The Middle Bulge

Nairobi blog closed, Washington blog launched

2009-05-21T00:39:00.004+03:00

This blog about our life in Nairobi/Kenya/Africa is now officially closed. Because we have moved away from that area, we can no longer write about our adventures there, so we need a new blog for our new home.

Our new blog about our new lives in Our Nation's Capital is called Capital Letter. It's like a newsletter but in blog form from the capital city of our country.

Visit our new blog. We hope you enjoy it, visit it regularly and even visit us in person in the capital!

Sarah, Stephen and Lexi

Out of Africa

2009-05-15T01:45:00.003+03:00

Dear Gentle Reader,

Last week the last of us Padres left our home in Nairobi, Kenya. Sarah and Lexi had stayed behind after Stephen left in early March so Sarah could finish her contract with The Lutheran World Federation's Kenya program. After 18 months, it was time for the Padres to leave East Africa and return to the United States.

After living as expatriates for five and a half years, we have returned to the United States. We are now in our new home in Washington, D.C. We are beginning new lives here and fulfilling a dream of moving to the East Coast that started in Chicago or even earlier.

Therefore, since we are now out of Africa, it is time to shut down this blog. We say asante sana - thank you very much - for going on this journey to Africa with us, for following our lives near the equator, for visiting The Middle Bulge. We were in East Africa for only a short time, but we had many adventures there, including some we hadn't bargained for.

Fortunately, we have moved to a very exciting city. We have gone from one country's capital city to our own country's capital city. We have followed the Obamas from our old home of Chicago, through the place where Barack has his family roots, and now live in the same city as he does. Because our lives will continue to be exciting in this place, we will not abandon you, gentle and faithful reader, but we will be starting a new blog soon. Watch this space for a notice about its launch and a link to it.

We will no longer be adding posts to this blog. But again, watch for the final post here about our new blog about our new lives in Our Nation's Capital.

Sarah, Stephen & Lexi

The man-eating lions of Tsavo - a great story

2009-05-06T04:12:00.003+03:00

I have to post another great story from Africa here on the blog before we shut it down. I posted this same text and photos on my Facebook profile at the prompting of my friend Liz in Chicago (Liz Hunter at The Lutheran for those of you who know her).

It's a great story I read about in Nairobi on a visit to the Nairobi Railway Museum, although it's a well-known legend in Kenya's colonial history. Here's the setup, courtesy of the website of the Field Museum in Chicago:

"In March 1898 the British started building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in East Africa [as part of a project to connect by rail the Indian Ocean from the port of Mombasa to Lake Victoria in Uganda]. Over the next nine months, two large male lions killed and ate nearly 140 railway workers [in an area of wilderness that is now a popular game park]. Crews tried to scare off the lions and built campfires and thorn fences for protection, but to no avail. Hundreds of workers fled Tsavo, halting construction on the bridge.

"Before work could resume, chief engineer Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson (1865-1947) had to eliminate the lions and their threat. After many near misses, he finally shot the first lion on December 9, 1898, and three weeks later brought down the second. The first lion killed measured nine feet, eight inches (3 m) from nose to tip of tail. It took eight men to carry the carcass back to camp. The construction crew returned and completed the bridge in February 1899."

But it wasn't long until the lions were a threat to the building of the railroad again. So one man thought he was tough enough to go out and kill them. Now read the story in the photo below (you can click on it to make it bigger). This was on a plaque on the side of a railway car I saw at the railway museum.

A movie was made from this story - "The Ghost and the Darkness" (1996), based on Patterson's adventures in Tsavo.

Where are these lions now? Stuffed and on display at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Here's me demonstrating how this man fell asleep (happy before he became the lion's dinner).

This is the non-lion-proof carriage.

Consider the lowly dung beetle

2009-05-05T00:03:00.005+03:00

This is one topic that's Africa-related and definitely something worth pointing to before we shut this blog down.

Today, NPR aired an interview with Douglas Emlen, a professor of biology at the University of Montana, who studies dung beetles.

To all our visitors who came to Kenya and visited a game park or family I have traveled with in other parts of Africa in game parks, I have always said, "Consider the lowly dung beetle."

Everyone who goes to Africa wants to see the well-known "Big Five" game animals - lions, giraffes and elephants and all. There's more to African wildlife than these big creatures and what everybody pursues on safari. I learned while in Kenya that there's also a list of the "Little Five" animals in game parks that includes the dung beetle.

What a wonderful world we live in that there are animals at all levels of the ecosystem and with a purpose for hauling away other animals' waste, as undesirable as we think it is.

I'm thrilled that someone really has considered the lowly dung beetle and that NPR has taken note of this creature as well (and only NPR can make these sort of things interesting - yay! - that'll prompt my pledge to my local station).

Photos, videos and the audio interview with the dung beetle scientist

The ants go marching...

2009-05-03T05:20:00.004+03:00

Before we shut down this blog (which will probably be soon, since this coming week we will all be out of Africa), I wanted to share an interesting video I shot at Lake Naivasha when I saw a line of ants.

Back to Africa (and Asia and the Caribbean)

2009-05-03T03:32:00.005+03:00

Today I took a trip around the world, all without leaving my city. If you consider that an embassy in a country is actually the territory of the other country, then I stepped on the foreign territories of Thailand, Indonesia, Botswana, Zambia and Haiti. Today was the annual open house at many of the embassies along Embassy Row, which goes up Massachusetts and Connecticut Avenues from Dupont Circle. It’s a chance for residents to see inside some of these buildings, some of which are historical houses, and for the countries to show themselves off, encourage awareness of their culture and tourists to visit, etc. I ended up visiting only embassies of countries that I had visited before, mostly to see how they promote places I’ve seen, but I was just as interested in the buildings and their interiors as I was about the countries themselves. It’s just interesting to see the spaces where diplomatic business is carried out. Unless you have an important reason to visit an embassy, one is unlikely to get inside one (and most of the time to get a visa to enter a country, it’s a different entrance or building all together).

I first visited Thailand’s embassy down in Georgetown because I just happened to have other business just a couple of blocks away in the morning. They had set up tables in several places that were selling all manner of things from Thai clothing and cloth (silk) to prepackaged food and leather handbags. In the back kitchen were several caterers selling food for lunch. It’s a new building that’s quite large.

Then I headed up to the area where most embassies are. The one I wanted to see the most because the building is an old, historical house was Indonesia’s. The line was long and stretched the entire width of the front of the building. It was because they were searching people’s bags, but it moved quite quickly. The embassy’s website gives a history about the house. An excerpt:

The building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places…

Thomas F. Walsh, the mansion's first owner, was born in County Tipperary, Ireland and immigrated to the United States at the age of nineteen. He made a fortune in Colorado's gold mining industry as the sole owner and developer of the Camp Bird mine at Ouray, Colorado…

Although Mrs. Walsh occupied the house until her death in 1932, the property's title had been earlier handed to her daughter Evalyn. As the daughter of a wealthy socialite couple and the wife of influential newspaper owner Edward B. McLean, Evalyn Walsh McLean was well-known in Washington . Evalyn inherited the house, but left it vacant for a time while she lived at "Friendship," the McLean family's estate in Washington , D.C.

Evalyn Walsh McLean is also distinguished as the last private owner of the fabulous 44 ½ carat Hope Diamond - the sale of which was negotiated at the Walsh Mansion by Pierre Cartier, the famous jeweler.

What an amazing house! Right inside the front door is an enormous staircase, and three stories above that is a stained-glass dome.

Off this central room is what was probably the dining room, which is huge. On one wall is a built-in Baroque pipe organ!

The house is in the French Beaux-arts style, but it’s a bit jarring and odd to see the structure and décor punctuated by very different Indonesian symbols – a coat of arms or statues of lions. As I was leaving, in the room adjacent to the dining room, there was a group of musicians playing traditional instruments. Some of these instruments are metallic xylophone-like plates that one has to hit hard with something that actually looks like your standard hammer. Yes, it makes a very loud and metallic sound, and the whole thing, with various drums, was just deafening and chaotic. Well, I’m sure to any Indonesian ears, it was normal, but I really would have rather heard the organ, thank you. It was enough to drive me outside, which one got to by going through a newer addition to the house, which is probably the main entrance and main business area of the embassy.

Then, as a side note, I walked around Dupont Circle to find a place to eat lunch. I found another restaurant in the Five Guys hamburger chain, which bills itself as the best hamburger in D.C. There was one in my former neighborhood, Columbia Heights, but I was waiting for a time when it was more necessary to eat out and when I could choose to try this chain. I saw Michelle Obama admit on TV the other day that she has snuck out of the White House several times and has gone to eat at some restaurants in town, and this is one of them (not this particular location, however). The hamburgers are good, but still not as good as my all-time favorite place – Dick’s in Seattle (a drive-in place from the 50s). The fries are good too – nice and salty.

Then I went to Haiti’s embassy. The line there was very long too – probably more than 100 feet out the door. But I think it was just the herd mentality – if there are a lot of people waiting outside, then there must be something good inside, and it just feeds on itself. But I can’t imagine why so many Americans are so interested in Haiti. After going inside, however, there almost was nothing to visit. I spent probably a half hour waiting in the line, which continued inside through the lobby and up the stairs to the second floor, around through one room and really only to get a third of a Styrofoam cup full of punch. Sure, it had Haitian rum in it, but it was so little, and they were being so inefficient about handing it out (a non-Haitian woman asking each person if they wanted alcohol in their punch or not). The only thing to look at were colorful Haitian paintings in each room, which I saw many of at the paintings markets in Port au Prince myself many years ago. There was a man, a painter, giving a lecture in French (translated) in one room, but only a few people were interested. The rest of us were just standing in the line that snaked through the room to get our free punch. Regarding the building itself, there was nothing noteworthy or impressive about it.

Up the road a few doors was the Zambian embassy. A much shorter line, but again, very little to look at – well, absolutely nothing new to me. At least they had made the effort to set up several tables in one room and were displaying handicrafts. People were so impressed by them and were taking pictures of the large carvings. To me, it was stuff I had seen a million times before all over Africa.

On to another street to visit the Botswana embassy. Their focus was more on tourism, and so they had booklets about all the wildlife parks you could visit. As with the carvings at the Zambian embassy, I had been there, done that. Both the Zambia and Botswana embassies were in buildings that had nothing noteworthy.

I had planned to go to a different area farther north in the city to see another cluster of embassies, but by this time it was 3:00, and the whole event was going to be over in an hour, and given the wait time in lines at each place, I decided not to visit any more. And besides, it would have taken me farther from home, which meant I would have had a longer bike ride home, and my legs were already tired of standing in the Haitian embassy line. So I called it quits. I’ll do the others next year. I heard somebody saying the Bangladesh embassy was the best (another country I’ve been to). But it was all worth it because I got inside Indonesia’s embassy!

Leaving Kenya

2009-05-01T13:54:00.000+03:00

In less than a week, Lexi and I (and my mom who has been here for a week) will all leave together to the U.S. It has been a crazy couple of weeks. I have been working frantically trying to get things wrapped up at work so that I don’t leave much hanging for my colleagues. My replacement will not come until August so there will be a gap that they will try and fill as best they can.

In anticipation of us leaving, I wrote Jane a letter just to indicate when her actual last day of work would be as her contract with us goes until the end of May. I told her that I would pay her the full May salary anyway but that I could not guarantee her a job. I think this made her mad as two days later, she gave me a letter from the Ministry of Labour. I didn’t open it right then but did when I got to work. In this letter, I was accused of everything from not paying a fair wage, to calling her the wrong title in the reference letter I had given her, to cheating my employer (she thought my employer paid for my house help). I felt horrible and was sobbing at my desk when the person who brings the tea and coffee things came in to my office. I think he was quiet upset that I was so upset. After consultations with colleagues, we decided that we should get the lawyer involved. The letter indicated that it had been CCd to various officials like immigration and the port – in other words, to indicate that my leaving the country would be a problem.

After review, the lawyer advised that we terminate Jane that day. I felt uncomfortable with her continuing and didn’t have the guts to terminate her either. So the lawyer and one of my office colleagues went to my house to do it; Jane refused to sign the letter accepting the final payment and said we had to meet at the labour office as scheduled in the letter I had received. I did have to come home and tell her verbally that she was fired and she left after that. Mom and Lexi were there the whole time – Mom reported afterwards that it was pretty tense and there was some shouting and lots of negative body language. Lexi obviously knew that something bad was happening as she went to stand by my mom and was very quiet.

That was Thursday. Mom and Lexi managed together without extra help. I felt pretty awful the whole weekend and didn’t sleep well Monday morning. Monday afternoon, the LWF office administrator, the lawyer and I left in plenty of time to get to the meeting which was in an office building downtown that looked like it had been built in the 70s. Out of 7 elevators, only 2 worked and there were lines of people waiting to get on one. So we walked – up 16 flights of stairs. I was pretty out of breath by the time we got to the 16th floor. And we found the meeting room right at the scheduled time. There was a line of people waiting outside this door as well which made us think we should wait. But soon the door opened and the labour officer looked out looking for us. So in we went. Jane was already there.

The meeting lasted 2 and a half hours – much longer than it needed to, I thought. The labour officer felt she had to defend herself – so we heard a lot of stories about similar situations and she kept bringing up rules in the employment act that I had broken. In the end, we ended up agreeing to pay Jane about USD 65 more than I had originally calculated if the labour office would write a letter saying that the issues in the original letter were resolved. I do think Jane did understand that I was hurt – the couple of items I spoke in the meeting, I struggled to keep from crying. But I am not sure if she was really happy in the end or not – even though she was asked and agreed to it. So to finish the transaction, we had to go back on Wednesday to hand over the money and sign the agreements. (Jane had to give her left thumb print as well as sign.) Up and down another 16 flights of stairs for only 15 minutes this time. I am not sure if it was completely wise to get the lawyer involved as I think it made it a bit more complicated than maybe it needed to be. And not that I have paid many lawyers, but it cost about USD 250 for 6 billable hours which sounds cheap to me – though I wish I hadn’t needed a lawyer at all!

So besides those disasterous few days, the stuff we are shipping to the US went this week. Because of cost, it is going by sea and will take around 2 months. Lexi didn’t seem to mind too much that the majority of her toys were being packed up. She enjoyed watching the packers do their thing including building the crate for the items in the car port. We have sold almost everything on our ‘for sale’ list which is nice.

It’s not the White House...

2009-04-30T04:51:00.003+03:00

...but now I can say I’ve lived on 16th in Washington, D.C., just like the Obamas (they live at the intersection of 16th and Pennsylvania), who also happen to be former residents of Chicago just like me.

Tonight is my last night in my first home in D.C. For the past six weeks, I have been living on my own as a temporary bachelor in a tiny, one-bedroom studio apartment. It has its own full bathroom (with a shower only) and a small kitchen area (with just a two-burner hotplate). It’s a room in a large, three-story house where several other people live in small rooms too, I’m sure (I’ve never seen the other ones), although I think they use the common kitchen on the first floor, which has a full stove with an oven.

This place is located in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, which is largely filled with immigrants from Central and South America. So I’ve heard a lot of Spanish spoken these last weeks. The way I like to describe my location is that if I get on my bike and ride directly south for exactly three miles, I run smack-dab into the White House! It’s so cool to live in a city and in a neighborhood where I can go just a few blocks and see the Washington Monument and have the White House come into view.

It was strange that I ended up on this very street as my first residence in this city because it’s where some other members of my family – three generations of them – have started out and/or lived. My great aunt (my grandfather’s sister), who lived in D.C. for decades (from the administrations of FDR to George W. Bush!), lived in a grand old apartment building called the Chastleton a couple miles south on 16th with her mother. When my own mother was young (younger than I am now), she moved with her sister from Seattle to D.C., and they moved in to this apartment with their aunt and grandmother. Later they would get their own apartment in this same building, and my mother would meet my father, and they would get their own apartment in this same building. I think this is the story of who lived where and with whom, but if I don’t have it all right, suffice it to say there was a lot happening in this one building with previous generations of my family, all on 16th, the same street where I happened to have ended up when I first landed in this city to start a new life.

Today this building has been renovated and is now all condos, with each selling for upwards of $176,000. It’s in the hottest part of town, mere blocks from Dupont Circle.

My parents were married at Grace Lutheran Church, several miles north, but also on 16th. This is the street where everything happened, and the same is true today. We have an active new president who is marking his first 100 days in office today, and from a busy White House down there on 16th, he and his family have established themselves in this city and have gotten down to business in these first 100 days, planting a new garden, modernizing the Easter Egg Roll and sneaking out from their home to try some of the restaurants in town.

Tomorrow I move to my second temporary residence, a larger place that can accommodate three of us, since Sarah and Lexi will join me here at the end of next week when they come from Nairobi. We’re renting the first floor of a house in the Brookland neighborhood in the northeastern section of the city. It’s in the shadow of The Catholic University. We’ll be there at least through the end of August.

I’m a bit sad to be moving away from my neighbors on 16th – the Obamas. But further adventures await in a new part of the city – parks to walk to on summer evenings, a Franciscan monastery to retreat to, and a college campus with a bizarre shrine to our country’s patron saint, Mary, Mother of our Lord. It’s all a testament to how interesting this city is.

What I did for Easter in New York City

2009-04-15T19:03:00.006+03:00

This isn't a post about happenings with all of us in Nairobi/Kenya/Africa, since I, Stephen, am now living in Washington, D.C., while Sarah and Lexi stay behind in Nairobi until Sarah's work contract is finished in early May.

Since I am here alone, I went up to New York City for the Easter weekend to see some friends and family. For the last few years, my brother Andy has been making artistic costumes and hats for the various parades that NYC has throughout the year (for Halloween, Easter, etc.) from Metrocards, the fare cards that the city's subway system uses.

So on Sunday afternoon, I gathered with him and a group of friends to be in the Easter parade, which is actually just a big street party where people show off their creations, mostly around St. Patrick's Cathedral. The New York Post TV unit interviewed us. You can see me, my brother and a friend in this clip about three-quarters of the way through. My brother is talking, and I'm wearing a hat in the shape of the Brooklyn Bridge.

This is the story that goes with the video:

LOW 'COST'UME PARADE

By AMBER SUTHERLAND

In an Easter bonnet, with yesterday's frills upon it.

With the economy in the tank, recycling was on the minds of many who stepped out on Fifth Avenue yesterday for the Easter Parade.

For example, a Florida woman, Molly Churchill, 47, was dressed up as a giant Easter Cake, which was made by her husband, Mark, 48.

"We had this costume from another parade. It only cost $100 to redecorate it for Easter," Mark said. "We're recycling. It's very economical. It was a very small expense and the costume amazes people."

Kenya and the U.S.: The differences aren't paper-thin

2009-03-17T04:01:00.002+03:00

This may seem odd, but one stark difference between the U.S. and Kenya/Africa that I noticed fairly soon after arriving in Washington, D.C., is how much paper is used in the U.S. in various parts of daily life. Of course, I had been part of this high paper consumption before myself, so it’s nothing really new to me, but it’s something that I noticed after living in Africa where not nearly as much paper passed through my hands on a daily basis.

Much of what caused me to notice this in Washington, D.C., and not in Seattle, where I spent several days first, immediately after arriving in the U.S. from Kenya, is that I attended a conference for about three full days during my first days in D.C. Not that I attended many (or any) conferences in Nairobi, but I don’t think they would have distributed and used as much paper as they do in the U.S. Participants in this conference received a paper folder containing various papers at registration, and at each workshop, the leader and other speakers handed out papers. If you strolled through the exhibit areas, you could pick up more paper from various organizations. At every place at the tables in the rooms where workshops were held, the hotel provided a pad of paper to take notes on. It seemed normal to me at the time when I worked for the ELCA in Chicago and I would come home from a conference with a stack full of paper to sort through, but now that seems like a real task – and almost wasteful! - after this conference. Also, this conference was held at a big, fancy high-rise hotel (a Hilton). In the bathrooms, you could dry your hands on paper towels (the garbage can for this under the paper towel dispenser was always full), and near the entrance to the bathrooms, they had a box of Kleenex. When they provided a means to dry your hands in Kenya (which was rare to begin with anyway) at a public bathroom, it was often an air hand dryer, not necessarily because they wanted to save the environment, but purchasing a continuous supply of disposable paper towels is expensive.
Also while living in Kenya, we took a hiatus of sorts from mail and specifically junk mail. Since there aren’t mail carriers in Kenya – mail is not delivered directly to residences (both people and businesses have to go to the post office to pick up their mail) – businesses couldn’t find us to send us ads and junk mail. We really received only what was essential to us. Junk mail is certainly a major way that a lot of paper passes through our hands every day. (As an aside, I did not really like this hiatus from mail, even if most mail these days is junk mail. I’ve always regarded mail as a gift that comes every day – I love being sent things that regularly without even asking for them!)
I am reminded that in homes in the U.S., people use paper towels in the kitchen and paper napkins at meals. We certainly could and did do this in Kenya, but having disposable paper for this purpose isn’t something you see in a typical African household – a poor African can’t afford to buy disposable paper products. A speaker from Kenya at this conference also noted this – how American households have a roll of paper in the kitchen and bathroom and everywhere else and how badly it makes her feel that trees are being wasted.
At the conference, the only meals that were provided in the conference costs were essentially lunches. And for those, we were given boxed lunches – that we ate at the hotel! So what a waste again by the hotel/the conference’s organizers. We each had a cardboard box that we threw away on-site where we got our lunch, and immediately after eating it – we didn’t really need to carry our lunches far in the box. At fast-food places, we do the same. There are boxes for Big Macs and fries that we throw away a few minutes after we’re given the food.

One bright spot in this often wasteful situation in the U.S. is that we recycle here. Thankfully, much of this paper that passes through our hands daily is recyclable, and people do recycle it in their homes.

From those still in Africa

2009-03-15T19:56:00.000+03:00

It’s lonely here without Stephen though his sister comes for 2 weeks on Monday so that will be nice. Lexi and I have had several dinner engagements since Stephen has been gone so don’t think that we are just sitting here doing nothing. We have been going to bed early as we have both been tired.

This morning we went to church at our usual place. The African organist has actually been on time the last two Sundays; he handles the hymns well (even at a nice speed) but the liturgy just makes me cringe. He definitely isn’t playing all of the music but I can’t pinpoint exactly what he is leaving out – something in the melody, I am pretty sure. Stephen would be going nuts if he was here! They are having a church cleaning day next Saturday; I really wonder how many people will show up. Getting people to do anything besides come to church on Sunday morning seems to be a problem.

The weather is still very nice though it has been a little cooler in the mornings. It has only been overcast and will look like rain but it hasn’t been raining. People are getting concerned that if the rains don’t come at the right time, things will be even worse with the food crisis. The other major regional concern relates to Sudan; with the arrest warrant out for the President, things might get ugly.

Lexi and I have booked our tickets back to the U.S. My mom will come two weeks before and fly back with us so that I don’t have to handle Lexi alone. We are leaving on 6 May. I am SO excited about it. Lexi and I (and maybe Stephen, too) will get to see my entire immediate family – nieces and all! Yesterday, I went through my clothes and now, along with Stephen’s, we have a large box of things to give away. And on Friday at work I did all (or 95%) of the filing that had been piling up as well as threw some things away so I feel I have really accomplished something the last two days.

From the capital of Kenya to the capital of the U.S.

2009-03-13T22:18:00.001+03:00

Time for an update on my/our relocation plans. The execution of the plan has begun!

I left Nairobi on the night of Sunday, March 1. It was a very long journey to Seattle that involved a very long flight that was extended unexpectedly. The Dubai-to-NYC leg of my flights was long anyway – normally 14 1/2 hours – but we circled over NYC because of the snow, which was preventing any planes from landing there. So add another hour on this plane. We finally started getting low on fuel (as if 14 1/2 hours in the air wouldn’t do that in the first place), so we landed in Philadelphia to refuel, which meant we sat on the plane for another hour. Then we went back to NYC. By the time we finally landed, I had missed my connection at JFK to Seattle. But I ended up spending the night in NYC at my brother’s place in Manhattan and having lunch the next day with a good college friend, so it wasn’t all bad. Plus I got to sleep in a horizontal position that night, since I was headed into my second straight night of sleeping on airplanes.

Once I arrived in Seattle, I stayed there for ten days. My main purposes in going there were to:

see many friends and family (and I was crazy busy seeing everybody over lunches, dinners and coffees and the unexpected phone call with some)
sort through and clean out my stuff that has been stored in my parents’ basement for the last 18 years and get it ready to ship to Washington, D.C. One of our reasons for moving back to the U.S. is because we now desire a house (i.e., a detached, single-family home) that has more living space so we can spread out, a place that includes a yard for our children (so far just Lexi) to play in. This is our chance to get everything we own in one place (stuff that has been scattered around the country for the last several years) and then enjoy many of the things we have collected on our travels around the world.

It is strange to be back in the U.S. Whenever I visited the U.S. while we were living abroad, and especially returning now after living abroad for 5 1/2 years, I feel like a foreigner in my own country. It’s strange because this environment and culture is familiar to me, but it’s not what I’ve been surrounded by for the past year or so. The culture of Europe was closer to that of the U.S., but the African culture was further removed from the American culture. It’s difficult to keep two cultures that are so far apart together in my mind. It was doubly strange being in Seattle as well. Even when I visited Seattle when I was living in Chicago, I never felt like I fit in anymore there. It is the place I lived as a child (until I was 18 and left for college on the East Coast). It is not a place I have spent much time in as an adult. Where I feel comfortable and where I fit in now is Chicago. That’s a city that suits me as an adult.

