Kwa heri Kenya

Today is my last day in Kenya, atleast for a couple months before I return for an internship with Save the Elephants in Samburu. Tomorrow we will travel to the SFS site in Tanzania for a few more weeks of classes and then our directed research project. It is exciting to go to a new country and meet a whole new group of staff. I'm very sad to leave the staff here at KBC though. This camp has definitely become our first African home. I will miss our many volleyball and soccer games, running the mile loop around camp with Kili rising in the sky, the same song that plays in the kitchen every day, Arthur's delicious food served with a joke, Charles' funny dancing, Jackson's crazy driving, Ernest's constant smiles, and our two student affairs managers Tara and Jenna, among many others.

In the past week we studied for and took our final exams in Kenya in Wildlife Management, Wildlife Ecology, and Environmental Policy. We have done some fun things too! We had our last visit to Amboseli where we walked around in an elephant exclosure in the park with KWS rangers measuring grass biomass. This was done by randomly throwing a wire square within our assigned area and cutting all the grass within the square, with one pair of scissors... it was a slightly tedious exercise. It was cool to be walking in a National Park and helping to collect data about the differences in the exclosure due to the lack of elephants though.

Last Sunday was a non-program day and we had a chance to go into town for a church service. It was a very interesting experience! The service was mostly song, with a little bit of preaching by the two ministers. One spoke in Swahili and one spoke in Maasai to the congregation. They spoke in a synchronized tempo where one would say something and the other would immediately follow in the other language. Their energy and enthusiasm was captivating even though I could only catch a few Swahili words. The most hilarious part of the service was the accompanying electric piano backbeat with a few well placed cords. The piano was also used every once in a while during the sermon to emphasize a few important ideas with repeated pounding on a chord while the congregation yelled hallelujiah and waved their arms. The songs were very energetic too and it was so much fun to clap and dance to the music. All the churchgoers were dressed up, especially the children. Some of the boys wore collared shirts and ties and the girls were in fancy dresses that resembled princess dresses for girls in US. We left the service so sweaty from two hours of dancing in the crowded building. The rest of the day was spent hanging out in Kimana.

After our last exam we went to the primary school we had previously visited to help them paint a mural on the school. We asked the kids what they wanted to paint and they named a bunch of animals and an airplane. Some of the more artistically endowed people in our group painted an outline on the wall of the school and the kids helped paint everything. We had a tree drawn out for the kids to add their handprints as leaves. There were 100+ kids trying to have a turn to paint which turned out to be pretty chaotic. The final product was beautiful though with such a unique look from all the different kids, especially a couple kids who painted their own cars on the wall. Many of us played with the kids while the painting was happening since there were so many of them to entertain. One boy in particular, Datiki, attached himself to me calling me mzungu wangu (my white person) and holding my hand the entire time. He painted my nails with the oil paint and I let him decorate my arms with handprints. I’m pretty sure he was telling the other kids that he loved me too. It was pretty cute!

                                                 The finished product, notice the airplane

Our last non-program day consisted of a hike to a hill called Lesoto. It was a steep hike up this hill with a lot of rock outcroppings. The trees and rocks there were so different from the surrounding area. The rocks and type of outcroppings reminded me so much of Colorado. We got to the top of the hill and were able to explore the rocks. It was fun scrambling around and seeing the view from the top. After our hike some of the Mamas came to camp to teach us how to bead the jewelry they make. I worked on a bracelet that was quite an endeavor! I now really appreciate all the work that the Mamas put into the jewelry they are making. The one bracelet took me probably 5 hours… not even kidding. In the evening we made volleyball teams and all played each other. Volleyball with the staff is my favorite activity because they are so competitive and love to play.

