Camping Re-cap

Hi all,
The line-up for the computers here at ICIPE are quite long, so I will again have to be brief, but I'll try to give you a quick run down of my crazy two and a half weeks of camping in southern Kenya.
Our first camping stop was the Maasai Mara.  We would usually get up at 6am to go on morning game drives, have class during the day, and then climb back on the trucks for an evening game drive, too!  We saw some of the amazing animals in action, including a lion devouring a cape buffalo carcass, a leopard hanging out in a tree, and a huge pod of hippos popping up for air every now and then in a hippo pool. Check out my friend Sheena's blog for some great photos:
http://www.sheenainafrica.blogspot.com/
Then we headed to Lake Naivasha, where it was very cold and then was a great lounge bar (where I did not drink, of course : D).  Next was Nguruman, one of the hottest places on the planet.  We joked that we must be in hell, because we had to drive through a town called "Hell's Gate" to get to our camp site and we were warned to keep an eye out for scorpions that might try to crawl into our tents!
Our last camping stop was in Elangata Wuas, where the wind was crazy every night and blew beaches worth of sand into our tents.  We also did our one-night homestays at E. Wuas, which was a once in a lifetime experience.  Brianna, Sarah, and I went to spend the afternoon and night with a Maasai family in their hut.  The hut was constructed by the wife of sticks and cow dung and very dark inside.  During the afternoon, we tried to help with doing the laundry and milking the goats, but failed miserably.  The washing water for the clothes came from a nearby dam, and we went with our mama to collect the water, which was brown before the dirty laundry even got in.  Our mama, Jacqueline, made chapati bread especially for us since we had mentioned that we loved this African bread, which was both so considerate (it took a lot of time and work to make them) and absolutely mouth-watering!  We eat around 10pm in the candlelit hut, after a delicious cup of chai (tea) with lots of milk and sugar.  We crawled into bed around 11pm and within minutes were freaking out.  There were bed bugs crawling everywhere!  I was quite fortunate, because I had crawled into my sleeping and zipped it up right away, so not very many bed bugs managed to crawl from the cow hide we were lying on into my bag, but Bri and Sarah had a really rough night.  I think I managed to get about 45 minutes of sleep, but most of the night was spent vigilantly paying attention to whether there were bugs crawling over me and squished them before they got too far into my ear canal... In the morning, we were treated to another delicious cup of chai and then spent about an hour picking the bed bugs out of the seams of our sleeping bags and brushing the cow dung-dust off our pillows!
While the experience was not perfect, it gave us such an insight into what life is like for this family.  We also got to meet Jacqueline and Josepj's four beautiful children.  I just fell in love with their youngest daughter, and I think Bri had a thing for their young son, Barrack Obama!
When we got back to camp, I headed straight for the shower to scrub off the cow dung and get rid of the last of the bed bugs, and then it was time to party!  We all got to witness the slaughtering of two goats, their heads facing towards Mecca as is proper for our Muslim guide.  They were then skinned and cooked as a special honour for us.  Students, staff, and our youth guides from the homestays all feasted together and then danced and ate marshmellows into the night.  Good times!!
All the best to everyone at home!
I'm off to Mpala, Laikipia in the morning.
Lots of love,
Kirsten xoxo

African Birdies

We are about half way through a short module on health and nutrition here in Mbita, Kenya, and I've learned some very cool things about various HIV prevention and awareness programs and support groups, as well as about a few school feeding programs that have been set up at different schools in Western Kenya.  But, just for you, Jo-Anne, and any other birders out there, this entry is going to be a quick update on some of the birds that we have seen so far in East Africa. 
When we were touring a couple ecotourism sites in Kibale National Park, my primatology group got to see a couple beautiful Great Blue Turacos, and when we were in Lake Nabugabo, we were absolutely surrounded by incredibly noisy Hornbills - they are loud when they "sing" and they are loud when they fly, "whomp, whomp, whomp" through the air...  But, today was my first actual bird walk around our compound here in Mbita with my ornithology professor, Dr. Bird (no joke), and his Swarovski scope (again, no joke).  In about an hour we saw over a dozen different species of birds.  Dr. Bird gave us hints to help us identify each of them, and it was a lot of fun digging through our guidebooks to try to puzzle it out for ourselves.  Just as we were wrapping up, I was able to identify a hummingbird all on my own!  Good for me, eh? :)

Today's birdies:
A whole whack of beautiful Village Weavers
An African Mourning Dove
A pair of Sacred Ibis
Some Cattle Egret, no cattle though...
Two Egyptian Geese flying overhead
Two irridescent Ruppell's Long-Tailed Starlings
A couple of African Fish Eagles, actually eating a fish in a tree!
One Common Fiscal
One White-Browed Coucal
A group of Speckled Mousebirds
A solitary Slate-Coloured Boubou
A female Nubian Woodpecker, identified by me!
and... a huge, beautiful Verreaux's Eagle-Owl who was starring right at us!