I have just arrived in Washington, D.C., and will begin the next – and main – phase of our relocation. What steps do I plan to take/what will happen now (the question I’ve been answering a lot since returning to the U.S.)?

I made my travel plans to arrive in D.C. in time to attend Ecumenical Advocacy Days, an annual event put on by the D.C. advocacy offices of the mainline churches (including the ELCA) and their related advocacy agencies. This is a good chance for me to network with a crowd I would like to work with, although I have pretty much already exhausted all job possibilities with these offices for the time being.
For the first several days after my arrival, I will be staying with a friend who lives in a central location in D.C. One of my first orders of business will be to find a longer-term place to live. I want to find a furnished apartment to lease/sublet for the short-term – for five or six weeks – until Sarah and Lexi join me. I may be able to find a place that’s big enough to add another adult and child later so I won’t have to move again, but I won’t know until I start looking at some places.
Another task - my main one in the coming weeks – that I will start immediately is looking for a job. I believe that I need to acquire things in this order: a place to live (a place on my own – an apartment – see above), then a job, then I can get a mortgage to buy a house, and then (or maybe at the same time as the house), a car for our family. So this is my list of big tasks in order of priority. Then we will be able to execute the moving arrangements for our stuff to come from Seattle and Salt Lake City and have a house to receive it in. Can I even look for a job? Yes, I am finding plenty of openings on various websites that I am monitoring for my line of work (nonprofits). These are openings that I am qualified for, interested in (more or less), and at places (in addition to nonprofits, I am finding openings at universities, trade associations, foundations, etc.) where I could work.
As I job hunt, I also have various other networking events I am scheduled or plan to attend and individuals I have planned or can contact with to meet for networking purposes. Friends and family have given me the contact information for many people who are working in D.C. whom I can contact with for job help or networking. But I am open to more contacts if you want to share them with me.
In between all of this, after my “job” of job hunting, I hope to get out into D.C. and enjoy some events – concerts, festivals, etc. – that are offered and visit some of the great landmarks of the city.

As you can see, I have been and plan to be quite busy in the coming weeks and months executing my plans as I’ve described above. If you want more details or need to know more about why or how I’m doing something, unfortunately, I can’t respond to every inquiry. I hope I’ve provided enough details (about the how and why) on what I plan to do for the time being, and in several weeks, I will write another update on my progress. I’m hoping to satisfy the curiosity and interest that is coming from many of you with these written updates, and I’m sorry they have to be for a mass audience, but there are many of you out there, and I can’t take the time to repeat this information for everybody who asks.

In the meantime, I thank all of you who are supporting me in various ways – those who responded to my first update and who keep in touch through various means, those whom I saw recently, and the rest of you who read this and who silently offer your good thoughts for my well-being.

An encounter with Kenya’s president

2009-02-27T18:08:00.001+03:00

This morning we attended a ceremony to open and dedicate a new building at our church. The most regular church we have attended during our time in Nairobi has been Uhuru Highway Lutheran Cathedral (the fact that it’s called a cathedral is a misnomer because it’s not the size of nor does it look anything like a cathedral). Next to the church building during the time we have lived here, a multi-story building with commercial and office space has been under construction. The offices of the congregation and of the denomination’s local diocese will also be housed in the building, which is now complete.

It was an interesting experience, but not totally a surprise in all respects, considering that this is Kenya/Africa and knowing how things don’t always go as planned or smoothly here. We had been told the ceremony was to begin at 10:00 a.m., and we arrived in time for that. There were tents set up around an open stage area in front of the building in the parking lot. The area was already full of police officers and armed guards because Kenya’s president had been invited.

Strangely, although the president was going to speak at the ceremony, there were no security checkpoints for the guests to go through. Nobody checked us for weapons, we didn’t walk through any metal detectors, and nobody searched our bags. Throughout the entire ceremony, we didn’t see any other signs of security to guard the president. I could have easily walked up in front of the dais at any time to throw my shoes – or hurl something worse – at the president.

After finding our seats and sitting for a few minutes, we got our hands on a program, and then shortly afterwards another program was handed out. The first one was a color program from the church (the national denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kenya). The second one appeared to be the official program that the president’s office had put together because he was taking part in the ceremony. This second program was quite detailed and indicated that the president would arrive at 11:00 a.m., which meant that’s when the program started. So already things had changed to an hour later – not a surprise here in Africa.

So we sat and watched the proceedings, some official, some not. At just six minutes before 11:00, large rolls of faded red carpet were still being brought in and rolled out, then swept and vacuumed. In the last half hour before 11:00, the podium was brought in. It was all glass, and someone was using a spray cleaner to clean it. Four flags (one was the American flag) were also put on poles in one spot, but they weren’t anchored very well, so as soon as they were up and flying, the wind started blowing them over, and the flags were touching the ground, a real violation of flag protocol, but no one seemed bothered by this at all. At one point the announcer called for some attention to be paid to the flags so they wouldn’t fall over. He also reminded the crowd before the president arrived that we needed to stand when he entered the area and that no pictures would be allowed when he was present, that only the accredited press could take photos. What a contrast to the way things would be at a ceremony the American president would be attending. All the setup would have been done hours before the start of the ceremony, everything would have been perfect and done according to the highest standards, and flags would not be falling over, carpets would not be faded, and people would not be vacuuming them at the last minute.

The president arrived a few minutes after 11:00, and the ceremony began. There were scores of ELCK pastors and all the bishops of all the church’s dioceses present. There were lots of prayers, with each bishop reciting one, and in between, choirs from churches across the country sang. In the program printed by the ELCK, the prayers were written out, and there were all sorts of typos and errors with capitalization – very unprofessional in what they wanted to be a professionally produced and printed program. But even the government’s program misspelled the last name of the Lutheran World Federation’s General Secretary, Ishmael Noko, who had come from Geneva as a VIP (he was Sarah’s ultimate boss in Geneva). Midway through the ceremony was the part where the president went to the front door of the building to cut the ribbon, and then they scheduled a tour for him of the building while the rest of the crowd had to sit outside and wait. Well, there were some choir numbers to entertain us during this time. Surprisingly, to keep things moving, the MC cut off two choirs’ numbers and eliminated the performance of a children’s acrobatic group because they would have had to tumble across bare cement.

Only after the president finished his tour did the long line of speeches in the program begin. The church’s archbishop had delivered a short sermon after a Gospel reading was recited at the very beginning of the ceremony, and truly it was short (amazing!), but then he did another, longer, unscheduled sermon before any of the other scheduled speakers in the second part of the ceremony. The program indicated that this government minister would introduce the vice president who would then introduce the president, but of course each person had to give his own speech. A representative of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod was present and gave a little speech because his church had given the ELCK a loan to build the building. The last scheduled speaker was the president himself, and having seen him on TV before, we knew that he speaks very slowly. His speech wasn’t unbearably long. But he’s an old codger. This is the president who basically stole the last presidential election and had himself quickly sworn in again before there could be any arguing over it. Like another president in Zimbabwe, it is about time for him to go. And at one point, various gifts were presented by different people to the president, and he had to stand up to receive each of them, so whenever he stood up, the whole crowd had to stand up too, so there was a bunch of up and down in quick succession.

Sarah and I had seats with a fairly good view of the dais where all the VIPs sat. We were under a tent, although I was sitting at the end of a row, and so when the sun got overhead, I was in the sunlight, but an American lady behind me let me borrow her large umbrella, which shaded me.

The press was there in full force, it seemed. In African countries, from what I’ve observed, usually one of the top news stories on the evening news every night answers the question, “What did our president do today?” even if it was something of little leadership substance like cutting the ribbon to open a building. So the photographers and cameramen were hanging on his every step.

By 1:15, two and a quarter hours after it began, it was all over, and the crowd quickly broke up for a catered lunch inside the new building. We were not invited to that. Sarah had to attend this ceremony anyway to represent her organization, and I wanted to attend just for my own interest and because this event was at our own church. It was also good to see the president in person, the head of state of the country where we’ve been living, and since we’ve been living in the capital city, and especially for me to see him mere days before I’m set to leave Kenya.

One last mountaintop experience in Africa

2009-02-27T17:56:00.000+03:00

Yesterday, as a way of saying farewell to Kenya and Africa (for now, at least), I climbed Mt. Longonot. I figured one last foray into the African wilderness was a good way to close my time here. The mountain is a fairly low one and is on the floor of the Great Rift Valley. It’s a volcano that blew its top many millions of years ago and now has a huge crater inside. We only recently discovered that it’s a fairly easy and quick climb, so I decided to squeeze it in before I left.

The drive to get there from Nairobi is not very long – a little over one hour. I drove Sarah to work then drove north, almost to Lake Naivasha (where we have taken some of our visitors). I arrived at the gate of the national park where the mountain is, paid my fees, got a guide, and started up the mountain at exactly 11:00. Two guidebooks said the climb to the rim of the crater takes “about an hour.” We reached the rim at exactly 11:59. I thought this was fitting for the occasion – reaching the summit in time for high noon. The climb wasn’t so bad. First of all, the duration isn’t long – I knew I wouldn’t be climbing all day. There were certainly steep parts, and because it’s an old volcano, there is a lot of volcanic dust and regular dirt. There was a stiff breeze the whole time, which was good, since it was at our backs going up, and which helped cool us off in the noontime sun. But it also whipped up the dust regularly, and it got everywhere – in my eyes and ears, and occasionally I was tasting it. But the terrain alternated a few times between relatively flat areas and steep climbs along loose, dusty trails that I was concerned I would slip on (especially coming down). But I never felt it was dangerous or never felt scared. It was also good that I am in shape and do my cardio exercises (which includes the stair climber) every other day at the gym.

As soon as we reached the rim of the crater, I could look down into the crater. We were standing at the top of a sheer cliff face, but it was different because the cliff circled around in the shape of a mountain. So it was like a big bowl, and on the floor of the crater, which was huge, was a dense forest. One can walk in a complete circle around the crater rim, which normally takes two and a half hours, but my guide said because of our good pace that we could do it in only two hours. I hadn’t planned on doing this, and we just spend several minutes at the top of the rim only. But the rim is jagged and goes up and down, and there’s a higher peak on the opposite side that one can climb up and get a higher view of everything, including the opposite side of the Rift Valley. One can also climb down into the crater, but this is an all-day trip, and one needs to spend the night camping on the crater floor, something that would be interesting to do. I imagine the stars at night looking up from a mountain floor would be spectacular, along with other sights.

The views looking out from the mountain are spectacular too, of course (the elevation of the point I climbed to is 2,777 meters). I could look out across the Great Rift Valley and see other mountains in the distance. I also saw Lake Naivasha not so far away and places on or near it that I had visited – Crescent Island and some of the commercial flower farms around the lake.

Heading down was harder than going up, and fortunately my guide let me borrow his walking stick, which helped. It took us about 45 minutes to get down.

On the way up and down, near the bottom of the mountain, one can see some wild animals in the game park. I saw some giraffes, zebras, hartebeest and some antelope on the way up and down. One can camp in other places in the park too, and you would see many more wild animals if you stayed longer.

On my way home, I took an alternate route back to Nairobi that we don’t normally take when driving up to Lake Naivasha. It was very scenic, and I was able to see Mt. Longonot from a distance at several points as well as the whole width of the Great Rift Valley. Before I climbed the rim of the Rift Valley (in the car), I stopped at a small Catholic chapel that had been built by Italian prisoners of war in 1942 in a scenic little corner of the valley.

From Zimbabwe to Kenya: A 20-year odyssey that begins and ends in Africa

2009-02-07T07:44:00.001+03:00

Exactly twenty years ago from this Monday, on my 16th birthday, I set foot in Africa for the first time. I arrived in Harare after two long plane rides from Seattle, set to spend the rest of 1989 as a Rotary International exchange student. One could say it’s ironic that I’m living in Africa again two decades later, but I say it’s exactly because I went to Zimbabwe and lived there during my formative teenage years that I returned to live here as an adult.

Unlike most American teenagers, I did not get my driver’s license on that day of my 16th birthday, but I did get official permission that I was old enough to travel alone to the other side of the world, to a continent that none of my family had been to before, and to explore the world on my own. I began my own Odyssey that day, and it has continued for two decades.

I was a modern-day explorer of Southern Africa and saw much of the country and the region, including parts of Malawi, South Africa and Botswana. I visited Victoria Falls and saw South Africa under apartheid, while Nelson Mandela was still in prison. I flew in a glider and took part in sailboat races. I also saw my first part of Europe on my way home. With a Kenyan from Mombasa, who had never set foot off his continent, we left Heathrow Airport on our layover and took the Tube into central London and saw Buckingham Palace. That was it. I was hooked on travel. I had started to see the world’s famous and exotic places.

Those were the good years in Zimbabwe. It was only nine years after it had gained independence. The memories of the revolution were still fresh in its citizens’ minds, but there was hope and optimism that it was a new country, and everyone - black and white, British citizens, former loyalists, freedom fighters, Mugabe loyalists (imagine!) - was willing to build a new, prosperous nation together. And it was an interesting point in Kenya’s history to be here in the past year, when it toyed with a civil war, when it threatened to break apart internally along tribal lines. Ironically Kenya’s recent conflict was triggered by a president – a presidential election – while Zimbabwe’s current woes 20 years later can be blamed on the same thing. I have one story from my time in Zimbabwe of living 11 months there under prosperity, and I have one (near) war story from my time in Kenya. At least I gained that while in Africa this time. So many of the expatriate friends we know have many literal war stories from living in places like Cambodia and Liberia. It’s the war stories that give life stories the real substance and texture.

So today, 20 years later, I sit poised to return to the U.S. from Africa, satisfied that I came back to live here, satisfied with a little over a year spent in Africa again. I’m obviously at a different point in my life now, with a wife and daughter, and she will have spent her first year or so of life here, although she won’t remember any of it. But when she gets older, together we can talk about our times in Africa. I will have to talk for her and fill in her memories for her of this place. I hope she, too, feels that Africa holds a special place in her heart. And I hope that she, too, will hold those memories dear enough that they will compel her to return and perhaps live somewhere here again for a year…or two…or more. Or at least that she knows she has permission – and encouragement - to be a 21st century explorer of the entire world and that it is traveling and visiting and being and living in different places that adds richness to one’s life.

So, I wonder where I’ll be living 20 years from now, on my 56th birthday…?

Stephen's plans for leaving Kenya and returning to the U.S.

2009-02-02T19:52:00.001+03:00

Many of you, our friends and family, have started to notice from what I’ve put on my Facebook profile and what I’ve said in e-mails and on our Africa blog that I’m laying plans for my/our return to the U.S. And some of you have started asking me about it. I’m sorry to do this, that it won’t mean individual replies to many of you who have asked about this, but I’m just going to write a mass reply/note/e-mail telling you what our plans are. This may be more detail than some of you care to read, but I’m trying to cover all bases with this:

I have a one-way ticket out of Nairobi leaving the night of March 1. I will head to Seattle first because that’s where we strategically arranged with LWF (Sarah’s employer) for our home base to be as part of her contract with LWF in Kenya. This gives us all the flexibility, should we need it, to go that far west when we first leave Kenya (i.e., repatriate, which is what LWF calls this). I will obviously take advantage of this opportunity, but Sarah may or may not (she can obviously choose not to go that far west but can fly anywhere east of there in the U.S. – not as far from Kenya - for less cost to her employer, which they should not object to). In Seattle I will visit family and friends and use the time to sort through and pack up some household belongings and old mementos that have been stored in my parents’ basement for, oh, the last 18 years (only half my lifetime) and get these things ready to ship later in some way to Washington, D.C. This is finally our chance to bring together in one place (a house) everything we own! We will somehow have to get everything from our Chicago condo that we didn't take to Geneva with us that is now in storage with Sarah's sister in Salt Lake City out to D.C. Everything that was in Geneva with us went straight to the D.C. area, and thanks to some of my coworkers from long ago who are retired and living in the area, they got it into storage in Rockville, Md., for us in preparation for the day we move back, which is finally this year.

Then, on March 12, I will fly from Seattle to Washington, D.C. (not stopping anywhere else en route for any layovers or visits). D.C. is our desired new home. Where we actually end up living and working will depend on where we can find jobs and an affordable house. But we are choosing D.C. or its environs (which includes the district’s suburbs in Maryland and northern Virginia). This means I will head to D.C. alone. Sarah and Lexi’s plans are to stay behind in Nairobi until Sarah’s contract is up in early May. Then she will fly to the U.S. with Lexi to officially repatriate. Where she will go first and what she will do as soon as she leaves Nairobi is not determined yet - visit some of her or my family in parts of the country before heading to D.C.? She hasn’t decided yet. We have talked about this and have made these arrangements together and believe it is best for us at this time. This head start with my repatriation, me going to D.C. alone, will allow me to concentrate on searching and hopefully finding a job and hopefully getting a start on searching for/buying a house and car. My initial plan is to stay with a friend for several days and then hopefully find a furnished studio or one-bedroom apartment in D.C. or nearby to sublet.

And no, I will not return to Kenya to help Sarah pack up our house (which we got furnished anyway, so most of the stuff isn't ours) or fly back to the U.S. with them.

You might have follow-up/new questions about my plans after reading this, but with just a few weeks before I’m set to leave Nairobi, and with some projects to finish up, as well as a visit of Sarah’s parents, I may not have the time to answer each of you individually. Please know that I appreciate your interest when you ask about my/our plans, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t respond to you right away or at all about my/our move and plans for it. This is what I know and have planned so far, and I’ll try to keep writing general updates for everybody to read as I make further plans.

Welcome to Africa column: How things really operate in Kenya

2009-01-28T18:46:00.004+03:00

Here are examples – all things that occurred in just one day (today) – of how things operate in this country:

Mid-morning a man from the city water company shows up in the compound, threatening to disconnect the water supply to our house – again. I’ve lost track of how many times this has happened in the 13 months that we’ve lived here. I explain to him, as calmly as I can, trying my hardest to contain my anger, the whole history of trouble we’ve had. Unlike all previous times, I manage to convince him not to shut our water off, but it appears that he is doing it only out of the goodness of his heart and after he calls me “friend” and “brother,” rather that giving me any benefit of the doubt or just believing that my explanations about the cause of the problem might be credible. The story behind this is that the water company believes more than 76,000 Kenyan shillings (close to US$1,000) are owed to it by CARE International, which was one of the previous tenants of our house (or the employer of) – and not even our immediate predecessor. The man who came today said he had been sent to shut off the water for CARE, and I kept telling him that CARE has nothing to do with us or our house anymore. He had a major epiphany that the problem must be between our landlord and CARE, to which I replied, “I’ll say!” This is something that we’ve been trying to convince the water company of countless times. But finally today’s man decided that we, the innocent party, do not deserve to be punished, but only after he asked why I couldn’t produce the latest bill and proof that it had been paid (I refused, countering with a question of my own: Why can’t he remove our house from his list?).
I call the office of Lexi’s pediatrician to make an appointment for next week. I call the land line and am told by the woman to call back on the cell phone for the office. She proceeds to give me two different numbers. I immediately hang up and dial one of the cell phone numbers and am pretty sure the same woman picks up, but I politely tell her what I need and why all over again. In the same number of words she used to tell me to call a different number, couldn’t we have just scheduled the appointment in my first call to the office?
I also call our Internet service provider to complain about the slow and dropped connections and manage to get through. I had tried to get through to customer support about three weeks ago, but nobody was ever answering, even after trying at least 10 times over two or three days. Finally a woman answers the phone, and when I ask if anybody works there anymore, she says yes and then tries to transfer me – twice – to a support person. Nobody picks up. Fortunately the woman comes back on and takes my number and promises that someone will call me back as soon as they come back to the office. That was at least two hours ago, and so far nobody has called me back.
Mid-afternoon I wait for the electrician sent by our landlord to come for his 2:00 appointment. This is his second scheduled visit after he failed to fix the water heater the first time he visited last week. It is now after 5:00, and there is no sign of the electrician, not even a phone call to say why he is late or when he might come later. For his appointment last week, I was told he would come on a certain day, but he showed up the following day instead. When I asked him why he was delayed, he said he had come the original day of the appointment but that “it was a bit late,” so apparently he never got as far as our house. And on top of all this, this was the second electrician who has worked on the same water heater. And that first electrician had to make at least two visits!
The people at the post office still cannot make change. I bring in two pieces of mail, and the total for the postage is 145 Kenyan shillings. I give the man a 200 shilling note, and he punches into his calculator 200 minus 145. I wanted to shout “55!” at him. I’m baffled at this because they always seem to be able to do some math in adding up two or three stamps per piece of mail to get the proper postage.

Again, this all happened in one day. Granted, I’ve tried to take care of a lot of business in one day, but some of it was unplanned (like the visit from the water company man) and not of my choosing. Imagine trying to run an office here or work in a place where you have to deal with service providers all the time and rely on things like Internet service. This should give you a slice of life in Kenya and a good cross-sectional view of just one day’s struggles to try to do ordinary things from one’s home. And we are not irresponsible people who may be bringing some of this on ourselves. We pay our bills (many of our utilities are paid by Sarah’s office) and expect our services to run uninterrupted. At least one thing went right and smoothly today: I got a haircut. That’s a service that can be delivered on the spot and without prior arrangements, and you see results in a very short time!

Is there any wonder that I can’t wait to get out of here?!

Mama Obama's inauguration hat

2009-01-26T09:44:00.003+03:00

Aretha Franklin's inauguration hat has really attracted a lot of attention. The hat itself has inspired its own groups on Facebook. But it's only because she's famous and happened to be the other First Lady on stage, the one of Soul, as they identified her on CNN. And I guess demanding R-E-S-P-E-C-T gets you that kind of attention.

But last week in the Daily Nation, one of our papers in Kenya, I saw identified in a photo on the stage behind Obama his grandmother, Sarah Onyango. Obama calls her "Granny" or "Mama Sarah." She had what would probably appear to be something inappropriate - too casual - for that occasion: a simple head scarf fashioned out of an African print cloth. Maybe too casual compared to Aretha's glitzy hat, which appears to have a personality of its own. But her headdress was so typical of African women, and Mama Sarah was dressing her part like Aretha was, yet nobody noticed her and what she was wearing and what it represented. The accompanying article says of her: She "raised Obama's father during his boyhood in the Kenyan village near Kisumu. Until recently, she lived in a hut with neither running water nor electricity, and chickens darted in and out." (Kisumu is quite far from us in Nairobi; we would have to fly to get there.)

Even today as I write this, Jane, our nanny/house help, has on exactly this type of head wrap.

So hats off to Kenyan women like Mama Sarah and the headdresses they wear, not just at their grandson's inaugurations, but every day! They're not famous singers or rich or wealthy people, but they're often just the poor, simple women who raise the children of Africa in tough conditions. They are the child-care providers, the cooks of the ugali and sadza, the tillers of the soil who grow the maize and then grind it. These are the hats that soak up the sweat from heavy toil or walking for miles in the hot African sun to fetch the family's daily supply of water. These are the hats that are often used to wipe the tears as they mourn the husbands and fathers and sons who die of AIDS. We didn't crown a king last week, but surely his grandmother deserves to be treated like a queen. Mama Sarah's hat was an acknowledgment and celebration of our new president's humble but worthy roots in Africa.

Living in an Obama world

2009-01-21T19:03:00.000+03:00

Let me begin at the end.

Yesterday’s inauguration of Barack Obama ended with a moving benediction, which began with the third verse of a hymn titled “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” This hymn is also known as the Negro National Anthem. This hymn and I go way back. I played it at my confirmation and have loved it ever since then. So I know it well. I hadn’t thought of this hymn at all in relation to Obama’s inauguration, but when it appeared, as the opening lines to the benediction, I immediately thought how appropriate it was to use at the event, especially as the inauguration happened the day after the country commemorated Martin Luther King’s birthday. The marking of his birthday had obviously spilled over into the inauguration the following day, what many saw as a fulfillment of King’s dream.

I’m pleased that this hymn has been raised in the nation’s consciousness again, and I hope people discover it again or for the first time and see how wonderful it is. It’s worth looking at all the words here and how relevant they were for the inauguration and our time. The words have not grown outdated or trite either, which makes them so enduring and relevant.

Lift every voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
'Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.

Otherwise, there’s not a whole lot more I can write about from our vantage point here in Kenya on Obama’s inauguration. Obviously Kenya is very proud to be able to claim a piece of his past, and the months leading up to the election and his inauguration have been inspiring and exciting for Kenyans. The country is even going as far as calling him a “son.” The news about Obama has been appearing on the front pages of the country’s newspapers for the past several days, every day with a big photo. There were big celebrations in his father’s village yesterday, which hosted a lot of visitors. We didn’t go out to celebrate the event yesterday or go anywhere to watch the inauguration. We all sat at home in front of the TV over dinner and kept Lexi awake past her bedtime to watch the event and Obama’s speech. Obviously she didn’t know what was going on or the significance of it all, but I want to be able to tell her when she’s older that she witnessed history being made on that day.

I’ve written about things and opinions on Obama here before, and I’ll just repeat, perhaps, something I said earlier. It’s been interesting for us to have connections and similarities to Obama, the unlikely candidate and president, the man who made history. Like him, we lived in Chicago (at least while we live outside the U.S., we say we’re from Chicago), and, strangely, we chose to live in a country where some of his roots are too. This has made it easy and fun to connect with Kenyans. Like I said before, I’m glad I’m not from some small, obscure town in the U.S. like Topeka or Boise, a place that nobody in Africa has heard of. And fortunately we’re in Kenya, and not some place like Lesotho, where people know about Obama very well. So it has been convenient from both our side and theirs to tell Kenyans when they ask where we’re from: “Chicago. You know – Obama’s city.” They immediately understand, and there’s no need to explain. And people seem excited by this. I never met one Kenyan who was supporting McCain during the election.

