how we were enjoying our stay.


We had to also, of course, hit up the beach near Shela---which is radically changed since I was last here! The view across the channel, for one thing, is now populated with enormous foreigner-built mansions, and the worst of it was right around the bend: apparently some Italian with more money than taste has built a private residence, right on the point of the dunes, designed to look like a monstrous sand castle. Argh!

Fortunately, I was able to drown my sorrows at the deck at Peponi, which opened for the season on 1 July. Perfect timing! Oh, and of course, we adjusted our cocktailing location according to the weather---blistering sun? Right out in the open. Torrential rain? Under the awning. Repeat.


















We left Lamu on 2 July and headed to Malindi. I never spent a lot of time in Malindi back in the way back, but I was looking forward to seeing one of its most prominent residents again: Ole Kina!



















He met us at the airport (where we entertained ourselves during our wait by counting the mangoes on the tree in the parking lot: 65!) and escorted us to the resort he and his wife own: the Seaview. We haven’t really left the resort since, actually--at least not to explore town on our own. We’ve been lounging by the pool most of the time (boring, we know) and occasionally making the trek into town to take advantage of the Book Café’s internet access and computers. Greg’s gone on a couple of runs (in this humidity? Insane.) and we’ve strolled down the VERY windy beach where bands of teenage boys play pick-up soccer that somehow incorporate the gusts into their game plans.

Otherwise, we’ve mostly just spent time with Ole Kina, his lovely wife Lucy, and their three children, Nareiyan, Shorua and Santoni. They are incredibly busy and productive people, with holding and activities all over town.

Ole Kina treated us to a visit to his favorite place: their property at Sabaki River, where he’s taken it as his personal challenge to, before he dies, "plant more trees than have ever been cut down for his life’s comfort." They’ve already managed over 100 thousand mangroves and 50 thousand or so others… so I’d say he’s well on his way.

The property stretches from the river, to the dunes, to the beach, and we got a tour of it all in the company of Ben, the very man who was reported in the BBC for being dragged up a tree by what must have been a very ambitious, very enormous and very buff python.

It is the morning of 7 July now, and the power is out at the hotel, where we’re now having coffee on our patio and watching the millipede I stepped on yesterday (my Facebook status update shortchanged the creature by many hundreds of legs---my apologies!) make its way across a beam, back toward the room. Awesome! At some point, we’ll wander back into town so I can get this posted and we can check in on our Blackboard classrooms. We’re "teaching" this summer, after all…

Trying desperately to maintain objectivity

I spent some time today doing administrative work at the Cura Home... tracking details like birthdates and spelling and photo records and whatnot. And the process was emotionally grueling. The applications for the children to be accepted at the home were humbling to say the least: the most challenging were the barely literate expressions of such pleas for help as "She is orphan. Please help." The waiting list file was almost too much to bear.



We distributed the collages Quinn's class created today, and there was one collage for every two children in the home. They now have the art work hanging in their rooms, and they created their own reciprocal art project involving tracing and coloring their hands. One girl, Grace, colored the tracing of MY hand and spent the day interested in my veins, my ring, my tattoo... She took this photo.



The girls were more interested in stories and songs and showing me the pre-primary school (where English-to-Swahili translations were written on the insides of corn meal bags and hung on the walls---which is more than the primary school classrooms have by way of visual aides)----but the boys kept Greg very active on the football pitch and playing separate-the-bald-guy-from-his-hat!

We had a lovely dinner with Jeff, Courtenay and Apollo at the end of the day (checked out Nairobi's swankiest new hotel---Tribe---too). Loved that--but nothing beats Cura. Can't wait to get back.

We fly to the Mara tomorrow morning and will be out of touch for at least four days after that... more when we get wired again!