Looking forward to doing a lot more bird watching in the Masai Mara!  Just a few days away!

The Slums of Nairobi

During my first week in East Africa, back in January, our program made a trip out to the two largest slums in Kenya.  I didn't have the time then to write an entry that would do justice to my experiences there and the incredible people that I met, but here is the story now.  I apologize for the length!

The main road in Kibera

 The slums, or "informal settlements," that we visited are some of the largest in all of Africa, and each is home to 200,000 to 1 million ppeople.  They are "informal" because the people living in them do not have any rights to the land.  It is usually owned privately, and the reisdents usually pay the landowners to live in pretty terrible housing conditions.  Waste management is pratically non-existent, mostly since there are no actual roads for garbage trucks to drive on.  Often as an attempt to get people out, large portions of the slum area are just bulldozed down.  But that does nothing to solve the problem, since the people just resettle in another part of the slum, squished into even smaller spaces. 

There is a lot of work going on to improve living conditions in slum areas.  Top-down governmental and UN programs are involved, as well as grassroots initiatives beginning in the communities themselves.  These efforts are made even more vital since about 70% of the African urban population resides in informal settlements!  A huge rural-urban migration has left people living in unhealthy, dangerous environments without basic services.  Knowing this, I thought the experience of visiting Kibera and Mathare, Kenya's two largest slums, would be very difficult to get through.  But at the close of the day, I was surprised at how calm and (relatively) unrattled I was.  Albeit, I believe that I was, at least in part, still in shock.  I had anticipated absolutely tragic and desolate places, and while I would never want to have to live in these slums, I had also been taken to places of deep community ties and laughter.  

View of the slum as we entered Kibera

The first thing you notice upon arriving at Kibera is definitely the smell.  The stench of human waste rises from the drains lining the main road, the start of which was built by the Kenyan government, the remainder by UN-Habitat (but, it has yet to be completed).  Before you even enter the main slum area, this smell has overwhelmed you.  All along the road, vendors sell fruit, meat, clothes, shoes, and coffins.  Hair salons are also abundant.  The most unsettling experience of the day may have been the sight of old meat in a butcher's window.  it was piled high against the glass.  The top two slabs were thick and red, identical to what could be found in a North American grocery store.  But the pieces at the bottom of the case were barely identifiable - having sat out in the heat for who knows how long, the meat had turned into what very closely resembled a tie-dye t-shirt.  I couldn't believe such badly rotten meat could be for sale or that people would be forced to consume such dangerous food.  

We had discussed the night before our visit the notion of "slum tourism," and we were very conscious of not treating the people living in the slums or the community as a whole like a spectacle or a trip to the zoo.  Odlly, as we were walking along the main drag, I felt a bit like a spectacle myself, as the people in the community stared at me, wondering what the heck we were doing there, in their space.

Members of the local community affiliated with UN-Habitat led us on a kind of "show-and-tell" of some of the projects associated with the Slum Upgrading Program: the main road; drains for water to prevent flooding (which can do a lot of damage to homes made from mud); showers and toilets for improved sanitation; a community centre in-the-works for various community and health servies; as well as the Youth Workshop.  As we were "touring" the bathrooms, two local women were loudly laughing at us (which only heightened the sense of being a spectacle), but I guess taking a tour of their toilets was a bit odd!

New shower built by UN-Habitat

Walking through the slum and seeing the layers upon layers of garbage, floating in muddy canals and embedded in dirt, goats wondering freely and feeding on grass and waste, and women washing their clothes in water spewing out of a leaky pipe (part of an extensive tangled network of twisted, broken pipes weaving exposed through the alleys) was a lot to take in.  It was all so far from the world I grew up in that it was impossible for me to truly imagine what it would be like to actually live there.