With the Chicago connection and my sense of history, I’m thrilled that Illinois has finally sent someone to the White House again. It’s been a long time in coming – since Lincoln. And you would think that such a big city like Chicago would have had more influence on the national stage, or that politicians from there would have become big leaders in our federal government. But it hasn’t really happened. But now Chicago has suddenly moved to the center of the U.S.’s political world, and all sorts of Chicago people are suddenly running the government (even our own Hillary has Chicago roots, although I’ve heard hardly any acknowledgement of them).

So, as I wrote for my Facebook status last night before I went to bed, I was “proud to be an Obama Kenyan, Chicagoan, American!”

Welcome to Africa column: (Forgotten) Part Deux: Going to the movies

2009-01-15T15:42:00.000+03:00

To add to my last entry about going to the movies and having to choose our seats, which we view as a bizarre practice:

Perhaps even more bizarre, the most unusual part of going to the movies here, is this (and I can’t believe I forgot this and left this out of the last entry):

After all the usual movie previews, on the screen came a picture of the Kenyan flag, and an announcer said, "Let us stand for the national anthem [Kenya's, of course]." It was quite awkward. There were just a few couples in the movie theater, and most of us clearly weren't Kenyans. But out of respect, we all stood for a minute or so while the music played, and then we all sat down, and the movie proceeded. It wasn't our national anthem, but we didn't want to be disrespectful. It was just kind of strange hearing and having to stand for the national anthem in a movie theater, with so few people present, and in the near dark.

Welcome to Africa column: Going to the movies

2009-01-06T16:41:00.002+03:00

During the holidays, when Stephen's parents were visiting us in Nairobi, we took advantage of their presence and had them babysit Lexi while we went to a movie one afternoon. We had been to the movies once or twice before here, but not to this particular theater.

When we bought our tickets, they asked us which seats we wanted, and we actually had to choose where we wanted to sit in the theater (on a seating diagram on the cash register's computer screen).

We had encountered this strange practice once before, a few years ago when we were visiting Stockholm, Sweden, but never in Kenya before. We knew that they wouldn't take such seat assignments seriously (this is Kenya, after all, where nothing is very organized), so we just chose seats without thinking about it much. And sure enough, because it was a matinee, there were only a handful of other people in the theater, so we didn't bother to find our chosen seats and just behaved like normal Americans and sat where we wanted to.

Trauma in Kenya - part II

2008-12-26T10:49:00.002+03:00

Tuesday morning, I went with one of my colleagues to the police station. Good thing he knew which building to go to in the police compound as I never would have found it easily. It was a good sized piece of land with various sized buildings scattered around. There was even a man cutting hair behind one of the buildings. The building we went to was pretty small. It was crammed with 3 desks and a small bench - and several people. I waited outside as my colleague went it. They have a large ledger book with all of the reported accidents in it. At first, they couldn't find our record. Then we went in another room, then we went back to the first room, then we returned to the 2nd room. They finally found the record and I sat down on some old bus seats to give my statement of what happened. The first thing the police officer asked me was whose fault was it. I stated that the bicyclist ran into me. The bicyclist happened to be there and I think he was asked the same thing. He spoke in Kiswahili so I couldn't understand a thing. He did say 'indicator' a couple of times - I had not used my indicator as I wasn't turning!

Anyway, the police officer wrote down my statement in long hand on lined paper. Then he had me read it. I made him change probably 4 things that he had gotten wrong. Finally, I agreed that it was acceptable and signed it. (The other party in the accident didn't have to write down or sign any statement.) Then there was a bit of putzing around as they tried to find a police officer to accompany my car to the inspection yard. Since it was a car-pedestrian situation, this was a requirement. Finally, they just gave my colleague a signed bit of paper and he took it to the inspection yard.

So hopefully, this will be the end of it and no one will decide to sue us. We will ask the insurance company to reimburse us for the costs paid for the bicyclists hospital bills (about USD 50) and the money we gave him and his friend for bus fare.

Our Christmas letter

2008-12-24T11:25:00.003+03:00

For those of you who may have not gotten it any other way (because we don't have your e-mail address), here is our Christmas letter:

Trauma in Kenya

2008-12-22T21:01:00.002+03:00

Today Stephen used the car to run errands while I was at work so he came to pick me up at the usual time. He brought Lexi with him as he often does. She likes to ride in the car and it gives her a little outing. We were taking a colleague home so all 3 adults and 1 16-month old piled into the car. We were barely half a mile from the office when we had to stop behind a mutatu. When it started to pull forward, so did I and suddenly, a bicyclist crashed into the driver's side rear view mirror and hit the ground. We weren't going very fast and I immediately stopped. People started crowding round and the traffic backed up. The rule in Kenya for accidents is that you don't move the car - at all - from the scene of the accident. You stay put. Stephen got out to check on the bicyclist and I called the transport guy from the office who said he would come. The injured wasn't bleeding and I saw him lift his head so I knew he wasn't dead. People were clammering for us to take him to the hospital. We got in touch with the police and finally, the guy from the office came and took the injured to the hospital with Stephen accompanying him. Lexi, my colleague and I waited for the police.

Lexi was very good about the whole thing. Even when people were shouting at us to move the car. Then they started rocking the car and so my colleague only with a Kenya outside the car who had helped us contact the police decided that I had better move the car. That was scary. I don't understand why they were all so angry. They knew the rules as I did - you don't move the car until the police come. PERIOD. I called the police several times - they were caught in the traffic as well. They finally arrived - on foot. They certainly weren't in any hurry and didn't seem to have energy at all. We walked back to where the accident happened and I let the Kenyans helping us do the talking.

Finally, it was decided that we all go to the hospital to check on the injured man. Another of the work colleagues had come along so he took the police and we followed. I went a different way than they and arrived at the hospital before they did. This hospital was right down the street from our house so Stephen took Lexi home. At the hospital, we had to wait for the police - they had stopped to investigate another accident. This was after it took them over an hour to come to our accident scene. The injured man is fine - nothing broken, nothing dislocated. Just some bruises and pain which he got some medicine for. We paid for his hospital costs and gave him money for bus fare - too much money, I am pretty sure. The police wanted to take the car as it was involved in an accident with a pedestrian. My colleagues argued them out of that and we agreed that I would go to the police station to make the report at 11 tomorrow morning.

Of course, the thought goes through our heads that this injured person will try and sue us even though it was his fault. We don't really trust the police either. I do know that LWF has been involved in court cases before over this sort of thing. LWF is the one with the insurance (which covers any one driving). If the company gets sued there is nothing I can do about it. I hope it doesn't happen though. It doesn't seem fair - but I think it has a lot to do with the color of my skin.

O, star of wonder...

2008-12-02T07:40:00.002+03:00

This was the scene from our front porch last night just after sunset - a crescent moon with Venus (the brighter of the two stars) and Jupiter - to usher in Advent.

Welcome to Africa column: 101 uses for cow dung

2008-11-28T09:52:00.003+03:00

For Christmas this year, I will be giving all of you a new pamphlet I’m working on titled “101 Uses for Cow Dung.” Several years ago, Sarah’s mother gave me a similar pamphlet with hundreds of uses for baking soda a la Heloise’s Hints. This is along those same lines. I learned many of them while visiting a cattle camp in Southern Sudan on Thursday. A cattle camp is a large open area where many young men and boys from many families bring their cattle together for protection for several days before moving on to graze their cows. These men and boys are the primary caretakers of their families’ cows, which are the main way Sudanese store – and show off – their wealth. If you think this is strange, if you think it’s an uncivilized thing for young men of 15 years old or so to walk their prize bull down the main street of a town to show off their wealth to attract a potential wife, consider this: Is doing this any different than a man driving a sports car down a city street in the U.S. to attract the attention of a woman?

Don’t have a supply of cow dung on hand? In the U.S., I figure there should be plenty around after a bruising two-year presidential campaign!

Here’s a preview of my upcoming production. I also plan to submit this to Good Housekeeping.

Burning cow dung to create a lot of smoke keeps flies and mosquitoes (which are annoying and can carry harmful diseases) away from your cows.

Smearing the ash from burnt cow dung (see the above for why you would be burning cow dung in the first place) on your face, head, neck and other exposed skin will not only make you look like a ghost (great for a creepy look at Halloween), but it serves another practical purpose: It keeps the flies and other “dudus” off you as well!

Brushing one’s teeth with cow dung ash is a great whitener! (I swear this is what I was told!)
Bonus tip: Cow urine makes a great hair dye! Tired of that afro looking like everyone else’s? Impress the ladies and increase your chances of finding a wife when you dye your hair yellow with cow urine! You’ll really stand out (not only because of your looks, but the smell will let people know you’re there)!

Giving thanks for Thanksgiving hospitality – Sudanese style

2008-11-28T09:48:00.001+03:00

The main project area I visited on Thursday was a remote village a drive of an hour and a half from the town of Yirol (I just don’t know how the Lutheran World Federation finds these places anyway; I think aliens identify them for LWF staff from their spaceships). I spent some time interviewing women in a savings and income-generating group. One of their new projects is running a shop. First they offered me a soda, and then when I asked the staff person who took me there if I could pay for it, he told me that it would be an insult to their culture if I refused something that was offered to me like that (which I suspected because I would probably be insulted too if they were visiting me in the U.S.). But I told him – and he translated it to the women, who understood my joke – that I felt like I should pay in order to support their new business, especially since that’s what we had just finished talking about. But I said I would graciously accept their drink, which the women said had not come from their shop anyway. When we were done talking, the women then offered to make me lunch. They had known I was coming and had already slaughtered a chicken (good thing I didn’t have to be one of their first customers the next day at the restaurant that they were opening next door, since the goat – still alive – had been purchased in preparation for the slaughter). So we walked around for a few minutes and then sat down and had a meal of stewed chicken with homemade bread.

I didn’t remember until we were driving away from the village that Thursday was Thanksgiving Day, and I realized that that was my Thanksgiving meal. It wasn’t turkey, and the main dish had only one trimming, but I thought to myself, “What gracious hospitality. It wasn’t a Thanksgiving meal like I had ever had before, but their gift, an offering from strangers, is something to be thankful for.” In the same way the Pilgrims had sat down with the Native Americans for a meal, I was hosted by strangers in a foreign country and was given a meal in their tradition. Again, it was a different meal than I would have wanted, but the unexpected surprise I received was Thanksgiving in the truest sense.

'Over the woods and through the river' on Thanksgiving eve in Sudan

2008-11-27T17:04:00.003+03:00

After a short day at home, I left again on Wednesday for a quick visit to the third and final project area of the Lutheran World Federation (the organization Sarah works for) Sudan program for my work on its 2008 annual report. This project area is in the same part of the country as first area I went to last week – it’s a city called Yirol and is in Southern Sudan’s Lakes District. Getting to this place involved taking a morning flight out of Nairobi that stopped to refuel in Lokichoggio (“Loki”), a city in northwestern Kenya (which, by the way, is where one flies to visit Kakuma Refugee Camp, which is managed by the LWF Kenya program), and then continuing on to Rumbeck, where I was picked up by an LWF vehicle and driver who had come from Yirol, 70-some km away. However, the drive took almost four hours, which tells you the state of the roads in this (large) section of Africa (Sudan is Africa’s largest country and is roughly a quarter the size of the lower 48 United States). It’s the same story in all of these LWF project areas with the roads. I’ve spent many, many hours in the car the past week on very, very rough roads.

Wednesday’s car trip was more adventurous, exciting and visually stimulating than my car trips to, from and around the other two LWF project areas. For a little ways out of Rumbeck, where I flew into, the road has been graded and is dirt but is quite smooth. Then it starts getting rough – many potholes and rough parts, which means you have to drive much more slowly. The land is quite lush with vegetation, but it is also very flat, so rains have fallen in a higher part of the country, and all the water has flowed to these parts, which means there are large areas that have some water sitting on them and that are swampy. In several places, the water is flowing across the road in little streams that aren’t very wide – the widest was no more than several yards across – and not always very deep, but these are prime places for vehicles of all types to get stuck.

When we came upon the first of these water-crossing points, there were two other vehicles belonging to non-governmental organizations similar to the type we were in that were stuck in the water, one of them with one of its back corners sunk deep and sitting at an odd angle. The driver and our two passengers joined the small crowd to assess the situation. After several minutes, I was told to roll up my trousers and walk through the water to the other side, which I did. Then, suddenly, came our driver with our vehicle roaring at top speed (as fast as one can go in 4-wheel drive and starting quite close to the edge of the water) through the water. He made it through without getting stuck! I was amazed, but still said to him as he jumped out of the car on the other side, “Are you crazy?!”

Then attempts were made to try to pull one of the other Land Cruisers out with the LWF vehicle. First the cable snapped, and then when it was reattached, it pulled the stuck vehicle free, which started coming toward me at a funny angle. I started to back away to make sure I gave it plenty of clearance, but then I got myself stuck in a thorn tree. Then attempts were made to pull the second Land Cruiser out, which was the one that was more severely stuck and in deeper water. It took two vehicles pulling the stuck one by cable at the same time to free it, but as soon as that happened, we took off to continue our journey.

We soon reached the next stream of water over the road and took some quick assessments. This time the driver told me to stay with him in the vehicle. I asked him if he was going to drive through the water fast. He said no. But he didn’t inch through the water either, which would be one technique that I would think would work. But apparently the best technique is to go through fast so the car doesn’t have enough time to sink in the mud and get stuck (again, it shows my complete uselessness and ignorance as a city boy in these rural parts of Africa). My driver demonstrated his fearlessness again as we plunged into the water with it splashing in front of us and over the hood of the car onto the windshield (these Land Cruisers can drive through deep water without it affecting the engine because they have their air intake through a tube at roof level). We did this a few more times, with our passengers jumping out each time we approached a deeper pool of water to wade through it first to find the shallowest route for us, as the driver and I stayed in the car. Each time I was both scared and excited by the adventure of it all. I kind of wondered, however, why we didn’t caravan with the other vehicles we had seen and freed at the first crossing in case any of us got stuck again. At most of the other crossings, however, we found other types of vehicles, most of them larger than our standard passenger Land Cruisers, that had gotten stuck and that looked like they were there to stay for several days. At one crossing there were two semi tractor-trailers stuck in odd positions – at odd angles and half-in, half-out of the water. Certainly our much smaller Land Cruiser wasn’t big or powerful enough to pull those trucks out with a cable attached to our rear. At another one we passed two truckloads of Kenyan army soldiers who were traveling with the United Nation’s Sudan mission and who were on their way to rescue some of their stuck U.N. vehicles, which one soldier had asked me if we passed. There was also a flatbed truck that had gone through the water but that was stalled on the other side because the water had flooded the engine. We tried pushing it from behind to see if the driver could kick start it, but it didn’t work. We also saw many motorcyclists getting off and pushing their motorcycles through deep water. One of them even successfully kept on driving through the water.

Once we passed through several of these, the road improved somewhat and we could move fairly quickly again. With all of this standing water in swampy areas, one thing that it – and especially these points where water passes over the roads – attracts are many water birds. I saw several interesting species of water birds, some of them quite beautiful. One was fairly large, probably a stork. It had a big, long, bold yellow beak with a bit of red at the top where it connected to its head. Most of its body was white, but on its wings it had some black on the edges and tinges of pink. At one point I also saw another type of stork, which, besides an ostrich, is probably the biggest bird I’ve ever seen. As it stood on the road as we approached it, it probably stood almost 5 feet tall. Then we scared it, and it started to fly off the side of the road. It was mostly black, and when it spread its wings, its wingspan must have been at least 8 feet, but it could have been 10. It was amazing to see this bird both standing and taking off in flight. I wanted to ask the driver to stop every time I saw an interesting water bird like this, which was happening a lot along this stretch, but I was worried about us getting to our destination in time because we had probably delayed by helping the stuck vehicles at the first crossing and because it was getting close to sunset, and I didn’t know how much farther we had to go.

Soon we were approaching some villages, and as we went through them, I saw so many other interesting sites, this time related to people. We drove through lines of cattle that were walking in single file on both sides of the road. Some of these cattle are very large and have enormous horns. All along the way we had to occasionally dodge a single dog or a pack of them or some sheep. One time I saw a pig cross the road in front of us. We passed a few cattle camps, an area where people gather hundreds of head of cattle and have literally set up their camping area among them (makeshift shelters, fires for cooking, etc.).

And the people themselves were so interesting looking. Even though we’re near the first area I visited last week (Panyagor), the people in this area look quite different – or they dress differently. The women wear fewer clothes, and many have just a single piece of fabric that they tie over one shoulder, so many more breasts are exposed here. I’ve seen many more young men wearing funny things on their heads (like a single white feather on the top). Because there’s a lot of standing water lining the roads, many people were taking advantage of it as a place to bathe, so I saw many boys and men (but never women) naked, washing themselves in a large puddle of water.

It was interesting to see the differences in people in this section of Sudan, and as we proceeded along the road, it was like watching a live documentary of life in Sudan through the windshield.

A very Sudanese Thanksgiving

2008-11-25T20:03:00.002+03:00

As of today, we have lived in Nairobi for a year. This is longer than the previous time I lived in Africa (when I was 16, I was a Rotary exchange student in Zimbabwe for 11 months). Since this anniversary falls during the week of Thanksgiving (which no country in Africa celebrates, by the way), I shall tell you the things we have here that I am thankful for. And since I am writing this on my one day home in between two trips to Southern Sudan, a very poor country in Africa, foremost on my mind are things that we have here in Kenya that I did not see always in Sudan, some of which are things that I am now much more thankful for, even if they still do not measure up to the U.S. standards that I expect and am used to:

Good roads that one can drive reasonably fast on (i.e., paved and/or mostly free of potholes)
A variety of food and availability of fruits and vegetables and milk (so I can have a bowl of cereal)
Weather that is not unbearably hot (but still warm and pleasant and summer-like all year 'round)
A comfortable house to live in with some luxuries (indoor plumbing – not having to use the latrine or shower outside – and even wooden floors that are nicer to walk on)
Internet access
The opportunities we have had while living in Europe and Africa to travel; just this past week alone, I have seen many places that tourists never go to (in fact, that’s true of the whole country of Sudan)
The “deal” we have gotten for living here that provides in Sarah’s contract a house where the rent and all utilities are paid for and that comes with outside maintenance staff; a vehicle that is provided and maintained and the fuel paid for; the fact that we can afford a housekeeper/nanny

And as always, no matter where we’re living, I’m thankful for:

My wife and daughter and other family
So many friends scattered around the world
My good health
The ability to live and work where we want, even to return without having to do anything (like apply for a green card and wait for years) to that great land of opportunity, the U.S. (I think it still is that place!), which so many other people long for
The gift of music (although I’m thinking more and more that it’s a curse because I always have a song in my head and can’t ever seem to “shut off” the music)

Happy Thanksgiving, all! May you see what blessings you have received as well.

The high price of a wife these days

2008-11-22T18:28:00.000+03:00

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s question of what tribe Sarah comes from was today’s doozie from my driver and another Lutheran World Federation staff person in Ikotos who were taking me to one of the projects in the area. We somehow got on the subject of men and women and how they marry in Africa. I was told that women are “bought” with cows when a man wants to marry her – the man’s family “buys” the wife from her family with the cows – 25 in this part of the world. This I already knew. They asked me if this happens in my culture. I told them no, that I did not “buy” my wife with cows or anything. I explained that Sarah had gone to university and had been self-supporting for some time with her own job and was independent from her parents already when I married her. At this they were astonished and had a good laugh about this big difference between our cultures.

But come to think of it, how many cows is Sarah really worth anyway?

Those Iowans - they're downright tribal!

2008-11-21T20:16:00.001+03:00

I am currently in Southern Sudan, visiting the three project areas of the Lutheran World Federation’s Sudan program for my work on its 2008 annual report (this is the organization/program that Sarah works for).

Yesterday we were driving around some of the areas in Panyagor, one of the project areas. The projects always have drivers taking people around to the various project sites in the LWF vehicles. So the driver and I were talking and getting to know each other. The driver there is a native Sudanese, a fairly young man who is married but already has five kids. He asked about me. “Does your wife come from the same tribe as you?”

Huh?

Is Iowa a different tribe? I must admit I’ve never been able to figure Iowans out. They are a bit foreign to me, indeed. But I had a bit of a challenge explaining to him that we don’t really have tribes in the U.S. But how was I supposed to answer that question? Are we from different anythings?

Visiting the obscure country of Burundi

2008-11-08T16:05:00.004+03:00

Here are some things I learned or observed on our road trip through Tanzania to visit Burundi and Rwanda a couple of weeks ago. In all, we drove 3,707 km/2,303 miles from our home in Nairobi west through Tanzania to the capital of Burundi – Bujumbura – then north to the capital of Rwanda – Kigali – and back east again.

Out of the four countries we drove in on this trip, Kenya, our own home/country, has the worst roads of the lot. This is surprising, given that it’s the wealthiest and arguably the most developed of all countries in East Africa. But this could be the very reason – this is why it has the most cars and trucks that use the roads and wear them out perhaps more than they do in Burundi, Rwanda or Tanzania. We took one route in Kenya west to go into Tanzania, but stretches of one road were so bad that on the way back, we chose to take a longer route once back in Kenya, hoping to avoid this stretch. But we happened upon another long stretch of road that was under construction, which meant we had to drive on a long, bumpy side road!
Much more so than in Kenya, people carry things on their heads and ride bicycles for transportation and to haul things in Tanzania and especially in Burundi and Rwanda. Instead of carts for cargo or even wheelbarrows, people use their bicycles to haul all manner of goods, from huge bags of charcoal or bales of hay to people – using them as a town’s official taxi service (we saw a lot of women riding side-saddle, sitting over the back wheel on a carrier). And it just made sense to us – but apparently not to the bicyclist - the many times we passed a bike that the load they were trying to haul was just way too heavy. Several times we saw an overturned bike, the load obviously top-heavy, with two people standing next to it, scratching their heads, trying to figure out what to do next. Or we could never figure out how the bicyclist could balance such a tall or heavy load and ride their bike. And we’re not sure why, but we don’t see people walking and carrying things on their heads much in Kenya at all, but this is common in the other countries we visited.
We visited the world’s third- and fourth-largest freshwater lakes – driving around Lake Victoria in Tanzania and stopping there both ways and visiting Lake Tanganyika at one of our destinations in Burundi. And we hail from the shores of the world’s largest freshwater lake – Lake Michigan/Huron (which are considered one lake together, since they are at the same elevation and water passes freely between them).
Good thing we are flexible drivers. When we moved to Kenya, we had to learn to drive on the left side of the road again, and we are now quite adept at it. Tanzania also drives on the left. But as soon as we got all the way across Tanzania and crossed the border into Burundi, we needed to switch sides of the road. This was challenging in itself, but we had our right-hand-drive car with us, so the steering wheel was on the outside of the road. But both of us did quite well switching to the other side of the road there and also in Rwanda (and then back again in Tanzania and Kenya). It’s odd that neighbors like this in Africa drive on different sides of the road. It must be according to who the country’s colonial power was. For Kenya and Tanzania, it was Great Britain, which drives on the left side, and for Burundi and Rwanda, it was Belgium, which drives on the right.
We are also grateful we have some fairly flexible skills in the language department as well, that we had previously lived in a French-speaking country. We didn’t find many natives in Burundi who speak English, and we managed to ask a few times for directions to the American embassy. In Rwanda, however, we found more English speakers, since they get a few more tourists there.
Driving west from Nairobi, we passed through a wide variety of terrain. We went down into the Rift Valley and skirted Masai Mara game park, which is the Kenyan extension of the famous Serengeti in Tanzania. On the eastern side of Tanzania we passed through an area that had hills jutting up out of the plains and outcroppings of boulders that sometimes had interesting piles of balancing rocks. Much of Tanzania was very flat, but these plains varied from very dry to being hit by torrential downpours, which we got caught in a few times. Once we hit the western side of Tanzania, it becomes very hilly. Both Burundi and Rwanda are very hilly. In fact, Rwanda’s nickname is the “Land of a Thousand Hills.” The land is also very lush. We saw many kinds of trees in these countries, including banana, coffee, tea, palm, baobab, eucalyptus and pine.
As much as Rwanda has been through, as concerned as it should be about racial tensions, the social atmosphere and alleviating poverty, it is also very concerned about its environment. Surprisingly, it has essentially banned the use of plastic bags in the country. In fact, at the border, a guard asked to see in the back of our car (our luggage) to see what we had in plastic bags, and then he asked us to throw at least one away (he didn’t catch all the plastic bags we had). They even had some free paper bags that we could have taken. In some places in many African countries, the land is so littered with thrown-away plastic shopping bags (I’ve seen this a lot around the refugee camps in Kenya). I’m not denying that plastic bags are bad for the environment, and it certainly is unsightly to see them discarded and blown away and stuck on bushes and trees in rural areas. But I’m just surprised that Rwanda would be so concerned about the role of plastic bags and that it would take such widespread action on a countrywide scale. Indeed, especially the rural areas – along the roads – are quite clean of such rubbish.

Our purpose in making this trip was to see some other countries and parts of the East Africa region while we are living here. I had never been to Burundi and Rwanda before, but Sarah had for work when we were living in Geneva.