                                                           View from the top of Lesoto

                                                               Volleyball at sunset
Our last day at KBC was one of my favorite days of the semester so far. We planned a big feast of different food we wanted to cook including bean burger patties, falafel, deviled eggs, coleslaw, chicken wings, fried rice, fried bananas, pineapple crisp, brownies, and cookies. It was a ton of food and it took everyone working in shifts about 5 hours to cook everything but it was really fun! We also decided to use the leftover paint from the primary school mural to paint the ceiling in the gazebo that was finished in camp while we were there. We painted a sun on one side with a sunset transitioning to a night sky with a moon on the other side. Our dinner was delicious and a lot of fun with all the staff. Afterwards some people decided to get red ochre in their hair which is a traditional decoration used by the Maasai moran during celebrations. I decided not to put any in my hair because it utilizes oil which sounded messy but I got a little body paint. The red got all over everyone and everything they touched. We all looked pretty ridiculous!

                        The mural in the gazebo, the stars by the moon say Spring 2012 Session 1
Now it’s on to Tanzania, a country that I expect to be very different even though it is right next to Kenya. I’m excited for the green landscape I have heard about which will be a huge contrast from the dusty bushland of Kenya.

Maisha iko sawa

So it’s been quite a while since I blogged, but as the title of this post suggests life is good! I’ve been pretty busy with a lot of assignments and other activities of the past couple weeks. Assignments and field exercises have taken the majority of time in the past weeks. One of the interesting events that our staff hosted was a shoat roast. All the goats and sheep here are referred to as shoats because they are always therded together and difficult to distinguish between. We observed the whole process of slaughtering, skinning, and cooking a goat in the traditional Maasai way. The slaughter was kind of difficult to observe and it was interesting to think about how it’s a part of daily Maasai life. I would rather eat this goat that I know had a good life roaming the grasslands around Kimana than processed meat in the US. It was a strange chewy texture but quite delicious!

                                               Goat legs roasting by the fire                                                

We had a non-program day where we had the opportunity to go into Oloiktoktok, a town that is closer to the foothills of Kilimanjaro. Here we were able to go on a hike into a beautiful river gorge. The land was so much greener and more forested than around KBC! We walked through a cornfield that Kilimanjaro rose above, looking even bigger than usual. Then we descended a steep slope into a rainforest-like wood around the river. There was a waterfall flowing down rocks and the air was nice and cool. We spent about two hours following the river until it ended in a waterfall. It was great to scramble around on rocks and forget about all of our assignments for a while.

After our hike we went to the VCT (Volunteer Counseling and Testing) center in town. This is a clinic where the community can come to get tested for AIDS and those who are positive can gather to support each other. We met a few women who were positive and told us their stories about finding out their status and how their life had been. Although I had seen many videos of people who were HIV positive, mostly from Contemporary Issues at Rock Bridge, it was a different experience to meet and hear the stories in real life. The women who spoke to us were so strong! They had been through so much and even through sickness had taken care of their children. It was sad to hear about prejudice against condoms that many men and some women seem to have, not wanting the inconvenience or believing it’s a product of the devil. In most of the cultures in Kenya, the woman’s body is the property of the man once they are married so many women have no choice in protection, even in wearing a female condom themselves. There is a lot being done to change the perceptions about AIDS and promoting its prevention, especially by the VCT we visited. They had set up opportunities for people with AIDS to bead jewelry and do other crafts as an income, since it is difficult for them to do the usual hard manual labor in the sun while on anti-retroviral drugs. The VCT employees also would travel to markets to do testing and raise awareness, although they had recently run out of funding and were struggling to maintain the clinic. Everyone who tests postive receives drugs  free for their lifetime from the Mbrikani clinic (where we donated blood previously). We  were able to support the women of the VCT  by buying some of their beautifully beaded jewelry.