Goats feeding on garbage and grass

While the trip to Kierba was very informative, a large "distance" was maintained between us and the people living there.  We were not really able to interact with the residents, except for briefly with the youth leaders at the youth workshop, who were very happy to speak with us.  A completely new experience was waiting for us in Mathare.  There, much of the updrading and beneficial work done in the community is not organized or funded by large parties, such as the government or the UN, but rather it is the local people with local independent groups that are working toward positive change and upgrading in Mathare.
When we arrived, dozens of children were hanging around near where we unloaded from the bus.  They were dressed in tatty sweaters and school clothes, but their smiles, laughter, and sheer numbers immediately lent a completely different feel to Mathare.  We were welcomed by members of the CME (Canada Mathare Education) Trust staff, graduates of the program, which provides funding for teenagers to attent secondary school, as well as members of the Mathare Roots Youth Group.  We divided into smaller groups and were led on guided and often personalized tours through the "streets" of Mathare. 

One of our first stops was a primary school on the edge of the slum.  We were greeted by a dance group of12 very talented and obviously dedicated young girls, backed by a young male drummer.  The dancers wore plan grey dresses, high white socks, and dusty shoes.  Their routine blew me away; their rhythm, coordination, precision, cohesiveness, and their energy throughout a very long performance in the heat were so astounding.  I've been a dancer since I was in the second grade, and it made my heart swell to see these 13 incredible young students.  They were part of an after-school program that aims to engage young people in Mathare in positive activities rather than have them get involved in drugs or alcohol.

Mathare school dance group

  Our guides had attended the school and appeared very proud of it.  They eagerly introduced us to the students in each class and showed us which classrooms they had spent their earlier years in.  The building was not fancy and the children were crammed into every bit of available space, but the opportunity for these children to learn was a real possibility and very heartening.

After our visit to the school, I spent the rest of the afternoon with Jackie.  A member of Roots, a graduate of the CME Trust program, and a resident of Mathare, she was above all a friendly, welcoming guide, happy to show me around and explain small things about the slum that helped me to get a clearer idea of her life and the realities of living in a slum.  She was dressed very well, in a clean skirt and top and dusty sandals.  Her long dark hair was done in many small braids, which at first I didn't think had any significance other than fashion.  When I asked how long it took for her to have her hair braided, she replied that it had taken a whole day and been painful.  But, for girls and women in Mathare, she explained, there weren't many options.  Hair was easily dirtied and tangled and not easily washed, so girls either kept their hair very short (she didn't like this because then you ended up looking like a boy) or you got your hair braided to at least keep it tidy.

Our group in Mathare.  Jackie is standing behind me.  Too bad I'm blinking :)

 For a short while, Jackie and I got separated from the rest of the group, and I belive this gave me the chance to see more of Mathare and actually meet people one on one.  Jackie introduced me to her "mama," not her birth mother but a women she lives near and is very close to.  We shook hands and chatted briefly.  She smiled and made me feel welcome, not like the massive intruder I felt like in Kibera.  We walked through the old "streets" of the slum, essentially very narrow dirt back alleys between the houses with barely enough space for two people to pass next to one another.  As we walked along, dozens of young children ran towards me with the arms outstretched.  I shook each of their hands, and they giggled and scurried away.  Jackie told me afterwards that they were not actually trying to greet me, but rather just wanted to touch my strange white hand.  They had then run off to boast to their friends that they had met a mzungu, or white person.  Again, I was the spectacle!

School children hanging around after class.

 We make an effort to reverse the tradition of thinking of Africa as one homogeneous place and Africans as all the same, yet as I talked with Jackie she always referred to me as a European, and a man I passed in Mathare even called out to me saying, "Hey, White Man!" (when I turned around, he corrected himself and called me a "white lady" instead).  I was taken aback slightly, but should I have been offended?  Is it fair to want them to see me as an individual, too?  Do I excuse them because they don't know any better?  And is that not yet another value judgment on my part, that they have more to learn and should become more like us?  Who decides?