I wrote about our time in Rwanda in an earlier entry on this blog, so here is a bit about our time in Burundi:

In Burundi, we stayed at the home of one of my former coworkers from the ELCA in Chicago in the capital, Bujumbura. Her husband has been stationed with the State Dept. at embassies in Bangkok and London (we visited them there once when we lived in Geneva). A while ago, he bid on a post in Burundi and got it, and they arrived there in August. So we were their first visitors. My former coworker is also now working at the American embassy in the capital.

The Kleibers lucked out and were given an embassy-owned house to live in that used to be occupied by the deputy chief of mission (the #2 in charge after the ambassador). It’s located in the hills above the downtown area, and it has a spectacular sweeping view of the city, with Lake Tanganyika beyond that and the hills of the Democratic Republic of Congo on the horizon. It’s an enormous house with a huge terrace that is great for entertaining. It also has a large garden filled with tropical plants and flowers that is well-cared for (by their hired gardener, paid for by the taxpayers of the U.S., of course). The house is definitely designed for wealthy expatriates who have domestic servants and who like to entertain – a huge dining room with a well-separated kitchen, two large bedroom suites plus a couple of other smaller bedrooms, a cold-storage room, etc. It’s a lovely place to relax.

Because Tony has lived in Bangkok, all of their house’s décor is Asian – many objects from Thailand, Burma, China and the region. As soon as I walked in, I thought, “It’s a little corner of Bangkok right here in the heart of Africa.” All of these same decorations were there in their American-style apartment in London, where it also seemed a bit out of place. The Kleibers are in their early 50s and have never had children, so all the delicate statues and shiny lacquer ware from Vietnam were definitely not toddler-friendly. So we really had to keep an eye on Lexi, but she really loved running around on their front lawn.

Burundi isn’t exactly a well-known country, certainly not as well-known as its neighbor to the north, Rwanda, which has a notorious reputation for its genocide. As such, it doesn’t attract many tourists because there isn’t much to do there. None of the countries that border these large lakes seem to really take advantage of the lake as a resort destination. We know some people do have boats and use the lake for recreation, but they’re white. The day we arrived in Bujumbura, we had been driving for two and a half days, and we arrived in time for a late lunch, and we spent the rest of the day just relaxing outside on the terrace and enjoying the view and the garden.

That night the Kleibers invited some other expatriates over for dinner. We met the director of the counterpart to Sarah’s organization in Burundi. He’s got Dutch nationality but grew up in Tanzania the son of missionaries and has an American wife. All the other couples were American and worked for the embassy or the U.N. (except for the wife of one man, who is French and West African; she was awfully outgoing and bold, eating the olives from my salad, which I don’t like, off my plate at dinner). It’s always fun to meet other expats but ones who have lived for many more years outside the country and to hear about how many places they have lived and how much stuff they have collected.

The following day was a holiday in Burundi, so the Kleibers were able to spend some time with us. In the morning, we took a drive to try to find the monument marking the spot where Livingstone met Stanley, but as I said, the country doesn’t get many tourists, and like in Kenya, these sorts of haunts aren’t marked well or at all. So it ended up being just a drive only along the lakeshore south of the city. We stopped at a couple of small handicraft markets. They had the same stuff we see in Kenya and Tanzania. And in the afternoon we went to a fancy hotel (for the tourists they do get) that has a large pool and a beach on the lake. So we swam in the pool and walked along Lake Tanganyika. Lexi was afraid of the waves again.

So our visit to Burundi wasn’t marked by many tourist highlights like our other recent trip to South Africa was, but at least we saw a new country and one that has a different sort of past than Kenya.

Public holiday to celebrate Obama's victory

2008-11-06T08:01:00.002+03:00

Today, Thursday, has been declared a public holiday in Kenya to celebrate the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president. Apparently Kenya's prime minster, who is from the same tribe, in the northwestern part of Kenya, as Obama's father, and who hails from the same area of the country, declared this day a holiday.

We think this is odd in many ways:

In a way, it's a day for Kenyans to celebrate democracy, the fact that Americans voted in, in a peaceful way, a man from the opposition party, a man so foreign to the office of the presidency. This when Kenyans can't hold a democratic election themselves, one that is peaceful, and simply allow the opposition leader, who arguably won the vote, into office as a true democracy would allow.
It's strange that we, American citizens, the only ones who had a say in selecting Obama, have to be outside our own country to get a day off to celebrate the election of our own president.
We wonder how Kenya can suddenly declare a nationwide holiday for the next day. I figure only small countries can do this. It would just be logistically impossible for a big country for the U.S. to do this. But it doesn't seem to inconvenience anyone here to be told they don't need to work the next day. Jane, our house help, seemed delighted to get a day off work and never asked us if her absence today would cause any problems (it won't, since Sarah's office is obviously closed too). But things in Africa are always so loosey-goosey. Hard and fast plans are never made for anything, or if they are, it's okay if they're changed or canceled.
What does one do to celebrate an occasion like this? I saw in the newspaper that a hotel in Mombasa this week was serving two types of double-decker hamburgers named the McCain and Obama burgers. The chef created them because he knows Americans like hamburgers. Perhaps we need to eat something American. But for breakfast we "celebrated" by making French toast!

But we have the whole day to figure out what to do, think about the impact of Obama's election and savor the victory for Kenya, the U.S. and the world!

Happy days are here again!

2008-11-05T10:30:00.002+03:00

This morning I have been awake for most of the past seven hours (and not sleeping very well before I got out of bed) - since just before 3:00 a.m. - and for much of that, I was watching the presidential election returns come in and Obama’s victory speech from what I will claim now as my (last) hometown - Chicago.

Again, to remind you of the historic nature of Obama’s election to the presidency (besides all those other firsts you have heard about over and over):

This is the first time since Abraham Lincoln that Illinois has sent someone to the White House.
This is the first time since JFK that a sitting senator has been elected to the presidency.
(not so seriously) The candidate whose last name did not end in N was elected, but the taller of the two candidates did win. Also, does anybody know if Obama is left-handed? That may be why he won.
Chicago has now proven itself as a national political powerhouse, something that has not happened in a long time. I’m sure Mayor Daley is pleased that his city is in the spotlight these days, especially as he’s placed it in the running for the Olympics. I wonder if he’ll get an appointment in the administration.

And again, I’ll state that earlier I was a Hillary supporter, and this was really supposed to be her day. It must be a bittersweet day for her (and Bill). But still, as a die-hard Democrat (and originally a Massachusetts one), I couldn’t be happier that my party has recaptured the White House.

But overall what I want to say is this: Because of the monumental nature of this election and selection, for the above reasons and more, my confidence in the United States of America is restored. Sarah and I were planning to return to the U.S. anyway next year to live and work, but now I feel we can do that, and with some pride. The U.S. really showed – to itself and to the world - that it has matured in choosing Obama as its leader. As an American living abroad, I am so pleased that America’s stature in the world, in places where we have lived like Geneva, from the houses of world power and influence, to Kenya, where millions of people live hand-to-mouth lives, will change instantly today. The disastrous era of George W. Bush ends today (and the Republican party is in shambles, which is a position the Democrats have been in more than once). America’s image has been restored, and I don’t mind so much living abroad and representing a country that is willing to turn around and put itself on the right course again. (BBC News has an article - "President Obama and the world" - that does an excellent job talking about what I'm referring to here.)

But another reason I am rejoicing today, along with millions of others who know how significant (in many ways) Obama’s election is, is because of my new perspective in this election. This is the first presidential election I have experienced as a parent. Sarah and I have recently brought a person into this world, a new U.S. citizen, and she will return with us to a country under new leadership, one that cares about what the U.S. does in the world and that cares that it acts responsibly. I know Obama won’t be perfect and won’t accomplish everything, but I feel like the world will be a safer place for my child because of his election, a new concern I have now as a parent. And like Obama himself said during the campaign, his campaign and that of Hillary Clinton meant that his daughters – and mine as well – now have every opportunity open to them – even the highest office in the land, the most powerful position in the world. It doesn’t matter what race or gender you are – everything is open to anybody. Sarah and I happened to have a girl baby last year, and there are still so many places in the world where every opportunity isn’t open to women. But now new paths in her country, at least, appear to be open to her, as today has proven. I wonder what her generation will accomplish when they are old enough to lead.

But for now, I’m thrilled that my generation is closer to being in power in the U.S. and this world (I don’t quite feel like Obama is my generation – he’s a bit too old to be one of my siblings). I don’t really need to feel ashamed anymore as a representative of my country living abroad. And by living in Kenya for the time being, where the son of a native has just been elected U.S. president, I actually now have something to be proud of!

My faith restored (somewhat) in Nairobi restaurants

2008-11-02T14:25:00.002+03:00

My faith is a bit restored in the Nairobi restaurant scene. Earlier I wrote on this blog about how disappointed I was that I could not find a good Pad Thai. After church this morning, we went out to a mall clear on the other side of the city which we decided to visit because we were halfway there from church anyway. We were planning to have brunch at the nearby Nairobi Java House, one of our favorite restaurants. But while at the mall we saw a restaurant advertising crepes. We always enjoyed having these in Geneva and on visits to various places in France (and the Dutch pancake version in The Netherlands and South Africa). We decided to eat there, but rather than having what had originally enticed us into the place, we each ended up with something different. I was delighted to see one of the lunch special was rosti, a favorite Swiss dish. My favorite place to eat this back in the “motherland” was at a small, dark café a half a block from the capital building in Bern. I always describe it as the Denny’s skillet breakfast. Sarah had some sort of filled potato pancakes (so she had something like a crepe).

The presumed owner was standing in the dining area making the crepes, and Sarah discovered that he’s from Switzerland. Although the place is called the Latin Café, it’s quite broadly European, and we felt very comfortable there, so much so that I had to stop myself from speaking to the waiters in French. They also have quite an extensive offering of different kinds of fondues, so we will have to return there to savor that favorite dish from Switzerland. For dessert, we had a yummy chocolate fondant (a cross between pudding and cake). This is a very European thing too (and very rich and satisfying). I thought I might even be able to get a decent cappuccino there – let’s hope!

Visiting Rwanda and the horrors of the genocide

2008-10-31T04:57:00.009+03:00

Last week the three of us piled in the car and took a long road trip west to visit Burundi and Rwanda. The highlight of the trip, er, the lowlight – okay, the most significant part - besides visiting some friends in Burundi was visiting the memorials for the genocide in Rwanda that took place in the early 90s.

I’ll write about the other parts of the trip in another entry on this blog later, but I want to give you my impressions of what we saw in Rwanda here first. We made sure we saw Hotel Rwanda before we visited. If you haven’t seen this movie, do watch it (because chances are you’ll never get to Rwanda like we did). It’s not as well-made as Schindler’s List, but it’s in the same genre and it will hopefully affect you just as much as Schindler’s List did.

When we left Burundi, we drove north into Rwanda and stayed the first night in a medium-sized city called Butare, a pleasant tourist stop with all the helpful services. About 30 km outside the city and outside a village along a rural road is the campus of a former technical school. It’s set among the hills surrounded by hamlets where people raise their animals and grow their food. All along the main road to get to the adjacent village are churches and schools. It’s a quiet, peaceful setting – today, that is. But maybe it’s only quiet because of people’s remembrance and reverence for what happened there, or maybe it’s so haunted by the horrible memories that no one dares to disturb the quiet of the place that is trying to heal its wounds.

The campus was actually never used as a school because it was under construction during the genocide. At one point, for about a week, 50,000 members of the Tutsi tribe fled and took shelter there before they were all massacred. It was later discovered that the very ones who told them they should flee there for “safety” were the government itself, which was behind the genocide. Now the campus is a memorial to the genocide, since so, so many people died there. They were buried in mass graves and then exhumed, and some were reburied elsewhere. This would all make the place significant enough and reason alone for one of the country’s major memorials to the genocide.

But what makes this place significant is the graphic way it portrays the genocide. Inside four blocks of six classrooms each are the dead bodies of a few thousand victims of the genocide, and when one “tours” this memorial/campus, the main part of the tour is viewing these dead bodies. So imagine walking into a minimally finished classroom (just the basic concrete walls and floors), and on three or four wooden-slat platforms are rows and rows of dead bodies placed side by side. To me, they looked like mummies with no clothes, and they had all been preserved with lime, so they were mummies that were bleached white. And like actual mummies, their muscles and flesh had wasted away, so they were mostly bones covered only with a layer of leathery-looking skin (again, very white). They weren’t skeletons – bones only – but contorted, twisted dead bodies.

What hits you first when you walk into each room is the smell – most probably the lime. And then the sight, of course. You see people’s faces – not a skull with empty eye and nose sockets – but covered with skin. Occasionally you would see a tuft of hair on top of a skull, and that, to Sarah, was chilling. There are things like this that remind you that these were real people – living, breathing people with lives and families and who worked and grew up – at one point. To me, they were first many, many dead bodies, and I had to mentally remind myself that, although they were bleached white “mummies,” they all once looked like the Africans with dark brown skin, like the small group that was following us around room to room (the main tour guide spoke broken English, but I think having a baby and being the only visitors there at the time attracted a few other people who appeared just to be hanging out there for the day). What was the most sad and shocking was the sheer numbers of the bodies you could see – and this was only a portion of the murdered who were exhumed and chosen to be preserved so they could be put on display at this memorial. Why did they do this, I asked the man. “To remember,” he said very firmly, but with a taste of bitterness in his mouth, it seemed – like why should something like this have happened and been forced into their memories.

Also sad and shocking was remembering that the last thing every single one of these people knew was fear and pain. When the killings happened, women were raped, some people were made to kill their children and husbands first before they themselves were killed, and people were beaten, hacked to death with machetes, or shot.

Talk about a powerful sensory and physical experience – visually, with smells, and definitely viscerally. I remember being hit this way physically when going through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and getting to the room where there were hundreds of shoes on display. The smell of old leather and sweat left in the shoes hit me first, and in that way I was reminded of the humanness of it all – that the victims of that genocide wore shoes and were ordinary people just like all of us. But this was the same sensation with the smell and a lot more – not just an object that a human used, but the human him/herself – his/her body. And it was the same sort of experience of visiting a concentration camp like we did in Germany – only worse. On our visit to Dachau, outside Munich, I remember feeling like I could hear, in the emptiness of the place, the thousands of people who had been there. I could hear their voices in the cramped living quarters, and especially when I stood inside the gas chambers, the very place people were slaughtered. But in that place, what I “heard,” the sensory experience, was inside my head. What hit me hardest in the concentration camp was seeing the ovens where bodies were incinerated. In those places, they killed people and then wiped off the face of the earth any last trace of them – that’s how much Jews were hated. But there, in that place in Rwanda, there was a visual reminder – a trace, a body - of who had been there and who was killed, and it made it much more real, tangible, but also stark and scary.

I could have taken pictures of these dead bodies, but I just would not have felt right in doing so. I felt I needed to leave them there without taking anything away with them out of respect and for their dignity. I did search on the web for some photos that others had taken at this place, and here is one:

I didn’t want to, but I made sure to look carefully and thoroughly at some bodies in some of the rooms. Yes, I looked at faces. Occasionally there was a hand on a face, and it made me wonder if that person was killed and frozen in their last pose while they were alive, one of shock and horror – a hand over a mouth that was gasping or shielding their eyes from witnessing murders in those very classrooms. Occasionally a hand or foot was broken off. There were sunken bellies and lots and lots of contorted, writhing bodies.

There were all sorts of people in all of the rooms – young and old, tall and short. There were babies and toddlers. We did not bring Lexi inside any of the rooms with us (one of the people walking around with us kindly watched her). But I saw several bodies of children who appeared to be about Lexi’s age, and I thought how awful it was to have children killed, or even how awful it is that this sort of thing is happening in her lifetime – that such horrors are still going on in her world today.

It was strange, but a woman with our tour guide went ahead of us to unlock each room (each opened to a passage outside). She did it as if there were ordinary things inside, as if to invite us to her museum of many rooms. I guess I couldn’t really expect her as a memorial employee to be falling apart emotionally in opening the door to reveal something horribly sad. This was simply her job and she had done it many times before. But could one ever get used to doing that job? Before we started visiting the rooms, I dreaded what we would see. Our Lonely Planet guidebook had described what was there, but I didn’t know what all these dead bodies would look like. I almost expected to see people’s faces and be able to look into their eyes (dead bodies like one sees at the new crime scene on the crime shows on TV).

Again, there were 24 rooms like this in all. After seeing 12, I said I had seen enough.

Our tour guide wanted us to see just one more, which was a little different than the rest. Inside on one platform were 150 skulls neatly lined up, and on the other platforms were other types of bones that had been separated from bodies.

It was everything you can imagine it was – haunting, chilling, shocking, alarming, horrific, sad, etc. It was all almost too much.

In other buildings, we were shown some of the victims’ clothes and where some French peacekeeping troops stayed.

The next day, we drove on further north to the country’s capital, Kigali. There they have the country’s main memorial. It was established by a U.K.-based foundation that educates people on genocide. It is very well-done and presents the background to the genocide – the history of the country during colonial times, explanations of the cultures and tribes, and the players in the genocide. If the earlier memorial was the visceral, sensory one, then this one provided well the intellectual side and presented the irrationality of the genocide. One could blame just about anybody – or everybody – for the genocide. You could go back and blame the countries that first colonized Rwanda – first the Germans and then the Belgians. One interesting fact about what these colonizers did is to essentially create the Tutsi and Hutu tribes. Apparently before the Germans colonized the country, there were many tribes there, and then the Germans decided arbitrarily that one group was the one who owned ten cattle or more, and the other group owned fewer than ten cattle. Over the decades, the Tutsi and Hutu tribes were pitted against each other in various ways, which ultimately led to the genocide. But again, whom should one really blame? You could go back a long way or else look at recent events and players in them. But one finger that should be pointed is at the rest of us – the international community at the time, the group of nations in the West who basically did nothing but sit and watch this genocide taking place. People from Kofi Annan to Bill Clinton have later admitted that they had the power to do something to stop the killing and regret not taking more action.

At this museum/memorial are gardens where there are also mass graves of victims. We also learned from the displays there of other sites of major massacres. In some cases, huge numbers of Tutsis were killed when they took sanctuary in their churches. In one case, the pastor allowed all of his parishioners to be slaughtered inside his church. In this genocide, humanity was at its worst.

Being in Kigali today, if you knew nothing about the genocide and if you were, say, visiting the city on business, you would probably never know that the country had been torn apart in such a violent way so recently. The city is busy, alive and vibrant. It appears the economy is booming, and there’s a construction boom all over town. People are out on the streets, and business workers downtown go out to lunch and enjoy themselves. There are huge plans to clear slums and put up 5-star hotels all over the city. Foreign investors have bought large tracts of land where slums are, built new housing for the slum’s residents in other areas, have paid them for their land, and will put up their hotels. Huge houses selling for US$400,000 are being built in new neighborhoods. Business areas will be cleared in 2010 and new areas developed. Even the original Hotel Rwanda – the Hotel des Milles Collines (Thousand Hills Hotel), which, surprisingly, is right downtown – is being renovated to capitalize on the increase in tourism and its fame from the movie. We tried to go there for a drink and dinner after our tour of the city but discovered the whole place is closed. It is great to see the country moving forward, but we were a bit puzzled about who would come to stay in the 5-star hotels – can any Rwandans afford it, or what else in the city would attract tourists to come and stay there? The tourist office is very professional about marketing the capital and other parts of the country, but I wonder what reputation the country has beyond the genocide. Unfortunately, people know Rwanda well only for its violence and genocide. I didn’t see the tourist office saying, “Come to our formerly war-ravaged country to relax and enjoy yourself! We’re not killing each other anymore!” But I wondered how and why they expected tourists to come – for what now after the genocide?

On our city tour, we also saw where ten peacekeepers from Belgium had been killed early in the violence. This spot is now a memorial as well. And at various places around the country, sometimes in rural areas, by the side of roads, are smaller memorials. Some are in the form of a small plot of land that looks like a graveyard. Inside these are probably a large common grave for many people. They are usually decorated with some purple fabric and painted with words like “RIP” and “We will never forget you.”

Also a few times while driving through the country, we passed a prison and could see prisoners outside working (behind fences). I found a travel article that a journalist had written about her visit to Rwanda, and she had noticed these prisoners as well. She wrote:

"...in the car, Foufou, my driver's daughter, had pointed out crumbling houses bombed by the killers, smaller memorials and even pink-clad prisoners convicted of war crimes toiling in the fields.

"I asked her why they are allowed to roam out in the open.

"'They will not escape,' she said. 'They have no place to go amongst their neighbors.'"

After seeing all of this, but especially the first memorial with all the dead bodies, we were obviously very moved and disturbed by this period in the country’s history. I was outraged – and still am – that such things could occur in the supposedly civilized 20th century – and that they still do in the 21st century in places like Darfur. I am moved enough to write to my representative in Congress (but I just may wait until later next week, since my senator in my last home in the state of Illinois happens to be a man by the name of Barack Obama, and I hear he might be leaving his position soon). I hope you would be inspired too by what I have described to you here to write to your member of Congress and/or the president. In my last full-time job, I worked with my employer’s response to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur as a result of the violence and genocide that is going on there. I could tell you a lot about the many terrible things that are happening there as well – villages being destroyed, women being raped, men being slaughtered – and that continue to this day, even after we saw what happened in Rwanda. I urge you to write to your legislator and ask him/her to work to end such situations like the genocide in Darfur. If you need help with this, to know what issue to write about or who your representative is, the ELCA's advocacy website is one place to find this information. We as Americans are in a position to do something about this because of the unique and supreme power and influence of our country, and if you plan to vote next week, then you know you have the power and privilege to participate in our democracy and elect leaders who have authority not only in the territory of the United States, but power and influence in places like Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Northern Uganda. Tell them, as I will, and as we heard in Rwanda, an echo from the Holocaust of Europe in World War II: Never again!

A Long Road Trip

2008-10-20T17:02:00.004+03:00

We had been planning for a while to drive to Bujumbura, Burundi to visit friends who had moved there this summer. The 20th is a holiday in Kenya so I took the rest of the week off and early Saturday morning we set out. The plan was to drive to Mwanza, Tanzania which we thought was about half way. The roads in Kenya are NOT consistently good. It took us about 2 hours to go just 100 kilometers and the day's trip was going to be 720 kilometers. We didn't really stop for lunch (we had a picnic lunch in the car) and finally reached the border between the two countries at 2:30. Luckily it only took 40 minutes to cross the border and more good luck for us, the roads in Tanzania are quite good. We made it to our planned destination 11.5 hours after we left home that morning. It was good that we started early or we never would have made it before dark (and you don't want to drive in the dark here).

We thought Sunday would be an easier driving day. We were taking a better road, even though it was longer, but we thought we could make up the difference in speed. Yes - and no. There were all of these small towns with speed bumps so you were constantly slowing down. About 1 PM, we knew we weren't going to make Bujumbura by

night fall. We did make it to the border town and looked for a place to stay - not as easy as in the U.S. The two best possibilities were full. We finally found a guest house that had a room and after hand motions with the woman who didn't speak English, had a room for the night. It was clean and we had mosquito nets but the toilet was a squat toilet, there was no hot water and no bath towels - and of course, we hadn't thought to bring them. We made it through the night fine, with Lexi only waking up a little early.

We set out a bit early this morning as well and finally made it to Bujumbura around 1:00 local time. We were to meet our friend at the US Embassy (where she and her husband work) and then go to their home. The US Embassy in Bujumbura is NOT well marked. We asked three different people for directions (all in French) and finally called our friend for some more help. We had driven past it three different times. It definitely doesn't blare 'embassy' like some US embassys do.

Tuesday we will spend doing some tourist things and then Wednesday, we drive north to Rwanda where we will spend a few days before starting back for Nairobi on Friday. I think I am all ready not looking forward to that drive home! Too bad we can't warp.

Here is the view from our friends' house in the hill above Bujumbura, overlooking the city and Lake Tanganyika:

Voting for a local boy (in more ways than one)

2008-10-15T15:21:00.002+03:00

A couple of weeks ago, Sarah and I cast our votes for POTUS (President of the United States) and for the office of senior senator from the state of Illinois. For the latter, I voted for the venerable Richard Durban, who holds the same seat as the late, great Paul Simon. (In case you’re wondering about the questions, the answers are yes, we can and do still vote from abroad, and no, we can’t do it over the Internet yet. We receive paper ballots in the mail and send them back the same way. Remember that our last home on American soil was Chicago, where one votes “early and often,” so that city is going to do all it can to get as many votes as it can.)

For the office of president, we voted for Mr. Durban’s esteemed colleague, the junior senator from Illinois, a man I had voted for once already (in that office), Mr. Barack Obama. Although I was an early supporter during the primaries of another Illinois native, Hillary Clinton (she grew up in Park Ridge, which is a Chicago suburb spitting distance from the ELCA), I am a card-carrying Democrat and will really vote for whomever the party puts up as its nominee (except for maybe someone like Sarah Palin).