                                                      The river we hiked along               

Next we traveled back to Kimana because we had been invited by our neighboring Maasai to a wedding! This was a very exciting opportunity to observe a Maasai ceremony that we had learned about in the culture class. We arrived at the boma full of people and entered the central livestock enclosure where the warriors were dancing. There were two groups; one that was jumping and one that was chanting and dancing. The jumping is a display to attract women and a competition between the warriors. The warriors or moran are men in Maasai society that are all part of a certain age group who have already been circumcised. They are the protectors of the society and follow certain rules, such as not cutting their hair and not eating meat with women. When we first arrived, a few jumping warriors came up to some of the girls in our group that were watching and flicked their long hair at them as an expression of attraction. We watched for a while and as the dancing opened up to the women, we were encouraged to join in. It was so cool! The warriors chanted a humming beat while everyone was gathered in a circular group facing inward. The dance was a chest and head movement with the beat. The body heat was intense in the crowded group but the humming infected your entire body and it was amazing to move with all those people, even though we were probably not dancing quite right. After dancing for a while we saw the bride and groom when they gathered with family to have pictures taken by a photographer from town, and all of us. The bride and groom looked great with their extravagant jewelry and fabrics. The the actual wedding of the two had already occured so we were only observing the following celebration.

The jumping moran and other wedding guests 

                                                             The bride and groom

One of the more interesting field excercises that we did was an investigation into human-wildlife conflict in our area by walking through several agricultural areas and interviewing farmers. We had a local guide to translate our questions into Maasai. It was really fascinating to get the people's perspectives on wildlife. Several of the farmers told us that their entire farm had been destroyed by elephants and as much as 50% destroyed by other animals like gazelle. None of the people we interviewed said that they had received any benefit from wildlife. Instead wildlife is a huge burden; most farmers stay with their farms during the night, using fire or noise to ward off animals. One man believed that the only solution to the problem of animal crop damage was to kill all of the animals, an extreme but probably prevalent opinion. There seemed to be a lot of miscommunication about the role of Kenya Wildlife Service in wildlife damage as well. Many farmers said that KWS had promised to compensate them for the damage but had never followed through. The Kenyan government has actually banned any compensation for crop damages because they were losing too much money from overestimation of damages by farmers. None of the people knew that this was the current situation and KWS was only continuing the confusion. This emphasized the continuous problems with farming in wildlife dispersal areas and the need for effective methods of keeping animals out of farms. It was cool to actually observe some of the farming practices such as irrigation. The farms are irrigated from a nearby river that is channeled to the fields. Each farmer is allowed to use the water once a week. They have a system of directing the water flow by opening and closing channels by moving dirt so that their seeds are provided with just enough water. The whole process looked quite stressful.

 Our student affairs manager, Tara, trying to manage the irrigation while the farmer watched

 Our expedition to Lake Nakuru was also this past week. We left KBC for 5 days to camp out inside Lake Nakuru National Park, a fenced in park west of Nairobi in the Great Rift Valley. It took us a whole day to drive there since we stopped at the grocery store Tuskys, a coffee shop, a couple curio shops, and had to drive through Nairobi which was busy with traffic. The Rift Valley was beautiful and green with a little bit of a chill to the air. One of our stops was an overlook of the valley escarpment. We arrived in Lake Nakuru in time to set up tents before it was dark. We were in a fenced in campsite complete with buildings for a kitchen, classroom, and bathrooms. The fence kept most of the animals out except for the crazy baboons that were not afraid of people. They have grabbed food out of people's hands before so we had to be careful only eat inside the buildings. They kept the askari (guards) busy chasing them with sticks and shooting them with slingshots to get them out of camp. While we were in Nakuru we had a guest lecture from a scientist in the park and a couple classes related to the problems maintaining a fenced national park so close to a city (Nakuru is the fourth largest city in Kenya and we could see it from our campsite). The main issue is the creation of a terrestrial island through fencing so that the population is isolated genetically and limited in resources. One of our professors had done many years of work in the park, so we had an inside perspective.  We had a few field exercises in the park where we counted animals in particular habitats and recorded the behavior of some species. The best part of being in the park was the many game drives we were able to go on. We saw black and white rhinos, lions and their cubs, many cool birds, Rothschild giraffes, and I caught a glimpse of a leopard. The lake was especially beautiful and during one evening game drive we saw a double rainbow over it.

                                          The 5 lion cubs we spotted in the bushes

                                      Isak, Molly, Sipaya and I overlooking Lake Nakuru

                                                           Rainbow over the lake
Time has really flown here in Kenya and now we only have a week left! I'm excited to experience Tanzania but very sad to leave the wonderful staff here! It's time to get to work studying for tests before we go...