View of Mathare

Jinja, Source of the Nile

It's sad to think that this is my last night in Uganda. 
After Kibale, we spent a few days in Lake Nabugabo.  This is one of the smaller lakes in Uganda, and everyone was saying it looked like Canadian cottage country!  Certainly made us all feel at home!  You could see all kinds of stars at night, including Orion’s Belt.  There is so little light pollution that you can even begin to see the stars while the sky is still a deep blue.  Then, we spent a couple nights in Seeta, where the hotel had a pool!!! And now, we are in Jinja.
I have had such a fantastic time in this beautiful country and have met so many warm-hearted and lovely people here.  Everywhere we've stayed, Kibale, Lake Nabugabo, Seeta, and finally Jinja, the locals have been welcoming and generous.  The rainforests are breathtaking, and the valleys of tea plantations are incredible.  The air is warm and sticky as I sit writing this entry in my hotel in Jinja, one of the largest towns in Uganda and the source of the Nile River.  From here, the river flows north all the way through Sudan and into Egypt. 
While I have learned a lot about primates, conservation, and ecotourism over the past couple weeks, what really made my stay in Uganda was the people.  Between the impressive presentation by the Kanyawara Cultural Group at the Kibale Health Clinic, the deeply moving church service our field assistants kindly invited us to, the talents artists and craftspeople I've met, the children smiling and waving at us from their doorways, the braver ones who run out to greet us, the local people who are more than happy to talk to us about their struggles to find work and pay school fees or about the different medicinal plants in the forest or the kinds of vegetables they grow, and the amazing education and health programs that are being put into place around the region, how could I not have fallen in love with this place?
While I could go on and on about the things I've seen and all that I've done, I unfortunately don't have time to go into too much detail now.  I've tried several times to send pictures home over the past few hours and it just doesn't seem to be working :( And now it is really time for me to go upstairs and pack.  We leave at 7:45am tomorrow morning for the Kenyan border.  So tonight I say good-bye to Uganda and its wonderful people, and I hope that one day I will be able to come back.

Natalie and I at the UN in Nairobi

Children outside of the school we visited in Mathare (slum).

Just a sampling of the endless garbage found throughout Kibera.  But also note the friendly smile on the man's face who is holding a baby and looking right at me.

Me holding what was left of out 9 foot sugar cane after we ate some and gave a bunch to some local children.

Photo op at a crater lake on our way to an ecotourism site at Lake Kasenda in the north of Kibale National Park.

Male dancers, part of the Kanyawara Cultural Group, doing a traditional dance at the Kibale Health Clinic.

Everyone dancing together with members of the Kanyawara Cultural Group.

A young boy called Amooti, a local woman who is expecting a baby, and myself together at the end of the presentations by the Kanyawara Cultural Group.  They had an amazing set of songs, in English and Rutooro, dances, drumming, and a short play about HIV/AIDS.  Our group of students prepared a rendition of “Proud Mary” so we could have some to share with them in return.  We weren’t nearly as good as they were, but I don’t think we embarrassed ourselves too badly!

Sunset at Kibale

Primate Time!

Kirsten does not have access to the Internet at her current location in Uganda and has asked us to make the post below on her behalf, after a telephone conversation this week.   She is having a great time, soaking up each experience as it comes.  We will let her share her feelings about visiting the Mathare and Kibera slums near the end of their time in Nairobi herself, as our description will not do this experience justice.  We pick up her journey at the beginning of her time in Uganda:

At 5:30 a.m. Saturday (Jan. 22^nd) we were on our way to the Nairobi airport for a one hour flight to Entebbe, Uganda.  We then climbed onto buses for a long and bumpy seven hour bus ride into the Kibale rainforest.  The views along the ride were spectacular, through mountains and valleys with tons of beautiful trees, including, surprisingly, a few transplanted pine trees!  As we passed people walking along the roadside and markets, it seemed like the pace of life here is less hectic than in a city like Nairobi.

During our first few days in Uganda we visited several different eco tourism camps, which are a growing industry here.  If you are looking for a luxurious, but eco friendly vacation, check out the Ndali Lodge.  But, of course, we’re really here to study primates!  Our focus now is the red Colobus monkey, which lives high in the forest, leaping from tree to tree.  In small research groups of about 5 students each, we’re observing different aspects of the Colobus behavior. My group is investigating who within the monkeys’ social group initiates movement.  I’m loving every minute of it!  We’re seeing other primates too, often up close, and I actually discovered a baboon eating a banana about 12 ft. from the entrance to my room the other day.  He didn’t seem too interested in me, but I kept out of his way anyways!