Although I still carry some disappointment that this was supposed to be Hillary’s day (and, OK, Bill’s comeback), it still makes me proud that my senator is running for president. Not since Abraham Lincoln has Illinois sent someone to the White House, so this could be history in the making in that way as well. I’m not an Illinois/Chicago native, and even though I lived there for eight long years (and it’s where I started my career and met Sarah and got married), I still feel a bit strange calling it my home and saying I’m proud that “my” state’s leaders have taken to the national stage (I don’t feel totally at ease anymore saying I’m from Seattle either, but it’s a little easier to say my heart is on the East Coast, even though I lived there for really only four years during college.) Nevertheless, the fact that we can say we are from Chicago when asked where we’re from while living in Kenya has actually been very convenient. We happen to have chosen the country to live in a year ago where Obama’s father was from. So to say that Kenya has Obama fever is an understatement (last week the man who wrote the latest book that is critical of Obama was unceremoniously kicked out of the country just before he was to give a major press conference at a huge hotel downtown. No one here would deny that the reasons were political – because he was being critical of a native son of the country, where nobody believes he has a single flaw). During Obama’s rise earlier this year, I became grateful that I didn’t hail from a small town in a less popular state, like Topeka, Kansas, or Boise, Idaho, which anyone outside the country has never heard of. It has been very easy to say to Kenyans who ask where in the U.S. I am from that I am from Chicago. It doesn’t take long for the connection to be made and for them to reply with, “Isn’t that where Obama is from?” Last week while in a more remote corner of the country, I had a little fun with this and was telling people I met, “I come from Illinois, and my senator is a man by the name of Barack Obama. Have you heard of him? I already voted for him once as senator, and now I’ve voted to send him to the White House.”

Even though we’re voting for a native son, a hometown boy (even though I just said Chicago truly ain’t my hometown), and we know that Illinois, one of those major industrial and high-population states that is a must-win for any presidential candidate, will no doubt be a blue state, I wish our votes could have been cast in a state where they would have made more of a difference. Our votes for Obama might have tipped the scales in his favor in a battleground state like Virginia if we had voted there.

I’ve had several occasions in the last few years while living abroad to tell Americans back at home of the importance of the U.S.’s role in the world and of a solid American foreign policy and good relations with the rest of the world. In the five years we’ve lived abroad, we have gained a new perspective on our own country (especially from all my studies in my efforts to join the State Dept.), and, because of our line of work with desperately poor people in developing countries, we have seen how dependent many of these countries are on the U.S. in many ways, including economically in general and through foreign aid. This election, as has been said by the candidates themselves, is an opportunity to put the U.S. position with the world right again. Although the U.S. economy is the only thing on Americans’ minds right now, I want to remind all voting Americans that, in my opinion, foreign policy is an equally important issue and just as urgent. You can read one of my earlier posts about meeting some Somali refugees in an enormous camp in western Kenya. For that situation alone, the state of anarchy in Somalia, the world desperately needs a U.S. president who is willing to work with the U.N. and pressure it to resolve that conflict so these refugees can return to their own country.

But I’ll tell ya – and you’ve all probably heard this before – if all the other countries of the world could pick the U.S. president, they would probably elect Obama. And maybe they should be allowed to vote for our president or at least have some say. The U.S. president isn’t just the president of the U.S. – he is truly a world leader. And so I hope Americans can be mindful of this and not so narrowly focused on themselves and what their president will do for them.

So, in a few short weeks, I – along with all of Kenya here – will be watching the election with bated breath. I hope the man who also hails from some of my homes – Chicago and Kenya – wins!

Springtime in Kenya

2008-10-13T09:32:00.002+03:00

Okay, the seasons aren't actually changing here, and we're not moving from a cold season to a warmer one and toward a hot one (see one of the earlier posts on seasons). But in the last few weeks, certain trees have been blooming, including the jacaranda trees, a tree common in parts of sub-Saharan Africa (especially in Pretoria, South Africa, which is known as the Jacaranda City).

There's a jacaranda in the yard of the house behind us, and part of it hangs into our back yard. The blossoms are a beautiful pale lavender, and they are delicate, so they tend to fall off the trees quickly and easily. But then they create a pretty carpet of purple on the ground.

I’m glad I’m not a refugee.

2008-10-09T19:57:00.001+03:00

I’m glad I’m not a refugee.

I have expressed this sentiment many times in the last several years as I have traveled for work and have visited refugee camps and met people who are in refugee and internally displaced situations.

More recently, as we have made some moves between not only homes but across oceans and to different continents, I have also somewhat jokingly expressed this somewhat opposite statement that is not as grave as the first:

There is something to being a refugee (i.e., being free from many household and worldly possessions that weigh one down and that tend to own a person rather than the other way around).

I returned last evening from my latest trip as a free-lance communicator here, for my work on my newest project of producing the annual report for 2008 for the Lutheran World Federation Kenya program. It was my first visit for this year’s annual report among the three projects that LWF Kenya operates. It was also my first visit to this particular project – the three refugee camps around Dadaab, which is a tiny town almost directly east of Nairobi and about 80 km from the Kenya-Somalia border and smack-dab on the equator. I flew there on Monday morning and back yesterday on a small-plane United Nations charter flight.

During my few days in Dadaab, LWF marked its first year of work in the three camps, although they have existed there since 1991. The camps are there because of the situation of anarchy, civil unrest and violence that has plagued Kenya’s neighbor, Somalia, for the last several years. Tens of thousands of people have been fleeing the situation for almost the past two decades, but it has gotten worse in the past couple of years, which is when LWF was asked to step in to address the influx of recent refugees.

I had been to LWF Kenya’s “flagship” project a few times before – Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya, which has housed tens of thousands of refugees from Southern Sudan. That is a well-organized, firmly established camp, which LWF has managed since 1993. Because LWF’s involvement in the Dadaab refugee camps is more recent, and because LWF was asked to come in to do some desperately needed organizing of the camp (the physical layout and of the people), I was interested in seeing the differences between the two camps. The circumstances of each camp’s creation and existence are also slightly different too, which made me see some new things that I had not seen on previous visits to Kakuma and other camps in other countries.

For these reasons – learning some marginally new things about refugees – even though I had been exposed to refugee situations before, I still believe in those statements about refugees, but see them slightly differently now. I knew before that those statements could be made in a derogatory light – that they speak ill of refugees and put me in a superior place above their situation, which often they cannot help. It places them in a position of pity from my perspective – “at least I’m not as bad off as them.” I’m well aware of that and work very hard in my work to not portray that attitude of my own (I have to be objective anyway and try not to inject my own opinions into my writing for other organizations) or such an attitude from the organizations I’m working for.

My visit to the camps around Dadaab and speaking to refugees exposed me to some other angles of being a refugee that I knew about before but had not seen so clearly in other situations. I spoke to some refugees who were very desperate for a number of reasons. Dadaab is in a very hot, dry, sandy, dusty and desolate part of the country. The region is essentially a desert. It feels quite isolated. The situation in the camps is dire, mostly because of space and land issues. There is a long list of problems I could list, a vicious cycle of problems, but suffice it to say there are a total of about 217,000 mostly Somalis living in the three camps around the town. The ideal number for each camp is 30,000 residents, but each is holding or approaching 80,000. About 200 refugees arrive unofficially and on their own each day, and there is nowhere to put them – no new land to expand to for new plots for each family.

There is a lot I could write about to describe this dire situation, but I will wait to write these things for the annual report I will produce in the coming months and then perhaps post some excerpts here. But I wanted to share here my personal feelings on the situation, not to say only that I’m glad I’m not a refugee but to name the flip side of that statement – to say what I am grateful for, what I have and what I can do. So, following my visit to Dadaab, here is a reminder of what I am thankful for:

My family, especially my wife and daughter. I have not been separated from them by force. We are able to live together. Neither has been killed and taken from me by war. Sarah and I have not been forced by extreme economic circumstances to separate so that one of us can go to work for better pay in a better place.
Luxuries like TV and a computer/the Internet. These keep my mind occupied and are ways that I can continue learning about the world. They provide amusement for me daily. In other words, because of these things, my mind is stimulated, and I have something to engage with. For a refugee, there are many hours and many days with few or no external stimuli, and especially with something like a job or a regular task to concentrate on or to accomplish. In other words, I do not suffer from constant idleness, nor is it forced upon me. Plus I have a way to relax, an escape from my day. Not everybody has this.
My bed. It is not a flat or scratchy mat on the hard ground. I have blankets and the option to put them on or take them off depending on my temperature.
Access to food and a variety of it. I am not dependent on someone else for my daily ration of food. I don’t have to worry about getting tired of eating rice or maize meal every day. I am able to have pasta one night for dinner and rice the next. I can have my favorite peanut butter on toast whenever I want (because I have a toaster too).
(This is a big one.) Freedom of movement and the ability to move around. Also the fact that I am a U.S. citizen. I’m grateful that I can move around my own country, that war (or any other disaster) never forced me to move from Illinois to Oklahoma, or that my government never said I couldn’t live on a farm if I chose to purchase land in Texas because of my race or class. I am so privileged in this way, being an American, that I can actually chose – which I have – to live outside my country. And – importantly – this privilege allows me to return at any time! How often do I see on the web advertisements for green cards or study permits to the U.S.? There are so many people in places I’ve been who long to move to the U.S. and who would have so many hoops to jump through – legal ones, not to mention just preparing oneself education- and economic-wise for a big move like that. After seeing how much difficulty others have in moving around – within their own countries or even to visit another country on the same continent as a short-term visitor – I am ever more grateful that I have the option to simply decide at any moment that I will go to the U.S. to live and work and don’t need to ask any government’s permission, and that I can settle anywhere I want! Nobody will tell me that I need a sponsor or to go to a certain place. And I could choose to uproot myself from California and move to Maine if I wanted to. What a privilege!

To everything there is a season – except in Kenya

2008-10-03T12:13:00.001+03:00

Here in Kenya, the weather is mostly the same all year ‘round – sunny and warm to bordering on hot. I like warm and hot weather and am happy to give up winter all together. So weather-wise, I’m happy here, where it’s essentially summer (by my North American definition) almost all year long. Because we’re so close to the equator here, the country does not have distinct seasons of winter, spring, summer and fall, but it does have rainy seasons.

It wasn’t until we arrived here from our former home in the Northern Hemisphere – and after several months of living here at that – that we began to notice how much of an impact the weather seasons as well as the various holidays that divide up the year into distinct periods have on ordering our lives and moods.

Lately, people have been saying things that have sounded utterly ridiculous in my mind, which has blissfully gotten wrapped up in the constant warm weather and has forgotten the rhythms of the North American/Northern Hemisphere seasons.

We received a package this week from my mother with a Halloween outfit for Lexi in it. We’ll certainly have her wear it on or around that day, but we might be the only ones here who appreciate it or even know its significance. Last year Lexi had another Halloween outfit, and we were having her wear it well after the date, and Jane, our housekeeper/nanny, never thought it was odd or remarked that the outfit was for a certain occasion. I have seen absolutely no signs of anybody celebrating or even recognizing Halloween here at all. I must say that with things like this, especially from a retail/consumer point of view, this is refreshing – it’s wonderful to visit stores and not have them pushing such a consumer holiday like this so much and so early (or at all). However, there are parts of this time of year that I miss. Sarah’s mother has been talking in her e-mails about picking apples and making cider and apple sauce. That is one thing I love about fall – the fruits that one gets and making things like apple pie. But an advantage of living here is that rhubarb is available year-round, and we’ve enjoyed many pies over the past few months.

Last week, an American woman we know invited us (albeit a bit early) to Thanksgiving dinner at her house. This is the woman who, with her family, always hosts big parties for Americans (and a few others) on the big American holidays. We attended one on the Fourth of July at their house. I know Thanksgiving comes in November, a month that is approaching, but my mind wasn’t signaled to start thinking about that by a change in the weather, which is normally the case. So I was almost dumbfounded by her invitation. The atmosphere and people's daily rhythms here just don't feel like we're headed toward that major holiday of the year.

At church, they've been talking about the "harvest season" and how it's time to consider stewardship and giving. This seems utterly odd to me because this always seemed to go hand-in-hand with back-to-school things in the U.S., and Kenya is on a different school schedule than the U.S. (and for us to have felt connected to a harvest season even while living in cities in the Northern Hemisphere is strange when you really think about it). Sarah confirmed with a coworker that it is, indeed, harvest season in Kenya, where the majority of the population is still involved in farming in some way (this coworker, a city-dweller, was even going to return to his family's plot somewhere upcountry to help with the harvest). But in the U.S., the fall harvest time was always such a big deal because it was the one harvest time of the year, but here, they can get two or maybe three growing seasons in every year, I think, so why September or October would be the harvest season, the time to discuss what we collect, earn and give, I don't know. But at our church, I think they also marched to the beat of the U.S. church season for these types of things because they were probably so missionary-oriented years ago (both Lutheran churches in Kenya were started by missionaries).

We've been here only a little less than a year, but we feel so out of touch with these season changes and the holiday cycles – Memorial Day signaling the beginning of summer, Labor Day marking its end, etc. I like variety and do miss some of the cycles that one gets to go through during the year in the U.S. But being removed from these cycles, I see how strange it is how they order our lives so much and have so much control over us and our moods and actions.

Welcome to Africa column: Church bells and mosque prayers

2008-10-01T08:39:00.003+03:00

In nearly every European city and town, you can count on being able to hear the bells from the tower of the medieval church in the center. In Geneva, the hourly chimes and other carillon music coming from the Cathedral of St. Peter became part of the city noise we were used to. We heard it all the time when we were outside our apartment, but to hear it from inside, we needed to open our bedroom window and stick our head out. Church bells are very much part of the landscape of cities and towns in Europe.

Now, in Kenya, it’s a very different scene. Although Kenya is an overwhelmingly Christian country, there are very few bell towers on Christian churches to be found. Instead, every neighborhood has its mosque with its minaret that projects prayer chants five times daily around the surrounding blocks of houses and businesses. The first day’s Muslim prayer session is usually before 5:00 a.m., but we have gotten used to this and don’t even hear it most days (although the dogs in the neighborhood have never grown used to it and still howl at the sound, day or night). As I sit in our upstairs back bedroom writing this, I hear an extended prayer this morning to mark today’s celebration of Eid ul-Fitr, the end of Ramadan (it’s also a public holiday in the country). On Fridays at the lunch hour, Sarah and I can hear the day’s sermon being projected from our neighborhood’s mosque. It’s a different scene than in Europe, but one that still provides a rhythm for the day and week, and one that is comforting in a way, the same way that the songs from the bells of Geneva’s cathedral, sitting high on the hill over the city, meant that everything was normal. The sounds from the mosque have become part of the neighborhood for us, a fixture in our senses.

Giving up on Thai food

2008-09-28T20:05:00.002+03:00

I give up. There’s no way we will find decent Pad Thai in this city. Last night, after Sarah got home from her week on business in South Africa, we went out to dinner. We tried a new restaurant, a place that’s listed in the Lonely Planet guide book, which said it had authentic Thai food. Like the other Asian restaurants in town, this place’s Pad Thai just was not the same as what I’m used to and what I like.

I’m almost ready to give up on Chinese food as well. We’ve tried a few Chinese restaurants in town. The last one we went to was a place next to the American embassy on our anniversary a few weeks ago. I love fried noodles, but this dish had no taste. We had tried another Chinese restaurant earlier that bills itself as having “Chinese” and “Thai” food, or maybe it is named something like “Thai Garden.” When we got there, there were no Thai dishes to be found on the menu, and when I asked if they had any, I was told that they use Thai spices in their Chinese dishes. Disappointed again.

I know I’m picky with my food, especially when it comes to something I’m craving at a particular time. Or maybe I’ve just been spoiled. I’ve eaten real Thai food in Bangkok, drunk mojitos in Havana, and have had the most memorable Italian meals in Italy (I remember how good the cappuccinos are even at the airport in Milan). So I get cravings for some of these favorite foods and long for something that will satisfy me, and not every city is cosmopolitan enough to have authentic food from around the world. We have found a really good Italian restaurant down the road from us that we’ve been to many times. The pasta is at least homemade there, and they have a wood-fired pizza oven, so it’s pretty European-style cooking. And there is the Swiss restaurant nearby as well for when we miss fondue, but the weather is too warm here for that most of the time.

I know that no matter where we live, I will never be totally satisfied, that there will be some favorite food that is just not quite like the real thing, like the perfect croissant (like they have in Paris) or the best shepherd’s pie (like they have in London – usually tasteless, but at least it’s authentic).

Five years as expatriates

2008-09-23T15:24:00.004+03:00

Here's a bit of a personal note to ourselves about today, but something that I'll share with the rest of you – my reflections on what the day means to us. This day on our household's calendar used to be marked as our "Geneva anniversary," the day we arrived in Geneva in 2003, having sold our house and car and left our friends and family behind, as well as most of our possessions. We had left our home and country, but we had set out on a great European adventure. Neither Sarah nor I had really taken the requisite backpacking tour through Europe as a young person, but we ended up becoming residents for several years and adopting and liking many customs there. We were still young and enjoyed those years immensely. I often thought of our move there, essentially leaving my country for work and economic opportunities, as doing the opposite of – and even undoing – the work of my great-grandfathers, who had left a poor part of Europe more than a century before. What would they have said if they knew that one of their great-grandsons had returned to a very prosperous Europe and to opportune locales?

Of course, "Geneva anniversary" isn’t what's on our calendar anymore now that we live in Nairobi. Today has become our "living out of the country anniversary." It has been five years now. I'm very pleased to think of that period as most of the years in the George W. Bush administration (however, having to represent him abroad as our president has been a real burden), and I'm pleased to remember that we haven't paid one single cent in U.S. federal taxes in all those years (thus not financing an unjustified war in Iraq). We are thinking about our return to the U.S. now. It will happen sometime in 2009, and we're ready to be back where we came from. We would like to say that we can come back because Bush won't be president anymore, and we'd like it even more to say we're returning because Obama will be president. But really it is our decision. Living abroad has been fun, and there are certain advantages that we do not have in the U.S. Just to name a few, the weather is great (warm and sunny) for longer periods of the year in Nairobi, we have a nanny/housekeeper, and we feel like tourists constantly because there are always so many new things to see. So we appreciate all that we’ve done and gained in the last five years.

Back in South Africa

2008-09-21T07:55:00.001+03:00

So I am back to South Africa, roughly 1 month later for a meeting for work. We are going to be here a whole week. It is much colder here than it was 2 weeks which is going to be problematic for me as I didn’t bring the right type of clothes! People will just have to get used to seeing me in the same sweater every day…

Stephen and I are still trying to figure out why Kenyans seem to give oblique answers – or can’t give you the correct answer, but give you an answer that they think you want to here. ‘Is this chicken?’ ‘Yes.’ But it’s not – it’s turkey. ‘How small does that playpen fold up?’ ‘Yes.’ We can’t believe that these people don’t know the right answers – but they don’t seem to be trained in customer service at all.

The world lives!

2008-09-10T12:05:00.002+03:00

In reference to one of my earlier posts about the new Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva (see below), this news was released this morning: The collider was switched on for some tests this morning, and I'm happy to report that, by the very fact that I am writing this, by the fact that I'm able to report this news, the world has survived!

However, I was sitting at the desk in our spare bedroom/office this morning, and I did feel a slight tug at my body, as if a small black hole was trying to suck a large chunk of Africa into it. But I grabbed on to the large rocking chair we have next to the desk, and I was able to remain in the room. I then continued my work at the computer as usual.

Unfortunately, there's another point in the near future when the world may come to an end: November 4, the day Americans go to the polls. If they elect John McCain and Sarah Palin to a third Bush term in the White House, then we are all doomed!

Out of Africa

2008-09-07T20:11:00.003+03:00

As Stephen explained re: our visit to South Africa, it truly did NOT feel like Africa to me. If that is the only country you ever visit in Africa, I feel like you really have not been - even if you do go to one of those native villages set up for tourists.

And yes, we didn't go into the really poor rural areas - which I am told there are some - but we did see some of the rural parts, though the more wealthy ones I think. First off, the roads are SO good. It's amazing after Kenya. It was such a pleasure to drive a car there. No potholes, people follow the traffic rules, things are well sign-posted. Second, the stores have a whole assortment of things (not so different from Kenya) BUT I don't think we had a power outage the whole two weeks! And they are supposed to be having an energy crisis.

All in all, it was a nice trip and I am glad we went. It was different traveling with a wiggly 1-year old, but I think she enjoyed it as well. We went to an acquarium one day and she looked at all of the fish and of course, she likes to look at people wherever they are.

Our trip to the bottom of Africa

2008-09-05T06:40:00.009+03:00

On Sunday we returned from our two-week “summer” vacation (although it was winter in the Southern Hemisphere) in South Africa. My sister came from Seattle on her second trip to Africa and met us in Cape Town to tour the country. Why South Africa? My sister, Lora, and Sarah (and Lexi, of course) had never been there, and this trip was meant to be a bit of a tour of southern Africa while we are living on this continent and was to include a return for me to Zimbabwe yet again and to show more of my family where I used to live as an exchange student when I was 16 years old. But because of the political instability in Zimbabwe in the last couple of months, and because I was not able to get in touch with the few families I had stayed in touch with off and on over the last several years, we decided not to go. My sister, however, took a couple of days after we returned to Nairobi to go by herself to one tiny corner of the country, probably the last tourist enclave – Victoria Falls.

Most of the time when Sarah and I travel, we visit places over a long weekend – usually only three days. It was easy to see many places in Europe like that, and here in East Africa we continue on occasion to drive to places in Kenya or take short flights to other countries in the region to visit a place as tourists for just a few days. So we rarely take as long as a week or two to see a single country. We did this a couple of years ago one summer to see Norway, but this makes for a long (in our opinion) vacation, and it can be a tiring trip, given how we tour. Our definition of a vacation is not waking up late every morning, sitting around reading books, or lying on the beach. We try to pack in a lot of site seeing every day and are out the door by 9:00 every morning and back in our hotel room sometimes as late as 9:00 or 10:00 at night (before we had a child to worry about getting to bed).

So because we were gone a full two weeks, and because we toured in our usual way, packing a lot in every day and covering a lot of ground over our many days in South Africa, there is no way I can describe every place we visited in the detail I sometimes provide in my trip reports. We simply saw too much for me to talk about – I just don’t have the time for that now. But I still do have some things to say – some general things about the country. OK – I’ve got plenty to say, even apart from describing each location we visited.

First, let me say that I have always loved South Africa since the first time I visited while an exchange student in Zimbabwe in 1989. Those were the days the country was still under apartheid, when it was at its height. That system was about to topple a few short years after that, although nobody knew it would and would happen so quickly. I returned to South Africa in 1998 with my parents, the last time I paid a decent visit as a tourist. I went there for work in early 2004 and visited a few of the major tourist destinations, but spent most of my time in new areas to me – rural areas – and also visited Swaziland and Lesotho (two small neighboring countries). So it was very fun and eye-opening to pay a thorough visit again to many of the same places I had not been to in a decade and to see what changes had taken place. The most visible changes I noticed were more monuments, museums and tributes to Nelson Mandela the individual and other anti-apartheid leaders and in honor of the whole struggle against that system. More about that below. But I’ve always loved South Africa because it is so much like my own country. It’s very Americanized, but also marches to the drumbeat of the U.K. in terms of culture. So it’s quite cosmopolitan as a whole country, more so than the U.S., because it has adopted the modern cultures of two dominant countries of the world. But on a more subconscious level, despite being a racist regime until the early 90s, I guess I admired South Africa because it had developed itself into a powerful country, economically and socially, and was a leading country in Africa in many ways, much like the U.S. had developed itself. I also like the country because it is modern and American, and one could live exactly the same type of lifestyle and at the same level of comfort as one does in the U.S., but the typical offerings of Africa – game parks, open land, beaches, etc. – are also close by in the same country. So you get the best of both worlds in one place.

Sarah declared to me several times while there, “This is not Africa!” I hate to say it, but compared to Kenya, it was so nice to return to a “normal” country where there is not so much dust outside and where the streets are orderly and have curbs and sidewalks (and not a pothole in sight!), and where the traffic and pedestrians move in a more orderly, reasonable fashion and speed.

The urban centers – Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Pretoria – that were the anchors of our trip this time were places I had visited before as a tourist. But there were many changes in these cities – most notably new (or replacement) museums. We rented a car two times and drove outside these cities and visited some places that I had been to before, but some places were new to me, most notably the Winelands, South Africa’s answer to California’s wine-producing region. The most notable changes I noticed were the apartheid-related museums in the cities that we visited, all new in the last ten years. South Africa has done a marvelous job of not turning its back in shame on this awful, oppressive, racist past (a period that ended so recently), which would be easy to do because it could weigh so heavy on their conscience as a nation, but it has acknowledged its past in appropriate ways and lifted it up as an example of a history that they never want to repeat.

Everywhere else we have gone in Africa (with the exception of some places in Kenya), the museums are far below the standards of those in North America and Europe and have not been maintained (or even dusted!) since the colonial era ended – sometimes decades ago. But the museums in South Africa – especially the new ones we visited – can compete with those in the developed world. The explanations are in English (and often additional language/s) and are clear, concise and informative. The displays are professionally done and are modern and often multi-media, using traditional text explanations but also photos, videos, audio recordings and other interactive activities. Many buildings are modern – a combination of wood, glass and steel – and all are handicapped-accessible, which impresses me. And again I will say what a marvelous job the country has done in the last ten years in portraying its apartheid history in its museums and now its civil/government buildings in appropriate ways that allow South Africans and non-Africans alike to delve into that past with some guilt, granted, that we as humanity allowed apartheid to happen, but with the appropriate recognition of this wrong-doing and with the hope that we can overcome these differences and build cultures, countries and systems that are more democratic, just and fair. One new government complex to me that we visited was in downtown Johannesburg and is called Constitution Hill. There they’ve combined historical sites from the distant and recent past with a modern civic building. The site has an old fort as well as two prison complexes for men and women who were held as political prisoners during apartheid. All of these places are open as museums or historical sites now. But the centerpiece of the complex is the new Constitutional (supreme) Court, a very modern building full of symbolism (well, all the new parts of the complex used for current purposes are very full of it). Some walls of the main court chamber as well as a walkway between the court and the old men’s prison are made with bricks from the now-demolished Awaiting Trial Block (and the stairways from this old block are preserved as well; one is incorporated into the courthouse). They are very clear to visitors in explaining that the symbolism of this is that you are walking (on this walkway) between the past and the future and that these buildings were built with the old bricks from this building as a way to show that, from structures that were used in unjust systems, new forms of justice and equality can be built. Very powerful stuff – a powerful and haunting but inspiring atmosphere is created – intangible ideas and ideals expressed with tangible things like brick and mortar.

I might venture that perhaps the country has gone a bit overboard in naming things after Nelson Mandela. One won’t be able to tell all of them apart before long: “Where should I meet you – at the Mandela bridge, square or office building (I can’t be that accurate because they’re all in the same complex!)” In fact, we missed seeing the man himself by just one day in unveiling yet another new statue of himself, this one at the entrance to the prison where he was released from his 27 years of detention as a political prisoner. We just happened to discover that this prison sat among the vineyards in the gorgeous wine-growing region and drove by it on the morning after the statue had been dedicated with Mandela present along with our tour guide from a few days before at Robben Island in Cape Town, who was also a political prisoner for many years there.

Another highlight was visiting the Cape of Good Hope and the adjoining Cape Point, those famous world landmarks made legendary by explorers and the southwestern-most point in Africa. I had been to both places before, however, with my parents in 1998. But I had not visited Cape Agulhas, the southern-most point in Africa and truly where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. We drove there while visiting some areas east of Cape Town. So within the span of just a few weeks, we had stood on the equator in Kenya and at the very bottom of Africa – gone to the ends of the earth – at Cape Agulhas.

We spent a couple of days visiting some wineries and tasting wines in the area east of Cape Town. We chose the most popular ones recommended by Lonely Planet. The ones we visited were over two or three hundred years old. They’ve maintained many of the original buildings and are on gorgeous estates with beautiful mountain scenery as a backdrop. And this was during the country’s winter when the vines aren’t growing and much of the land is brown and dormant.

One of our final stops was a town we stayed at while visiting Mpumalanga Province in the northeastern part of the country. I had us stay in an old gold mining town from the late 1800s that has been preserved (many buildings are from the turn of the century or later, however). We stayed in an old 1920s mining cabin high up a hill above the town. This truly did not feel like Africa to me. It felt more like a historical American mining town in the Old West. When we were there, we were nearing the end of the trip, and a couple of times I had the urge to go outside to look at the stars in the dark night sky, to drink in the African sky. I had actually forgotten that I live in Africa now – that’s how far mentally I was removed from Africa on this trip. I had forgotten that I was returning only to Kenya, still in Africa, and could go outside anytime at home and see the dark, starry African sky. As I have written earlier, it still feels a bit strange to come “home” to Africa, even while visiting other places on the continent, which in my mind is still an exotic, far-away location that one must travel great distances to get to from one’s “real” home – it’s always a “strange” place to visit and to experience only for a short time before one returns to one’s real place of residence.

I enjoyed several favorite South African foods during our visit. These include koeksisters, a sticky, sweet donut/coffee accompaniment which are basically a twist donut soaked in sugar water; Appletizers and Grapetizers, which are sparkling apple and grape juice soft drinks; and rusks, another great coffee accompaniment like biscotti. The foods I get to taste and experience on trips are one of the most fun parts of travel for me.

Overall, it was a full and rich trip – mostly because it was so long. It had something old – returning to places I had visited before – but also plenty of new things to see and changes to observe. As I have said after all my other previous trips there, I would love to live there some day for reasons I have previously mentioned. But the crime, especially in Johannesburg, the biggest city, is still driving whites away in droves. Many are moving to Australia. So the insecurity is a big factor. At this point as well, with a young child, I would also not want to live so far from family, and South Africa is so far south in Africa and about as far from the U.S. (and Europe) as one can get. So we will not live there for a long time, but it is something I will keep in mind as a possibility for many years down the road.

Mystery mail: Are you J?

2008-09-02T17:28:00.002+03:00

Recently in the mail I received something addressed to me, but to our old address in Geneva (it was forwarded from there to our current address in Kenya). Inside the envelope was a page torn from a magazine - an advertorial. On the page was a post-it note with this written by hand (in a woman's handwriting, it seems to me):

Stephen,
Try this.
It's really Good!
J

There was no return address on the envelope. I can't figure out who "J" is - and she obviously doesn't know that I now live in Kenya and not Geneva!

I can't figure out who sent this to me. Was it you?

The end of Geneva – and the world – as we know it?

2008-09-02T15:33:00.005+03:00

In Geneva, our former home, there is a large scientific research facility called CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, but “CERN” is its acronym for its former name in French). It’s actually on the border between Geneva and France, which was deliberate – that makes it truly an international center for nuclear research, which is basically what CERN does. It’s a place where scientists from all over the world come to do research because there aren’t many other facilities like it in the world. One of the only other few places like it is Fermilab, outside Chicago. One of our good friends from our church in Geneva worked at CERN along with many Nobel Prize winners and other brilliant minds. If you have read one of Dan Brown’s high-powered thrillers – Angels and Demons – parts of the story take place at CERN.

For many years, CERN has been constructing an enormous circular tunnel way underground, under both Geneva and parts of neighboring France. Its purpose is to attempt to discover the very origins of our universe, to apparently replicate something like the Big Bang, by pushing atoms around the circle in the tunnel at extremely high speeds and then do the same thing in the opposite direction and watch them crash into each other. This enormous “machine” is called the Hadron Collider.

The Hadron Collider is due to be switched on on September 10. As this momentous event unfolds, people in the area might notice their lights dimming a bit as it powers up, but then they – as well as the rest of us in corners of the planet both near and far from tranquil Geneva – might notice something a little more: COMPLETE OBLITERATION AN ANNHILATION OF THE ENTIRE EARTH AND HUMAN RACE!!! This is the concern of a group of nuclear researchers from the U.S. who filed a class-action lawsuit to stop construction of the Hadron Collider because they fear the first experiments will create mini black holes, which will merge into one big black hole, which will effortlessly swallow up the planet. This lawsuit has been dismissed, and the switch will be thrown next week, with the Americans’ concerns addressed by scientists in Europe who say there is nothing to worry about.

This is quite a proposition to consider. First of all, it’s ironic – in attempting to discover the very first moments of our universe, its origins, its beginning, the “let there be light” moment when God Almighty Himself spoke, the scientists could be responsible for its very end, bringing several hundred billion years of work and evolution to a screeching halt. And how ironic and awful this potential end of the world would be coming on September 10, a day before the anniversary of our other near-Doomsday experience of September 11.

Second, if the experiments do go wrong, if the Americans are right, how would they be able to say afterwards, “I told you so!” (I would certainly be one of the first to open my mouth to say that.) If we all die, there will be no way to say, “Oops! I guess that didn’t work.” There will be no chance to feel regret or to do it over. It would truly be a one-time experiment, but if the worst happens, how would we all really know the results?

Is it even physically possible for humankind to create something that comes even close to what God did at Creation, to build a small machine that is capable of creating forces as vast and powerful as those found in outer space, able to swallow entire planets?

Genevans and all Swiss by law are required to have in their single-family homes a bomb shelter. Unfortunately, these are able to withstand only nuclear bombs and not black holes, so even the Swiss can’t protect themselves with such defenses. It would really be a shame if that group of American scientists is right and ironic as well that the end of the world should originate in such an idyllic and peaceful place like Geneva and among such modest people. But let’s all enjoy life for another week or so until they turn that machine on, okay?

Journey to the center of the earth

2008-08-05T16:03:00.005+03:00

We had another long weekend away last week. Sarah had a work retreat from Wednesday afternoon to Friday afternoon at a hotel in Nyeri, which is a town north of Nairobi in the area among the game parks of Mt. Kenya, the country’s tallest mountain and Africa’s second highest after Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. One night of Sarah’s stay during her retreat was at the world-famous Tree Tops hotel (so I didn’t see it or go there), where a young Princess Elizabeth was staying in 1952 and was awaken in the middle of the night to be told that her father back at home had died and now she was the queen. The hotel is a four-story wooden structure with a watering hole in front. You’re supposed to feel like you’re in a tree house high above the animals when you stay there – rustic luxury, I might call it.

Lexi and I drove up on Friday afternoon with the wife of Sarah’s boss. We took a route on country roads for about half the trip, and the countryside was beautiful – many rolling hills in parts – although the roads were quite muddy and dirty, which detracted from the scenery somewhat. We met Sarah at the main hotel where they stayed so we could stay through the rest of the weekend with her and explore the area. The hotel where we stayed is a sister hotel in a grouping with Tree Tops, so it, the Outspan, is supposedly a luxury hotel catering to game park visitors as well. The Outspan isn’t actually in any public or private game parks (unlike Tree Tops, which you can’t actually drive to yourself with your own car) but is near a few of them. It's in a lovely setting with beautiful gardens around it. But I wasn’t impressed with our hotel at all as a luxury hotel. The service in the restaurant for breakfast one morning was very bad (Tree Tops residents are bused over, and I think they were a little overwhelmed, although the woman putting silverware at the table next to ours didn’t care to look over to see we were lacking it too and waiting for it to eat the food in front of us; that’s how brainless some people here are); there was no hot water to really speak of on our first morning; and the food didn’t have much variety or sophistication. Even at remote game parks where we’ve stayed, they’ve done a much better job with the food, given how much harder it must be to get there. The rooms are enormous with a very large bedroom area and, semi-divided from that, a sitting area. The bedroom area has a fireplace that you can have them come light a fire in, which we requested the first night, but they were so late that I got angry at their poor service with that as well. The rooms are sparsely furnished as well, with no carpeting or area rugs on the floor at all, so during this time of year, when it’s winter and the rainy season, it is quite cold in the rooms. The fire helps a bit, but there was always a chill that we couldn’t escape. Throughout the hotel, they’re trying to retain much of the colonial charm of the place, so the dining room and bar areas are very charming, and you feel like you’re in an old colonial game lodge.

Friday night we had dinner with the rest of the staff from Sarah’s office who were there at the hotel for the retreat. They all stayed through the night on Friday, and nearly everyone left on Saturday morning. That morning, we visited one of the rooms of the hotel that used to be part of the cottage where the man who founded the Boy Scout movement used to live. It’s not really a museum but a room dedicated to him and his wife. There is all sorts of Boy and Girl Scout memorabilia from all over the world covering nearly every inch of this small room. It’s kind of a pilgrimage site that boys and girls still visit and bring a scarf from their club’s Scouting uniform to leave there.

In the afternoon we drove a half hour or so out of town to visit a private game reserve that is known for its breeding of black rhinos. You can drive your own vehicle into the park. We spotted a large handful of rhinos during our couple of hours in the park as well as a large group of beautiful giraffe (the reticulated variety, for those of you who have visited us and have learned the useful skill of telling the species of giraffe apart), lots of warthogs, some waterbuck, zebras, lots of antelope-type animals, and some Cape buffalo. Rhinos are not in every game park in Africa, so seeing them is a treat and hard in some places. We had to be out of the park by 6:00, and it was getting dark by 5:30, also becuase rain clouds were forming. None of the dirt roads in the park are sign posted, so we didn't know exactly which way it was back to the main gate. We started to get nervous about getting lost and getting trapped inside the park, but we found we were headed in the right direction and got out in time.

Sunday morning after checking out of the hotel, we drove farther up north to another major town that sits right on the equator. There’s nothing else worth visiting in this town but the stop at the equator. There’s an aging sign there marking the spot and a grouping of many souvenir stalls. Under the sign we were met by a man who gave us a demonstration using a pitcher of water and a bowl with a pinhole in the bottom of how water flows in opposite directions down a drain in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. One cannot merely stand just on one side of the imaginary line to observe this phenomenon, however. We had to go about 60 meters on both sides of the line to see the water swirl first in clockwise then counter-clockwise directions. It’s true, it’s real, it really does that! We took a few pictures, one of each of us straddling the line, with one foot in each of the Northern and Southern hemispheres. I had fun jumping back and forth a few times over the line.

Then we headed home. The landscapes we drove through we quite varied. The area near the equator town was very flat, even though we thought we were still in the mountainous areas, and it was quite dry, not getting any of the rain that was in the area. As we returned to the area where we stayed, which was at a higher altitude, it was wet and drizzly, and parts were hilly. Again, we’re in sort of Kenya’s winter, more specifically the rainy season, and these days the temperatures are much cooler. So in the higher hilly areas where we were, it was cloudy and damp and drizzly for much of the time, and the dampness just makes the coolness even colder. At home at night, after the sun has been down for a few hours, it’s quite cool, and we get into a very cold bed and try to warm up quickly. We have our thick comforter on the bed these days. Mind you, it doesn’t get as cold in the “winter” here as it does in the U.S., and Kenyans don’t even have central heating in any of their homes or buildings. But it’s warm enough during the rest of the year that it gets hot in houses, so there are permanent vents to the outside, which nobody really closes up in the rainy season, so this tends to let in cold air from the outside. But what we’re even noticing is that our house tends to trap the night’s cold air during the day, so once the morning wears on, it’s actually colder in the house than it is outside these days.

Anyway, on our way home, we stopped at the Blue Posts Hotel in Thika, a famous colonial-era way station. They have a lovely buffet there on the weekends within earshot of two waterfalls. We took my parents there for lunch when they visited.

It was another lovely outing, but then again, we really haven’t had any trips that have turned out to be disasters. As long as it’s seeing a new place, we always have a good time.

A trip to an exotic locale: Zanzibar

2008-07-30T20:16:00.011+03:00

We spent a long weekend in Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania in the Indian Ocean. We had been to Kenya’s version of this island for my birthday back in February, and we wanted to try out Zanzibar before our Tanzania visas expired at the end of this month. Lamu (the island off Kenya’s coast) and Zanzibar are very similar – they have similar histories and share the Swahili and seafaring culture. But Zanzibar is a bigger island, and there are more things to see there – historical sites, museums, etc. – and it is more developed than Lamu. If we had known about both places before visiting either of them, I would have opted for Zanzibar and not ever bothered visiting Lamu. Zanzibar also reminded me very much of Marrakech in Morocco because the Arab culture is so dominant (and is also predominantly Muslim), but I would say Zanzibar is “Marrakech lite.” Our hotel – its layout, décor and the type of pedestrian-only tourist-shopping lane it was on – totally made me feel like I was in Marrakech, which I have many happy memories of from my two visits there.

We flew down on Friday morning and saw the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro as we flew past. Upon arrival, we checked into our hotel, and immediately went to eat lunch at an Italian restaurant outside on a terrace overlooking a white sandy beach with turquoise water. There are many spots like this on the island. We took a walk through the town and tried to see a museum that had been closed and ended up at one of the main museums/historical attractions – an enormous house that had lots of good displays about the culture and history of the museum. Often at museums in Africa, the displays are very old and worn out and not well done at all, but this museum was done well, and there was actually too much to read for one visit.

For dinner we ended up at another fun restaurant, one where you sit on the floor, Arab-style. Lexi enjoyed this because we were at her level and she could crawl all over us. She made a friend at the restaurant – a 4-year-old girl who was with another family eating there. I had an interesting dessert. It was called a cardamom date cake, but there was neither cardamom in it (that I could taste), nor was it cake-like. It was really just date meats shaped into a small roll and sliced with a dollop of whipped cream on top. Luckily I like dates (and cardamom), and they are a typical Arab-type dessert, so I was eating something authentic for the area, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting.

On Saturday we scheduled ourselves to be with a group of people for an organized spice tour. Also on this tour were a young mother with her 9-year-old daughter who are from Richmond Beach, Wash. (very close to where my parents live) and who are volunteering for a month elsewhere in Tanzania but were taking a short break from that to visit Zanzibar. They actually stayed at our hotel too, and this girl also made quick friends with Lexi, so the girl was pleased that they were together for a few hours on the tour.

We took a van a short distance from the island’s main city into the rural areas where there were a few other vans full of tourists doing the same thing. We could see signs for spice farms/plantations, but it seemed the areas we visited to see spices growing were really just next to people’s houses by the side of the road. And in many ways that really was what it was, I was told by another person on the tour – that the tours don’t take tourists to the actual farms but just show them how spices are grown in sort of demonstration areas where many different types of plants are grown in small patches so one doesn’t have to travel from farm to farm to see all of them individually.

We made several stops for a couple of hours in the area and were shown various spice plants and trees – cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, peppercorn, lemongrass, nutmeg, mace, ginger, vanilla beans, and several others. We were also shown the trees of many exotic tropical fruits – star fruit, jack fruit, bread fruit, Japanese pear, cocoa beans, the various kinds of coconuts, and several others. We got to sample many of these spices and fruits, although many of the spices were in their raw forms, since parts of the tree, such as seeds (or pods inside thick fruits), are usually dried and ground first to make the spice. But it was very interesting to see how many of the spices I know and love start out. At the end we were taken to a small fruit stand and were given samples of many of the fruits we saw. I found a new favorite fruit – jack fruit. Near the fruit stand was a place to buy all the spices we had seen, so I bought some cardamom (my favorite spice, which I always buy when traveling) and some flavored coffee and tea.

Then we drove what seemed to be a good distance further from the main city to a beach area. A short walk from the shore was a cave that had been used in the 1800s to hide slaves by Arab traders before selling them on the market, who continued to illegally trade slaves after the British abolished slavery on the island. From there we walked to a beautiful stretch of beach with soft white sand. We had an hour there. We had brought a life jacket for Lexi in case we got an opportunity to get to the beach. We stood her in the shallow surf, but she didn’t like the water, probably because it was too cold. So we just sat in the shade for most of the hour, and Lexi happily played in the sand.

When we returned to our hotel late in the afternoon, we popped into the café next to our hotel for a cup of coffee and tea. I needed another cup of the cardamom-laced coffee they serve in many places in Zanzibar. I was delighted to have it at breakfast at our hotel the first morning, which was served on a small roof-top patch of our hotel in an open-air dining room with a 360-degree view of the sea and the old city of Stone Town. Immediately after having coffee, we returned to this roof-top restaurant, which was set up for dinner. Our Lonely Planet guide book describes our hotel as a "Zanzibar institution," since it is a former sultan’s palace that has been restored to look like it did in its heyday. Its rooftop restaurant is also an institution, it says, with much sought-after dinners. One definitely needs a reservation, which are offered first to hotel guests. Like everybody else with a reservation (and several without reservations for dinner, who were promptly asked to leave when those with reservations showed up), we showed up an hour early for drinks, just as the sun was setting (it was overcast, so it wasn’t as colorful as it was the night before). Breakfast at the restaurant is served at tiny tables that seat only two, but for dinner, one sits on pillows on the floor and propped up against the outside walls. The floor space can seat 24 like this (with small tables for you to eat on). So, starting at 6:00 with drinks, it was a six-course meal that was still going strong at 9:00 when we left to put Lexi to bed. There were essentially two main courses with sorbet in between – a fish, potatoes and vegetable plate and then a chicken, rice and vegetable plate. Neither was quite large, although it’s a good thing we were warned to pace ourselves by the woman from Richmond Beach who had eaten there the night before.

Sunday morning we had another lovely breakfast on the same spot. For breakfast they have fruit scones, something I rarely see served for breakfast at a hotel. They were delicious – almost as good as the scones I make! With the spiced coffee, they were a real treat (in case you don't know, scones are one of life's greatest pleasures for me)! Then we walked around to other parts of the historical town that we hadn’t been to yet. We visited the main market area, at the center of which is a covered building where all sorts of fresh meat and fish are sold (very smelly in that hot weather), and surrounding it are stalls selling fruits and vegetables and spices. Then we toured the Palace Museum, which is where the 12 sultans that ruled Zanzibar lived. Because this palace was used over many decades, the styles of furniture that are on display are an interesting mix of African, Indian and European.

We ate lunch at an Indian restaurant and sat in a verandah-like third floor and had a great view of the water again. Then we toured the Anglican cathedral, where the slave market once stood. There’s a stone disc just in front of the altar where the tree where slaves were whipped once stood. In the basement of a building next to the cathedral are two chambers that remain from those times, where slaves were stored before they were auctioned off. And there’s a monument outside the cathedral to the slaves. It was a powerful place to visit, since all that history is on that site. This was also the first Anglican cathedral in East Africa. (In the back of the nave are 12 short marble pillars for the 12 disciples. When the cathedral was being built, the bishop took a vacation and returned to find that these pillars had been installed upside-down, which is how they remain today.) Finally, we made another stop for coffee before we had to head to the airport to come home.

It was a fun weekend in an interesting place that’s rich with various cultures and history. The food was good – lots of Indian food and curries – as well as great coffee, scones and spices! It was also nice to be where it’s warmer. We’re wearing long sleeves these days in Nairobi, and the weather has been drizzly and cloudy most days. So it was good to return to summer weather and to see the ocean again.

A word on how Lexi is traveling these days: It had been a while since we had taken Lexi on a trip that involved flying somewhere. In the ensuing months, she has grown to be more mobile and to have constant energy and motion. Although the flights down there and back were only about an hour and a half long each, it took constant attention and a lot of energy from two adults for every minute of that time to keep her entertained and happy. This seemed to be the most challenging part of the trip with her, since airline seats are confined spaces, and we can’t let her crawl around and roam free like she does at home. But also, because she likes to be part of the action all the time, and there were exciting things to do and see on the trip, she didn’t take her naps during the day at all, and she stayed alert late, past her usual bedtimes, both nights we were there. And she woke up at her usual time or earlier each morning, even after getting less sleep than usual. We’re really wondering how she will do next month when we meet my sister in South Africa to tour the country for a full two weeks! Most of all, we’re dreading the longer plane ride down there!

Thank you, Uncle Sam!

2008-07-23T08:51:00.005+03:00

Yesterday in the mail we received a check, dated July 4, 2008, for $600 from the United States Treasury, our 2008 economic stimulus payment. Thank you, Uncle Sam! This is especially generous on your part, considering we have not paid one cent in income taxes to the U.S. government, for a few reasons, since we left the country in 2003. What a deal – don’t pay taxes for about five years, but get a refund, essentially! Uncle Sam gave us a gift on his birthday!

Other benefits we have received from the U.S. government since 2003 with no financial support from us:

all of us have been issued new passports (well, I suppose we paid for these directly, but it has the perk of allowing us free passage to most places in the world)
Lexi got a birth certificate of sorts (from the U.S. consulate in Geneva), which will be more acceptable to Americans that the birth certificate the Swiss issued to her
two wars fought on our behalf so we can enjoy the blessings of liberty in a world free from terror, courtesy of George W. Bush personally (not!)

And some good this $600 will do for the U.S. economy in the hands of Americans living in Africa. I know Dubbya thought we would immediately run out and buy that new fridge from Sears that we’ve been eyeing as a way of stimulating the economy. Actually, though, we plan to deposit most of it into Lexi’s college savings account, so the money will make its way back to the U.S. and aid in the creation of more money when it gets in the hands of the investment company, so I guess it will help.

Hold Up

2008-07-19T13:22:00.002+03:00

One of the LWF finance staff went to a meeting on the new government's annual budget. It was a two day meeting in a nice hotel in a good area. Someone decided that they would like to rob the casino in this hotel and so at 10:15 in the morning, the people in the budget meeting heard gun shots! I asked what did they do - hide, evacuate? She said they all ducked under the tables for about 45 minutes. There was quite a bit of shooting and several employees were killed. I didn't find out if the robbers got away with or without the cash.

Who would have thought such a thing would happen here? Sounds more like NYC or Vegas.

Welcome to Africa column: A lesson that will stick

2008-07-15T19:32:00.002+03:00

Sarah reported that one of her coworkers who works with the Lutheran World Federation program in Sudan took back with him after a visit to Nairobi some non-stick pans for cooking at the compound in Southern Sudan where the staff live and work. There are probably a few women who do the cooking and washing of dishes for the staff there. Apparently they got the pans and because they had a dark coating, they thought they were dirty, so they scrubbed them, and now they are a shiny silver with no non-stick surface anymore!

This almost happened to us until we caught it and put a stop to it. We noticed that Jane, our house help, was washing our dishes with a scouring pad. If you go to the grocery store to the aisle where you buy dish-washing implements, there is a large section of nothing but these scouring pads, including the steel kind. Finding something like a dish rag or a softer sort of pad is actually difficult. Washing with a scouring pad is actually the standard method of washing dishes here. They believe that by using something scratchy, you are not only washing but polishing your silverware and metal pots and pans to a shine, which must mean they’re clean! So we noticed this – really the damage that was being done – on things like our expensive set of German-made stainless steel knives. I immediately took away all scouring pads from the house, and we actually had to explain to Jane about how she shouldn’t scratch off the non-stick surface of some pans or bring the silverware to a bright shine.

People in Sudan are less likely to know this as they’ve just come out of a two-decade-long civil war, and luxuries like non-stick pans are very few and far between. Most people are still collecting firewood to prepare their meals with, so who’s concerned about frying an egg easily or making pancakes? But isn’t it funny how we Americans take even simple things like this for granted and just know how to use them?

What's in a word?