Julie, you asked about food, and we’re being fed very well here, probably not a typical diet for the average Ugandan.  We have a wide array of fresh fruit to choose from for breakfast, like pineapple, mango, passion fruit etc.  Lunch and dinner generally involve potatoes or rice, cooked meat and vegetables .  If we pack sandwiches for lunch, they’re either cheese or vegetable, to avoid carrying meat sandwiches in the heat.  We also have these delicious small deep fried doughnuts for snacks.  The other day we stopped at a small market selling a variety of root vegetables and some spinach.  They also had long (probably nine feet or so) stalks of freshly cut sugar cane.  Our prof bought some and our driver chopped the stalks up into small pieces. The texture of the stalks was a bit like celery, and we could suck the sugar and water out of the pieces – mmm! Near the end of our trip we had some left and stopped to share it with children who were running along beside the bus.  It was a great treat for them on a hot day!

72 hours in Nairobi

It's three days into our stay in Nairobi, and so much has happened already.  After arriving on Sunday night at 9:30pm local time (8 hrs ahead of Montreal), we climbed into our two enormous Bunduz safari trucks for the first of what will soon be hundreds of times and got our first view of Nairobi.  The weather was like a dream.  The air was humid and warm, much like a summer night in Montreal.  As we drove through the streets of Nairobi, the air smelled heavily of dust, and then a much stronger smell of burning garbage reached us as we drove by small fires on the side of the road.  As we got further away from the airport and the fires, the air freshened up a bit.

Monday morning we got up earlier and re-traced our path from the research centre we are staying at on the outskirts of the city back into the downtown core, but the changes from the night before were astonishing.  The streets were teeming with cars, buses, and crowded 14-seater vans called matatus, which are incredibly cheap, but not necessarily law-abiding ways for locals to get around the city.  There is construction everywhere here.  All the stereotypes of Montreal as a city notorious for its traffic, construction, and j-walkers seem like mild little quirks next to the chaotic streets of Nairobi.  We spent the day at Nairobi National Park, where we saw lions, warthogs, zebras, giraffes, buffalo, many different kinds of birds, as well as a crocodile, rhino, and (very!) recently devoured impala carcass.  Most of my pictures of these "wild" animals are set against the city skyline, as the park is actually in the middle of the Nairobi.  This led to the first of many discussions on land use in Eastern Africa.

Yesterday, Tuesday, we traveled back to the city and visited the University of Nairobi.  Professors there presented to the CFSIA participants and local Geography students a couple lectures on Kenya, and specifically Nairobi as the rapidly growing economic center of East Africa.  Then in smaller groups, we were brought on a tour of the Central Business District of Nairobi by students at the university.  I could go on about the fascinating differences between Nairobi and Montreal, but that would take hours.  However, I will share these tidbits: in general, the students at UoN are much better dressed that McGillians, and they are all At Least trilingual, most able to communicate in their tribal language, Kiswahili, and English. 

Today, we spent time at both the United Nations and the Canadian High Commission.  While I couldn't really follow all that was going on during the conversations about Pro-poor housing and Capacity building, it was very interesting nevertheless.  The UN was swarming with middle school students, "Model UN" delegates.  Also fascinating was just having a look around the cafeteria.  Montreal is relatively multicultural, but this was something else altogether.  All kinds of people, men and women, older and younger, from all over the world coming together at the third largest UN headquarters in the world (after Geneva and New York).  Also interesting was finding out what Canadian embassies and high commissions actually do abroad!  However, no one could quite figure out why the Commission needed both tennis courts AND a swimming pool... :S 
So, today certainly felt a little strange, walking through fancy buildings with high tech equipment and air conditioning after spending yesterday walking around a much more unpolished part of the city, and I'm sure it will seem ever more unreal in 24 hrs time.  Tomorrow, we are going to visit two very large slum areas, one of which is the largest slum in Africa, where 1 million people are crammed into the size of roughly a single golf course.  In fact, previous slum areas have been bull-dozed down in order to create golf courses. 

Already I have seen and learned so much; I can't believe that I have only been here 72 hours.  We've barely begun!
I hope you're all doing great back home in Canada,
All my love from Nairobi,
Kirsten
(10:43pm local time)

Vaccinations and Visas

I'm one step closer to getting on that plane in January!  I have received both my Ugandan and Kenyan visas, as well as my passport back from Kenya High Commission.  Phew!  No reason for the entire program to be held up at the border because of me :)
And... I have now been sufficiently pricked... in both arms... repeatedly... and have checked off all the vaccinations I needed from my list.  My advice for future African adventurers - plan slightly better than I.  Getting my last four vaccines in one go wasn't particularly fun :)
One more final exam to go - Intro to African Studies... wish me luck!!