2008-07-13T16:59:00.002+03:00

What's in a word? To Stephen, a lot. I don't if it is because some of the Africans we encounter here didn't have a full education or if they just don't teach the nuances of some of the words. For example, our house help uses 'must', 'will' and is often very direct - and assertive - with her comments. She tells Stephen that Lexi must eat, that the party will happen (even when she knows nothing about it). She doesn't really put things in a questioning way and I am not sure if maybe is in her vocabulary. Stephen is so tuned into the subtleties that this drives him crazy. He wishes she wouldn't offer her opinion in such a forceful manner - like there is no other option.

How do you explain this to someone? We have tried, but I don't think she understands our subtleties. She can't understand that it is her way of speaking that is the problem, not necessarily what she says.

I find at work that with some people I have to be very explicit. I can't assume that they will do everything the way I would do it - or think to tell me what they have done. So I have to keep following up - and sometimes, I feel like I am questioning how they do their jobs, but I just don't know how else to make sure it is getting done.

I think we are both finding it much harder to live here and fit in than in Europe. Europe was probably more like we are used to - and there were things that we really liked about living there.

Even the air is different

2008-06-30T11:29:00.007+03:00

Nairobi/Kenya/Africa is obviously a very different place than Chicago/the U.S. It’s strange to be familiar with and comfortable in both places, which are, in many ways, a world apart. When I was living in the U.S. and traveling abroad for work several years ago, it was always a challenge for my mind to hold together the world of Chicago – home – and places in developing countries, especially remote places where extremely poor people lived subsistence lifestyles, while I lived a life in a huge metropolis with all the demands of city life. Even now it’s still hard to reconcile these two worlds in my head when I really think about it.

After spending a little over a week in Chicago, I returned home to Nairobi on Saturday morning. The first thing I always noticed when visiting Africa is the air. I had forgotten this time when returning from outside Africa that even the air here is different to me. Going back to the U.S. or Europe, I never notice a change in the air. Most of the time I make a conscious effort to notice the air when I step off the plane because it’s always the first signal that I’m in Africa. But this time, for the first time really, I was returning home to Africa, which was strange in itself. But because Africa is home now, it was familiar to me already, and I forgot to notice the air when I stepped off the plane. But it was sure to notice me this time. It was the very first thing that hit me – unexpectedly – on Saturday morning. It’s the smell of earth, of air fed by vegetation of the flat savanna. Sometimes it’s flavored by the body odor of people here, which strangely I don’t mind.

And it was strange in other ways to be returning to home here in Africa, as opposed to a home in Europe or the U.S. I still feel very much like a stranger, an outsider, a foreigner, someone who visually sticks out here. It’s still very easy for me to set foot again almost anywhere in Europe or in the U.S. and be comfortable and know I can blend in and get around. But Africa to me is still an exotic location in the world, a place that people visit only on vacation or temporarily. So here I was after several days of visiting Chicago going back to Africa to live, to return to my family and house – to go back to the place I belong, to go home. It was strange. But if I even forgot to notice the air, then even that ordinary thing has become familiar and comfortable to me.

Read an article I wrote in The Lutheran magazine

2008-06-29T15:43:00.005+03:00

In February, you'll recall that I visited Southern Sudan as part of my work in producing the 2007 annual report for the Lutheran World Federation's Kenya-Sudan program (the office Sarah works for).

I included in that annual report several sidebar feature stories of real-life people that LWF had assisted. I adapted one of those stories for The Lutheran, the member magazine of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), where I used to work. The Lutheran has published this feature article in its July issue. Read the article: Be it ever so humble: Lutheran help follows refugee families back home to Sudan.

A companion piece about the son of the main article's subject also appears in the July/August issue of The Little Lutheran, the magazine's periodical for children. Unfortunately that magazine is not on the Web. But with that I can also add "children's author" to my resume - quite appropriate, I guess, now that I'm a father!

Flying first class

2008-06-29T06:53:00.000+03:00

I was in Chicago last week, my main purpose being to take the Foreign Service exam on June 24. More on that in an entry on this blog soon.

On my way to Chicago from Nairobi, I flew British Airways through London. That airline was generous to me and upgraded me on both flights to business class. So I enjoyed more legroom and a bigger seat that included a leg rest and foot rest. On the second leg to Chicago, a man wanted to trade seats with me so he could sit next to his wife, so I got his seat, which was a seat alone in that row and in front of the exit, so I gained even more foot room and privacy.

On my return trip, my first flight, from Chicago to London, was delayed three hours, which meant I was going to miss my tight connecting flight in London. (On that flight, I had to sit in ordinary coach.) So I was rebooked on a Virgin Atlantic flight, which meant a second overnight flight the next night and a longer layover in London – basically the afternoon. Well, it was well worth the delay in getting home and the extra time in London. If British Airways was generous to me, then Virgin was extremely generous – they upgraded me all the way to first class! I was in the very front section of the plane in seat 9K! What luxury! I had a great time sitting there. I don’t know what I had done to deserve this. Perhaps they knew I had gone through some trouble with my late flight, having to change airlines, and being delayed on my trip. Or perhaps it was because I wasn’t causing trouble at the check-in counter like one African man a few people ahead of me who was growing very impatient and slapping the counter and threatening the agent who was helping him, which prompted her to call the police and take him and his family off the flight he so desperately needed to get on.

I did get some final generosity from British Airways before their obligations to me ended. I had gotten a meal voucher to have dinner with in Chicago because of the delayed departure of my flight. And then because of my extended layover in London (which was their fault), I asked to have some more meal vouchers, and they gave me two of them for a total of GBP 15. So I had a lovely traditional Irish meal of steak pie, mashed potatoes and peas at an Irish pub for lunch, and I had time to get a generous snack later.

On my Virgin London-Nairobi flight I had a little compartment all to myself with a seat that had a wide range of reclining positions and a permanent footrest at the other end of the compartment. I was offered champagne (or another drink) as soon as I boarded and then had a glass of wine with potato chips as a pre-dinner drink. The wine (I had three choices in each of the red and white categories as well as for champagne) flowed freely throughout dinner, which was served on real china, with real glasses (and a choice of regular bottled water or an expensive sparkling kind) and real silverware. I had three choices for the starter and main dish of my meal and a couple of choices for dessert (in addition to the three cheese options). I enjoyed a movie during dinner on my large TV screen, and I listened with my deluxe headphones in stereo with a noise-canceling feature. Then my seat converted into a lie-flat bed, and I changed into the “sleep suit” I was offered (basically a light and soft sweat-suit type outfit with a top and bottom) and slept a bit under my warm and fluffy duvet. Before bed I was offered some goodies from a basket that was brought around – things like mints, shaving cream, hand lotion and lip balm. For breakfast, I had about a half-dozen choices and again was brought a meal on real china, including coffee made to order, i.e., with my cream already added for me, not given to me in some mass-produced plastic container (I discovered later that I could have ordered an espresso drink). So I had a lovely breakfast of fruit in a real bowl and a Danish.

Another bonus was that, because of my seat, I was the second one off the plane. One drawback of my upgrade was that I was in the back of this front second, right near the bar, where there were a couple of seats and a small space for people to stand and socialize, which people did after dinner. But I think someone asked them to be quiet because they wanted to sleep, so I wasn’t disturbed for long.

So that was my experience in traveling home, a small consolation, perhaps, for my trip which had not resulted in me getting what I had hoped for – a position with the U.S. Department of State. But these complimentary upgrades sure made it easier and nicer to take the journey on a couple of long-haul flights between Chicago and Nairobi.

The House Help Sleeping Over

2008-06-28T11:26:00.002+03:00

Since Stephen was away and I had to go to northern Kenya for work overnight, Jane, our house help/nanny, needed to stay overnight. It was a big deal trying to figure out where she was to sleep. She needed to stay in the house, but we only have the guest bed which is a double bed. She thought she should sleep in Lexi's room - there wasn't enough space for that mattress in there. We do have a servant's quarters out back - but no bed there. However, even though we have never told her not to, Jane always uses the toilet out there. She also uses the shower there on occassion too. So I think it was a bit wierd for her for me to insist that she sleep in the guest bedroom. I am not sure if she slept in the bed or not the first night when I was also here - I had to leave very early so she needed to stay over. When I came back, she told me that she had slept in Lexi's room that second night - on the floor, I guess. I didn't ask.

Retirement benefits

2008-06-28T09:38:00.002+03:00

LWF has set up a provident fund for staff here in Kenya. As part of my job, I am a trustee of the fund. The last two days we had a trustee training and an annual general meeting of the fund for the staff. The government has only been regulating/encouraging these funds for the last 8 years. Many of the staff still do not understand it. The current rule is that when the staff leave the organization, they can get their contributions to the fund, but don't get the employer contributions until retirement. This rule went into effect 3 years ago - before that, you could take out the entire balance. Some staff don't see why they can't get the entire amount when they leave the organization. They worry that they will never get it; that LWF keeps it or somehow the government gets it. Most don't understand why they need to save for retirement - the practice in the past is that the children provide for the parents in old age, but that is becoming less possible for most to do.

Other related facts:
Life expectancy in Kenya is 44 years.
There is no offical government set retirement age; it really varies by organization.
The trustees of the LWF fund can change your beneficiary (when the person dies) if they don't think your selected choice was appropriate (nothing provided for the kids, nothing for the wife and all to the girlfriend, etc.). -{I feel pretty uncomfortable with that.}
There is a government Social Security plan - everyone contributes about $3/month and the employer matches it. This plan has not been managed well and no one really has a clue how much is attributable to them.

Baby hippo going into water

2008-06-26T04:34:00.003+03:00

While in Chicago, I have access to a better (i.e., true high-speed) Internet connection, so I am posting here now a handful of videos I shot during a visit we made with Stephen's sister over Easter weekend in March to Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda, where we took a boat ride on the Victoria Nile River.

This one shows a baby hippo going into the water from the river bank.

Fish eagle in flight

2008-06-26T04:33:00.001+03:00

A fish eagle in flight over the Victoria Nile River in Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda

Angry hippo running into water in the Nile River

2008-06-26T04:31:00.000+03:00

On the Victoria Nile River in Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda

Hippos on the Nile River

2008-06-26T04:29:00.001+03:00

Hippos on the Victoria Nile River in Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda

Skimmer birds on the Nile River

2008-06-26T04:28:00.001+03:00

Skimmer birds on the Victoria Nile River in Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda

Cold!

2008-06-21T10:49:00.002+03:00

While it might be June and warm in the northern hemisphere, but it is definitely cold in Nairobi! We are wearing sweaters and jackets and Lexi now as the opportunity to wear her stockingcaps. I am told it won't warm up again until September. Parts of the country are still warm though. I will be up at Kakuma Thursday and Friday and it will definitely be warm there.

Welcome to Africa column: Hiring movers

2008-06-17T13:22:00.002+03:00

The family in the house next to us in our compound at #4 is moving out. Yesterday and today a moving company with two large trucks has been here. Yesterday, the vans were still parked in front of their house and ours, blocking our driveway, when Sarah got home from work. As Sarah was trying to park in a different spot, I was talking to the driver of the larger van about moving it so she could park the car in our carport.

It turns out that the van was having engine trouble, and they couldn't get it started. So a handful of men started pushing it backwards. I thought they were doing that to get it out of the way of our driveway, which was a sight that was funny enough - men trying to push this very large and heavy moving van. But actually they were trying to get it started, and the driver was inside behind the wheel, and all of a sudden the truck lurched and started.

Apparently the truck was still having engine trouble today.

The name of the company is "Urgent" something, and the side of the truck shows moving boxes with the words "Urgent shipment" in big, bold letters. I would guess this refers more to how they urgently need to get their trucks to start so they can transport people's belongings.

Wouldn't these sights just inspire confidence in you if you had hired this company to move you? I guess they have to load up their trucks, and then they push them to your new house. Urgently.

Different things in South Sudan

2008-06-15T16:19:00.003+03:00

So we left early this morning to drive 3.5 hours north to Juba where I was flying out of. I got to sit up front - either because I was the only female or the only white person, not sure which. The driver, who is Sudanese and very skinny, was to my right. Driving in Sudan is like in the U.S. on the left side of the road but many of the cars are right hand drives. Kind of hard, in my opinion. Anyway, the two last fingers of his left hand - the pinkie and fourth finger - had a very pretty pink nail polish on them. I certainly don't see that too often. This is also the fellow who on my last trip to Sudan wore the same red (warm!) track suit for all 4 days.

I also learned that most Sudanese usually only eat 1 main meal a day - for breakfast and either lunch or dinner, they would only have a cup of tea or coffee.

Hot and Sweaty in South Sudan

2008-06-14T18:24:00.002+03:00

I am here on Sudan on another business trip. We had a three-day meeting of the senior staff - not the most well-organized, but I have survived. Of course, it has taken my entire weekend. I will only arrive home Sunday afternoon.

And it is HOT here - quite a contrast to Nairobi where we are wearing long sleeves and jackets. The air is so still and there is hardly any breeze. It is supposed to be the rainy season, but it hasn't rained at all while I am here. My ankles have been bitten up and the flies seem to like my ankles as well - maybe because of the scratched open bites??

I am staying in a tent - on a bed in the tent - so that is kind of fun. It cools down enough at night that sleeping is not unbearable.

Pastors' passage through Africa

2008-06-06T22:19:00.002+03:00

We have continued to host a slew of visitors, and for the past two days visiting us has been the pastor of the church in Seattle where I grew up (although she was not the pastor when I was there) and her husband, who is also a pastor at a Seattle church (where my Aunt Carol is a member). They decided to stop by Nairobi for a quick visit at the end of their time in Africa, after two and a half weeks on a sort of study tour of Rwanda through a Seattle-based organization. They are on a sabbatical/vacation and are spending quite a number of weeks visiting a number of countries in Africa and Europe.

Those two short days were really not enough time to see a lot of Kenya or even Nairobi alone. But one itinerary that gives visitors a good taste of some of the country’s history, culture and African wildlife in just a few hours, while allowing them to soak up some Kenyan sunshine and enjoy the warm air, is what I call the “Karen tour” – most of the sites are in the suburb of Karen, named after Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa. We visited the elephant orphanage, where one can observe young elephants up close. Then we went to Blixen’s house, which you can tour. Then we had lunch in the garden on part of her old property. And then we went to the giraffe center, where you can stand face-to-face with these animals and feed them out of your hand.

On the morning of their second day here, I arranged a visit for all of us with the pastor of the Lutheran church (LCMS-affiliated) in Kibera, the enormous slum near us, that had been looted and burned during the post-election violence. This burned church and the pastor had made international news in January. Since our visitors’ time in Africa had been dealing a bit with peace and reconciliation issues in Rwanda, I thought a visit to this church would be along those same lines – a story of peace and reconciliation in Kenya. That pastor showed us around the church and its facilities that were burned, some of which are being rebuilt today, and told us about those tense days in late December and early January when the slum and other parts of the country had erupted in violence. He also took us for a walk a bit into the slum so we could see how people live there. Kibera is supposedly the biggest slum in the world, with about a million residents. Our visitors were moved by the powerful story and the scenes of destruction, so that was another side of Kenya that I’m glad they got to see, as tragic and negative as it is. Even I found it interesting, although I had visited this church once before during worship with our pastor and his wife.

We really enjoyed the visit with this couple. It was short but intense because of all the conversations we had, which ranged from talking about travel, past, present and future, to deeper conversations over work experience and being married. I did not know Kathy well, although she has turned over the pulpit to me many times when I have gone home and have preached at Our Redeemer’s. And I had never met Bruce before (his congregation’s secretary and her husband came with my Aunt Carol to visit us in Geneva at one point). So there was a lot to share about our lives, and since we have so many friends who are Lutheran – and Lutherans pastors – it was easy to relate to them. They took us out to dinner on the first night, and we went to a lovely restaurant in Karen. The food and conversation over a bottle of wine was excellent, and we enjoyed wonderful desserts afterwards.

Visiting Kenya's second city, Mombasa

2008-06-01T17:05:00.003+03:00

Late this past week, my parents returned home to the Seattle suburbs at the end of their five-week visit with us. For a few days before they left Nairobi, Sarah and I took advantage of Baba and Lolo’s (what the grandparents call themselves) willingness to babysit and took off without Lexi to visit another place on our East Africa list – the city of Mombasa. When people here say they are going to Mombasa, they mean the beaches and resorts that are outside the city proper. We had already been to one of these beach resorts back in December, and we actually prefer to visit cities as tourists as there are usually more museums, monuments and tourist attractions in them. So we had to return to see the city itself.

Part of deciding to go to Mombasa was to experience something else that was nearly as exciting (to Sarah, at least) as the destination – the train ride home. Because of the schedules of the train, we took it only one way and flew down to Mombasa on Sunday morning. More on the train trip below.

Mombasa isn’t the most pleasant place for a tourist. Many factors were not in our favor. We tried to see the city like we saw European cities – by staying at a hotel in the city center and walking around on foot a lot. Most tourists visiting Mombasa would probably have a guide to drive them around to the various sites. It’s the low tourist season anyway, hurt more by the fact that tourist numbers are still probably way below normal as a result of the post-election violence from earlier this year. So many guides and tourist operators are even more desperate for business and an income. So we as white people in a very densely populated town really stood out and showed we were tourists. We were hounded a lot by people wanting to be our guides, to give us taxi or tuk-tuk (motorcycle taxis) rides, or to come browse (and buy) in their souvenir shops or visit the tourist information/travel agent. And there are many more child beggars on the street than Nairobi who aren’t afraid to ask for a handout. So we could not really walk anywhere without being noticed and spoken to; so much for a quiet, pleasant getaway in another city. Also, it’s much hotter there than in Nairobi. One afternoon we just went back to our hotel and rested in the heat of the day. And there are lots of mosquitoes that ate me alive – they always love my blood. Add to all this the fact that Mombasa is a lot dirtier than Nairobi. There are large piles of garbage all over the place, and the streets and sidewalks have litter everywhere. Then the cats and crows scavenge in these garbage piles.

But like a European city, Mombasa also has a historical old town, and we stayed very close to it. We toured it with a guide on our last afternoon there. The houses have balconies over the street (think New Orleans-style but with intricately carved wooden railings instead of iron), and the lanes among them are windy and narrow. The architecture here is influenced by the Portuguese and Indians, and the city, which was really just the old town, an island on the coast, for centuries, changed hands many times among the Portuguese and Arabs. There are some streets in the old town that are mostly intact and where most historical houses/facades are in fairly good condition. But wander off the main drags, and you’ll encounter much poorer living conditions with many run-down houses and with all the piles of garbage among them.

On the edge of the old town is Mombasa’s main attraction, Fort Jesus, built as a defense by the Portuguese. We toured that as well. It’s got a few interesting places to walk around among the outer walls and ruined buildings inside, and it has a museum inside.

One night we had a lovely dinner at a fancy restaurant on the water. We returned to a dark city center and a dark hotel room, where we were issued a couple of candles for the night. It appeared the entire city was without electricity – the case for most of the country, we later learned.

We paid a brief visit to a large Hindu temple near the train station. It had been advertised as being tourist-friendly – that you could get a tour. We were met by a kind Indian gentlemen who met us at the front door. He showed us the prayer rooms and explained briefly how and to what Hindus pray, mentioning their belief in reincarnation. Sarah asked him how long he had been in Kenya. He told us he was born in Kenya and that his father had been born here too. I thought it was a strange answer for someone who believes in reincarnation. I was surprised he didn’t respond with something like, “I started my life as a peasant in 1362 in Nepal then became someone in the royal court in India after that…”

Shortly after we moved here, I had heard about taking the train to get to/from Mombasa. This route’s operation has recently been taken over by the South African railways, and apparently they had brought back some of the old-time feeling of a railway journey. So we had to try it ourselves. Going either way, it’s an overnight trip that takes at least 13 hours – leaving one city at 7:00 and getting in sometime the next morning. This isn’t Switzerland anymore, Toto, and trains (or anything, for that matter) cannot be expected to run on schedule. They tell people to expect to arrive more around 11:00. We had to check in for our trip an hour early, although there were only a handful of other parties in the one sleeper car that was used on the whole train. It was dark by the time we left Mombasa, so we were not going to be able to see anything. At 8:00 we were invited for dinner in the dining car. This was part of the trip that we had heard was fairly luxurious, and it was a fine and lovely meal. We started with bread and soup and had our choice of three main courses (one of them vegetarian). We chose the beef/vegetable stew over rice. And there was fruit salad for dessert. The silverware used was mostly the old, fancy silver used during colonial times, but the dishes were fairly modern. By the time dinner was over, it was fairly late, so we retired to our cabin, which was fairly spacious compared to its European train counterparts, and went to bed. I slept quite well. A hot breakfast was served at 7:00 a.m. the next morning in the dining car again. We sat and read after breakfast while we finished the journey. We got into Nairobi around 10:45 a.m. Before we entered the city, we saw a bit of wildlife in some fields – some zebra and some animals in the antelope family. All this – transportation on an overnight train trip, a two-person private cabin with bedding, and dinner and breakfast – was quite cheap. The only drawbacks were that the bathrooms were lacking in several ways – squat toilets, no soap, and no locks on most of them. We had a small sink in our cabin, and there was a separate faucet for drinking water, but it didn’t work. But it was fun to come home this way – a fun part of the trip and not just functional transportation to get us home.

The Flame Trees of Thika

2008-05-18T15:08:00.003+03:00

Saturday we drove northeast from Nairobi to Thika. You might be familar with the book with that town in its name. The traffic was bad getting out of and into the city, but the drive was nice. The countryside is really beautiful. We had a little trouble finding the place we were looking for in Thika. It was a hotel that has been there since 1908 - used by the white settlers as a way station. It's situated on a piece of land between two waterfalls. Lexi liked to look at them - the rest of us did, too.

Then we drove another 20 kilometers to 14 Falls which is a santuary type place. There is a horseshoe shaped falls broken up into 14 sections hence the name. There were several school groups there and the thing to do seemed to be to wade across the water a ways from the top of the falls to the other side. We decided just to look from the shore. People had brought their picnic lunches as well.

Overall, a very nice outing.

Welcome to Africa column: Casting light on the situation

2008-05-14T08:11:00.002+03:00

My parents are visiting us in Nairobi from the suburbs of Seattle for several weeks. The other day, we stopped at a cafe near our house. My mother used the bathroom and noticed a small sign above the light switch that read: This is the light switch.

Huh?

Tanzania

2008-05-01T18:30:00.002+03:00

We got up early this morning and piled in the car to head to Tanzania. We are spending 4 days in Arusha which is about a 5 hour drive from Nairobi. You have to cross the border (of course) - and that takes a good hour! You have to register your car in two places on either side plus stop twice for immigration - once on the Kenyan side and the other on the Tanzanian. It's quite a struggle. You don't know quite where to go if it is your first time, but plenty of helpful people point you on your way. I am not sure if they were employees or just people hanging around.

Driving south the scenery is much different than driving north. Tanzania seems to be quite fertile and there are some interesting rock formations along the way...

Time for dinner now. More later.

That magnificent bird

2008-04-14T15:07:00.003+03:00

I hope somebody is impressed by this. We tried to be.

When my sister was visiting from Seattle last month, we went to Murchison Falls National Park in northwestern Uganda for the long Easter weekend. The Victoria Nile River flows through the park (this part of the river originates in Lake Victoria), and at one point along the river, it shoots through a narrow gorge in the world’s most powerful waterfall. Hence the name of the park – Murchison Falls.

The calmer parts of the river are teeming with wildlife – elephants, hippos, crocodile and many types of water birds, from the tiny to the big. One bird we saw was the elusive shoebill stork (this is the impressive part). Apparently sightings of this bird are rare. Even our Lonely Planet guidebook says you have to be “very lucky” to see this bird when visiting the park. It was a big, gray bird with a funny-looking beak. On Easter morning at sunrise, we took a cruise on the river downstream to the delta, where the Victoria Nile dumps into Lake Albert. We don’t know how they spotted it, but our guides found this bird several yards back from the bank of the river, and, since it was gray and very neutral-colored, it was even harder to spot among the river reeds. This is why my photos of it did not come out very clear, but trust me – this is an impressive sight. Hopefully there are some bird watchers among you who will be impressed.

Another impressive fact we learned is that it takes a whole three months for water to get from the source of the Nile to its mouth in the Mediterranean. So the course the river takes is: from Lake Victoria into the Victoria Nile River, which dumps into Lake Albert, which flows into the Albert Nile River, which eventually dumps into the Nile, which we all associate with Egypt. And all along the delta that we visited on Easter morning, there was a lot of papyrus, which is what Moses was hidden among when his mother sent him away along the Nile in Egypt. In places like this that we visited, it seems time has stood still since those ancient days, and that it is still as wild and primitive as it was back then, with animals still roaming free and nature ruling the land.

Want to buy a kite?

2008-04-12T20:24:00.002+03:00

Want to buy a kite? Or how about a goldfish - complete with bowl? Car floor mats? Sunglasses? The Economist? A TV antenna?

All these and more can be yours - from the front seat of your car!

Driving in downtown Nairobi, it is very common to see hawkers walking down the middle of the street, trying to sell items to people as they sit in their cars waiting for the red light to change or the traffic to move on. And, yes, we have seen all of the above being sold. Though we aren't sure who buys the things. You are on the way to church and you just happen to think 'yes, I do need to buy a new shower curtain - and I can get one at this stop light!' We certainly haven't purchased anything this way and except for newspapers, I don't think I have seen anyone buying any other items from their car windows, either.

"I had a farm in Africa" - Blixen; "We live near it" - Padre

2008-03-27T03:35:00.008+03:00

I decided that while we live here, I should read Out of Africa, especially because the Nairobi suburb of Karen, which is supposedly named after its author, Karen Blixen (although when you visit, there's another explanation for the name), is just a short drive from the neighborhood where we live. Last week while my sister was visiting us from Seattle, I took her to see Blixen’s house. (Yeah, I know – no need to ask me, “You hadn’t read this book before?” If you know me well, you know I’m not a reader, so I haven’t read many of the classics in my lifetime, although I have read Make Way for Ducklings, which takes place in Boston.)

I’m probably a third of the way through the book, and even though it was written some 70 years ago, I think many of the things she writes about are still accurate, or I’m learning many truths about Africa that still pertain to today.

There’s a line at the beginning of the book that says the rainy season starts every year on March 15. I read that section in early March, and I observed on March 14 that there was a very heavy rain. Since then, we have been getting heavy rains regularly. It seems to rain mostly at night, although yesterday morning when Jane arrived, it started to pour and continued for a while. Then, last night, it poured for a long time when we went to bed and again for a long time early this morning before we got out of bed. This isn't just a steady, average rain. It's usually heavy and solid for a surprising amount of time. Where does all this water come from (and where is it all going)?

Most of the time, when we're not trying to sleep, the sound of the rain is fun to listen to. In our house, the ceilings aren't insulated, and in our bedroom, we have a high ceiling with exposed rafters. So we hear the rain pounding directly on the roof over our heads in the bed.

We've learned that these are the long rains and will last a couple more months, and then later in the year we'll have the short rains. So instead of the usual winter, spring, summer and fall seasons here near the equator, we have the rainy and dry seasons.

With the rains have come slightly cooler temperatures, and it's now only between 75 and 80 degrees for our afternoon highs. Woe are we.

As an aside, I find it amazing that Karen Blixen had two of her books made into critically acclaimed movies, which is infinitely more than any author could hope for. These were Out of Africa and Babette's Feast. If you haven't seen Babette's Feast, which isn't as well-known as the other, I urge you to rent it sometime. It's got a great "Lutheran" theme.

Adventures on safari

2008-03-25T13:54:00.006+03:00

My sister, Lora, is visiting us in Kenya for a few weeks from Seattle. A couple of weekends ago, the first weekend she was here, we all drove down to Amboseli game park, in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro on the Kenya-Tanzania border, the same place that Sarah, Lexi and I went between Christmas and New Year’s. After two nights at Amboseli, Lora and I spent an additional night at another private game reserve, the same one that we had gone to last year after Amboseli, but at a different hotel in the reserve. So after Amboseli, Sarah and Lexi flew home on Sunday morning so Sarah could go to work on Monday, and also because the hotel in the other game reserve did not allow children under 5. This meant that Lora and I had a drive of a few hours from Amboseli to Taita Hills game reserve, farther away from Nairobi, after dropping Sarah and Lexi off at the airstrip in Amboseli.

At the airstrip, a game warden who staffs the “airport” there, asked me where we were going. I told him we were headed to the main highway and then south on to Taita Hills. He told me that maybe we could take an additional passenger, a man who was standing around and who needed to go to a town along the highway closer to Nairobi. Providing rides to strangers is a very common thing in Africa. In rural areas like where we were, this is how many Kenyans travel long distances. It’s basically expected among Africans. And since many people are poor and don’t own cars of their own, sharing rides or picking people up when you need them to come with you are very common. We weren’t really asked about transporting this man – he was just kind of handed over to us – but I didn’t mind so much. I was a bit surprised, however, that I as a white person was asked to do this. Part of why I agreed was that I was just unsure of how to say no on the spot and wondered what reasons I would give if I said no (I just felt it would have been unkind to say I was afraid for my safety in front of him). As we left the airstrip and he told us he was an employee at a hotel in Amboseli where we needed to stop first to get gas and pick up a security escort, part of me thought that he would be – and he was – helpful in some small ways when he was with us because of this.

About this security escort: When Sarah and I drove from Amboseli to Taita Hills in December, we took a long route out of Amboseli to the main highway, over a muddy, very rough and never-ending dirt road. This time, I wanted to try a supposedly shorter, more direct route that wouldn’t take us so far north to the main highway only to go south again. Last time we learned that going this other way would require a security escort through the first area out of Amboseli, which is partly why we didn’t go that way, plus we would have had to cut through another national park and pay the fees, even for just passing through it. But we thought we would try this way this time despite these extra barriers. So at the hotel where we got gas, we also asked for the escort service. I was expecting a specific thing in my mind – that it would be another car we would follow, and in that car, I did expect there to be an armed person. Apparently this stretch between the two national parks was hit a few years ago by armed bandits who would attack tourists (those are all the details I know – I don’t know what exactly they did to tourists). So the two parks provide this service for free.

When getting gas at the hotel, I was told by our other passenger and others at the gas station that the escort would leave in a few minutes. I was expecting that we would be told where to go to meet this other car or that the other car would find us there at the gas pump and we would proceed. While we were waiting, we were “registered” – our names were written down as well as our car’s license-plate numbers on an unofficial looking piece of scratch paper (it definitely wasn’t a form, nor did it have anything official printed on it). So far, nothing was surprising to me. But while we were waiting, a young guy, probably in his early 20s, with a machine gun slung over one shoulder showed up and spent a few minutes talking to all the people standing around at the gas station. After a few minutes, this guy and our other passenger got in our back seat. I said to the young guy with the large machine gun, “Oh, are you taking us to the escort?” He replied with a bit of a smile, “No, I am your security.”

Boy, was I surprised at that moment to learn that the escort actually went with you in your own vehicle! Then all sorts of terrible thoughts started racing through my mind. My main concern was if the guy with the gun would wait until we were in an isolated area and point the gun at my head, tell me to stop the car and give him all our money and passports, and run off with it all, leaving us stranded in the middle of nowhere. He could have easily done that. And then, not only did we have this guy with a machine gun with us, but we had two men in the back seat who were strangers. What if they both attacked me and Lora, or worse, what if they somehow worked together to overpower us? It just made me very nervous to know that directly behind me was a man with a deadly weapon, not that I would have felt much safer with him in the front seat. I actually feared him and now our hitch hiker too and wasn’t so concerned about being attacked from outside the car by bandits who lived along this stretch. I couldn’t tell Lora about how nervous I was about this because I didn’t want to talk out loud about it in front of them – then they would surely attack us, I thought. But when we got to the gate to leave Amboseli, I handed Lora my cell phone and managed to catch her alone for a moment. I instructed her to call Sarah while I was checking out of the park at the window of the gate office and tell her that we were leaving the park and who was in the car with us. I thought that if anything happened or if Sarah didn’t hear from us for a while, she would know some good information (time we left the park, who the culprits might be, etc.). I don’t know if Lora understood why I told her to do this or how nervous I was. Unfortunately, when I got back to the car, she told me that there was no cell phone service from that spot. So, what else was there to do but to proceed as planned? So I just started praying as we left the park.

The road was in much better condition than the other road we had taken out of Amboseli. We cruised along quite nicely, and occasionally, the two men in the back seat engaged in conversation in Kiswahili. I was just sort of waiting for the awful things to happen as I drove. There were little villages along the way, and we saw one or two people on occasion. After a while, we came to a hamlet, and there was a makeshift wooden roadblock. I slowed down to a stop, and our security guy told me we needed to register. In a little booth made from roughly hewn sticks next to the roadblock, there was a soldier in a camouflage uniform who got up. We all piled out of the car, the guy with the gun going a few paces away to talk to a group of people standing by the side of the road. I’m not sure which authority I was registering with (the parks service, the Kenyan police?), but he took my name and passport number, car license plate number and then asked me how many there were of us in the car. I wasn’t quite sure how to answer it. I knew I could count Lora and me, but did our hitchhiker, who officially wasn’t related to us, count? With slight hesitation, I told the uniformed man that there were three of us and our security guy. “OK, so three,” he declared.

After about two hours of driving, we made it to the boundary of the other national park. There wasn’t a gate there, so we drove into the park and drove through it for a while. Eventually we came to a gate, where we had to get out and talk to somebody. Our security escort cheerfully declared to us that he had reached his destination. I gave Lora 200 Kenyan shillings to tip him. We had made it safely through the park. We had to go to another gate on the opposite boundary of the park to pay the fees for driving through the park, and outside of that gate, we let our other passenger out as we turned south on the main highway.

While this was quite an uncomfortable situation, it was still similar to many things I have done here. It seems as if every process you go through here, whether it’s figuring out how to pay a certain bill or doing something with forms for a government agency, you are never provided with all the information about it. There’s never any explanation at the outset of all the steps that you’ll need to go through so you know what to expect and how long it will take. And when you ask someone about the process, or for more information about what is going on, they just don’t seem to understand what you’re asking or what you need. As I stood at the window of the gate leaving Amboseli, I asked the man there if the security arrangements like we had were normal, and he basically said yes, but I still got a feeling he couldn’t tell that I was confused or needed more information.

This situation arose toward the end of a weekend that had already been adventurous – or rather when we had come dangerously close to a major inconvenience. We had borrowed a more rugged vehicle from a coworker of Sarah at the office (since they’re all “company” cars, trading of vehicles like this happens on occasion) and had driven down to the first park very early on the first morning (after stopping by the airport first to get the rest of Lora’s luggage, which hadn’t arrived with her the previous day) really without incident. After checking into our hotel (actually a camp) and eating lunch, we set out on our first game drive late that afternoon. But shortly into the game drive, we saw that the engine of the car was overheating. Fortunately, we were only a couple of kilometers from our camp, which we immediately returned to. Upon inquiring at our camp if anybody knew anything about auto repair, the camp staff directed us to the headquarters of the park, which, fortunately again, was a very short drive away. There they had full auto-repair facilities and trained mechanics (for the park vehicles). They determined that the radiator had sprung a leak and wasn’t cooling the engine, and they told us to come back early the next morning and they would try to repair it fully. In the meantime, we found other ways for Lora to go out on game drives, since normally we would have driven ourselves around the park to view the animals in our own vehicle. On Saturday morning, as the mechanics at the park headquarters determined that they did not have the right things to repair the radiator fully, we were in touch with staff of Sarah’s office, and they decided to send two drivers down to meet us with another vehicle, and they would take the broken-down car to a regular repair place or try to get it back to Nairobi while we continued our holiday weekend with the replacement car. This all happened relatively smoothly. But it was determined that, indeed, there was a leak in the radiator and all the water inside had drained out, but we were very lucky that we had made it all the way to our destination after a drive of several hours on the first day, which included a stretch on a long dirt road with really no other cars, people or houses along it.

The weekend provided us with some good stories, and we’re thankful that things were not worse than they were, which could have easily been the case. But I’ve traveled enough around Africa to expect there to be incidents like this – vehicle breakdowns, that is, which have happened on a few trips I’ve been on, but thankfully being the victim of a crime or armed robbery is something I’ve only heard of happening!

Greetings, Kenya style

2008-03-04T08:28:00.000+03:00

“Hi. Good, thanks.”

Sometimes people greet us with these three words uttered quickly, without us ever asking, “How are you?”

In a way, I suppose it’s more convenient. You don’t have to bother asking “How are you?” On the other hand, I can think of it as being quite presumptuous – I care how you are only if/when I ask.

In other ways, Kenyans view greetings as very important. Men shake hands a lot, even when you see a friend or colleague, and if there’s reason to show a closer bond with somebody, you do two types of grips in one hand-shake greeting.

Men often call each other by their last names as well. Some Kenyans know how to pronounce Padre and are aware enough to ask me if I know what it means. Most, however, have problems with pronouncing it, and, rather than just calling me by my first name (which isn’t unusual here), they struggle with my last name and say it’s Peter or something. I had a coworker in Geneva who was Dutch, and several times when I wrote a news article and referred to somebody by their last name on the second and subsequent references, she came to me to tell me how offensive this was to her in her culture (even though it’s a standard journalism practice all over the world). I can just imagine how she would feel here in Kenya with this common practice among men – and there are a lot of Dutch people here!

Words and Phrases

2008-03-02T12:13:00.001+03:00

Maybe it is the British influence or something else, but there are many English words and phrases that they use here in a way that Americans, at least, wouldn’t do. If the traffic is bad, you say you are caught in a jam. You don’t live in that neighborhood, you stay there. The plug for the sink is a stopper.

More later….

No Water? Or No Electricity?

2008-03-02T12:11:00.000+03:00

Which would you rather have? Or not have, that is? The electricity going off is a fairly common problem in Africa. At work, we have a generator that kicks in quite quickly when the power goes off. And I have a little grey box that is hooked to my computer so it never shuts off and I don’t loose any work. At home, we don’t have a generator so when it’s off, it’s off. During daylight hours it’s not a problem, but as the sun goes down around 7:00, it can get pretty dark at home. We have candles scattered around the house for just such instances. Our stove has 3 gas burners and 1 electric. So we can cook with no power but can’t bake anything as the oven is electric.

Yesterday, the water company came and shut off our water. We do have water in the tank so we can survive for a while, but we don’t know how much is there. The story seems to be that someone who lived in our house several years ago owes the water company over $1,000. Doesn’t seem fair that they shut it off when our account currently has a credit balance! So my office is trying to sort it out. Supposedly it was to be fixed today, but it didn’t happen. If it doesn’t happen tomorrow, we may soon be dry here!

Didn’t post this when I thought I would…so Tuesday was the day that the water was shut off and today, Saturday, Stephen and I went to the water company ourselves. Supposedly, the information on our account was too vague and the person who would turn the water back on spent all day Friday looking for our house. For some reason, the same person is not responsible for turning on and off the water – it’s two different people. Go figure.

Welcome to Africa column: Road repair

2008-02-27T15:37:00.002+03:00

I believe we live on the worst street in Nairobi. The combined surface area of the potholes, each wider across than your arm, is much greater than the surface area of remaining road, which is also a combination of cement and dirt. Add the speed bump that’s there (really unnecessary now), and coming and going from home, we get quite jostled if we don’t drive this stretch slowly. For most trips we make around town, we can drive along at a normal rate of speed on fairly good roads. But when we get close to home, we have to slow way down to a snail’s pace to navigate the last eighth-mile stretch or so. I joke with Sarah that we live close enough to her office so she can come home at lunch, but it takes just as long for her to drive most of the few miles to the office as it does to drive the last few hundred feet before our gate.

So we are always delighted to see when a random person takes the initiative to fill in some of the potholes on this stretch. Sarah pointed this out to me today, as she was the first to drive this road since a couple of repairs had been made. Only…our hopes we dashed to discover that the material used to fill in the holes is broken bathroom tiles, which I think creates a whole new risk of driving on this road – one of getting a flat tire on a shard of tile. Not only that, but this tile came from our neighbor’s bathroom that was demolished last week. Thanks - that's so neighborly of you to fix one problem only to create a new one!

How Americans benefit from the backs of poor people and how we repay their backs (literally)

2008-02-27T15:25:00.001+03:00

I know Americans don’t get enough news about the good they have done for Africa. Our president was just over here visiting and telling the world what good he’s done here, even if he’s messed up a whole other part of the world. Well, fortunately I have another piece of good news about the positive impact that Americans are making in the lives of Africans. Do you ever wonder where the clothes you give away to the Salvation Army or Goodwill end up? I’ve heard that these type of organizations sort through their clothing donations and re-sell the best stuff and send to developing countries the rest.

From all my travels around many developing countries, I am happy to report that I see many of these articles of clothing being proudly worn by their citizens. A couple of weeks ago in southern Sudan, I spotted an employee of the Lutheran World Federation, a young man in his 20s, wearing a pretty ladies’ sweater, the type that I would expect a 60- or 70-something woman to wear to the company Christmas party. He had complemented it with a necklace that a typical young Sudanese man his age would wear, but I thought the combination of the two items was especially charming. Back in town the other day, I saw another man, probably in his 30s, with a great pair of women’s pink leather moccasins on his feet (the type that was popular in the preppy 80s). As I passed him, he was stooping to adjust the rolled-up cuffs on his jeans, the better to display his shoes, I’m sure. On an earlier trip to Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya, I spotted someone wearing a t-shirt that had KPLU on it, a National Public Radio station in the Seattle area that I listen to when visiting there. And it’s not just in Africa that I see this used clothing put to great use. I still remember seeing a young woman in rural Haiti decked out proudly in a pink and white hospital candy striper dress. She had no clue of its original use as a uniform from a bygone era of American culture. From Africa to India to the Caribbean, I see t-shirts that read “1996 Syracuse Bowling Champions” or “Bob’s Drive-in – Tulsa – Home of the Crispy French Fries.”

Seriously, though, I’ve also heard that when all this used clothing is dumped in developing countries, it actually does them harm by competing with the local clothing-manufacturing market. So rather than actually doing good, we in the developed world keep living off the backs of poor people in the southern hemisphere, first by buying the new goods that they have manufactured for us with practically no pay, and then they take our cast-offs literally back onto their backs. How many “Made in Bangladesh” shirts do you have in your closet? How many people do you think are the second-hand wearers of those same shirts back in Bangladesh?

An early exit from southern Sudan

2008-02-16T17:47:00.001+03:00

Well, the remainder of my travels around southern Sudan was cut short. I completed my time in Panyagor yesterday and took the flight out of there to Juba, a major city in the south of the country, early yesterday afternoon. The original plan was for me to fly from the first stop directly to the second, but somehow the LWF staff who made my travel arrangements did not know that there was no direct flight between the two, which meant I then would need to fly to Juba to get from destination 1 to destination 2. There was a flight from Juba to destination 2 this morning, but because I was supposed to be on another, nonexistent flight, that flight was full. This would have meant going on to destination 2 on Monday and doing the rest of my visits from Monday to Wednesday, when originally I was supposed to be home by Monday evening, something I had been planning on mentally for my own sanity (given the harsh conditions here) and for the sake of Sarah and Lexi – not to leave Sarah alone too long to care for Lexi.

So basically I decided to pull the plug on the rest of my trip for these logistical complications that were caused by others and because there was no easy way to communicate with me in Juba and others in two different places in Kenya to try to work out new travel arrangements – ones that would have minimized this unexpected delay in Juba. I had my cell phone with me, but because of the service provider I have, it does not work in Sudan. E-mail was not really reliable either.

This all means that I spent the night unexpectedly in Juba last night, for which I had to take some money (a few of the 100 dollar bills from the stacks I had brought with me to Panyagor). I put some effort into gathering information about getting on the UN flight from Juba to destination 2 this morning and getting in touch with LWF staff in Kenya to see what, if any arrangements, they had made (none, really), so I just took matters into my own hands and went to a travel agent and bought a ticket home. I found a decent hotel to spend the night at and was safe and all.

There is more detail to this story, parts of which were adventurous and a bit crazy, as every situation like this in Africa tends to be. Much of it is quite complicated, so I won’t go into those details here, except to say that some involved a taxi driver from the airport who took me to the wrong place yesterday (apparently the Asmara Hotel sounds too much like the Smart Café) and then took off and the hotel proprietor who set me up with a motorcyclist (like a paid taxi) to take me into town to visit the travel agent. Needless to say, I was a bit of a spectacle – a white guy riding on the back of a motorcycle (you never really see white people taking such forms of transportation). This other movement around Juba was all in the hottest heat of the day and over very dusty roads. I was picking accumulations of dust out of the nooks and crannies of my face for the rest of the day. (People write books about these sort of experiences on their trips, don’t they?)

Well, I of all people should know that such travels, especially such complex itineraries like the one for this trip that involved multiple stops and a lot of movement by various means of transportation, never go completely smoothly, that there needs to be one major fiasco on every trip, like the bus full of people breaking down in the middle of nowhere and being stranded for hours (I already lived that episode in Malawi years ago). So part of me is accepting of this fact, that this happened on this trip – the part of me that was ready to return home to Sarah and Lexi, the moderate temperatures of Nairobi, and all the modern comforts of home (I’m even grateful for a bathroom sink and mirror after this trip). But the other part of me is annoyed at another major inconvenience, which is typical of things here (both major and minor inconveniences). In so many things that I’ve tried to do here, there seems to be some inconvenience that arises, either externally (out of your control, like a power failure) or internally (poor planning on somebody’s part, the driver coming late to pick you up). In so many tasks or projects, it seems that things can never get done completely or that you hit some hurdle. And this all seems acceptable to people who live here all the time. Well, in a way it is, and maybe it’s my Western/American attitude, that I’m arrogant for being frustrated that things won’t work “right” (i.e., the American or Swiss way) and why can’t things get done, and no wonder progress is so slow. I still have those thoughts sometimes, but, on the other hand, I’ve learned a little more on this trip that many times it’s the larger, external factors (those less out of my direct control) that can cause the inconveniences or slowdowns or interruptions. But those seem to be accepted to a degree as well (no regular electricity supply in a big city, bad roads, people who can’t be reached on the phone numbers given on their website, etc.).

One way to look at it, I guess, is that this place is really a whole different world and that I can’t – and perhaps shouldn’t – try to compare it to other places I’ve lived. It is what it is, and fortunately I have the choice to stay here and experience it and put up with it or to leave and return to my home country or somewhere else in the Western world. For the time being, we’ll be here and extract what we can from living here – hopefully more positive experiences than negative ones, and hopefully we can be pleased with what we do gain, even if it’s not the full measure of what we were expecting.

I did get to southern Sudan, however, a new country for me (the 48th on my list) and one that is at a significant point in its history. It was very interesting to have visited the part of the country that many refugees are returning to now to restart their lives after Africa’s longest civil war was going on there for 20 years. Now, on to new adventures!

Regarding domesticated animals and wild birds

2008-02-15T09:11:00.003+03:00

This city boy has gotten quite the education over the past two weeks on the lives of (African) cowboys. On my two trips so far for my work on the LWF Kenya/Sudan program’s annual report for 2007, I’ve visited areas where LWF is working with communities who raise cattle and other livestock for a living and where they’re helping them with the challenges they face with their livestock, whether from disease, drought or cattle raiding.

In these parts of Africa, where a family’s wealth is in their cattle, it’s hard for me as a city dweller and as an American to understand this. In my culture, people’s wealth is in their stock portfolio, their house (and their second vacation home), their car(s), electronics and clothes. So where cattle is king, where life revolves around one’s herd, rather than where one will vacation this summer, it’s hard for me to understand how these people live their lives – how a man in a family or a teenage boy can spend his work days (every day, in fact) caring for the cattle or spending time wandering away from home with the herd, going where the grazing land and water is. And it’s strange to me to hear that this wealth – the cattle – figure into a marriage (with the dowry) and can cause great disputes (how many cows is a woman really worth, anyway? I’m going to figure it out for Sarah…). But then again, doesn’t wealth/money in our culture cause great disputes among families too (think of when a rich person dies and what’s revealed in their will)?

Otherwise, besides visiting places and talking to people about their lives and challenges they face, I feel like I’m on a bird safari a bit. The other day, flying up to Panyagor, my first stop on the trip, we followed the Nile River a bit. It was beautiful to look down and see it. The land stretches as far as you can see (and farther) and is brown and dry, but on both sides of the Nile, there is a green strip, so it makes a beautiful green and blue-striped ribbon along a tan landscape. Anyway, Panyagor isn’t very far from the Nile, and the land around here, in parts of the area we’ve been driving in a lot, is swampy. There are lovely lily ponds along the dirt roads between villages, and in these ponds are many interesting water birds – storks and long-legged birds, some big, some small, and some with long black beaks that curve down. As we come along in the big Land Rover, many of them get scared and take off, and you can see them stretch out their long wings and fly, and it’s beautiful to see how graceful they are. Along the dry stretches, I’ve seen a vulture or two feeding on a dead calf carcass. And even in the LWF compound, and in many other places, there are many eagles (I think that’s what they are – they’re brown) that come quite close to people – they’re always sitting on top of the houses. They also soar high up in the air, and you can hear them making their calls, which reminds me of those Wild West scenes on TV shows.

I’m on my way out of here soon, from Panyagor, my first stop in southern Sudan. I always appreciate the comforts of home (or any modern place) when traveling to places like this. On the face of it, this place is very uncomfortable. It’s very hot, so by the end of the day, I’m very sticky, and my net number of mosquito bites seems to never decrease (even sleeping under a mosquito net at night, I still seem to get a few bites), and it’s dusty and dirty. But that’s not enough to stop me from going to places like this. There are too many interesting things to see, and my mind is fed and enriched so much, even if my body isn’t totally comfortable. But, in working for the church or church-related organizations, it’s all about suffering for my Jesus, isn’t it?

Boat ride - Sarah's take

2008-02-14T09:12:00.001+03:00

(See Stephen's last post)

Ever been on a sailboat? You know how they can lean WAY over without tipping over – but sometimes, it goes too far and there is no stopping it. We went to the island of Lamu (on the Kenyan coast) for Stephen’s birthday this year. The evening of his birthday we went on what was supposed to be a “Sunset Cruise”. You hear the word “cruise” you think calm, right? This “cruise” was on one of the traditional wooden sailboats. It’s maybe 20 feet long and there isn’t a horizontal bar on the bottom of the sail. Instead there is a very large plank that gets notched under one lip of the boat and sticks out over the edge of the boat over the water. At certain points during our sail, 3 of the 4 crew members were all sitting on this plank out over the water – acting as a counter weight to the wind. We didn’t tip over – but several times it felt like we were surely going to.

On this cruise, there was the 3 of us plus these 4 sailors. The one in charge was an older man who was actually the others’ teacher. He came on this particular trip for 2 reasons: 1) the high winds the island had been experiencing for the last few days and 2) our baby. I did sense that the whole crew knew what they were doing, but I think they also got a story out of this particular tourist jaunt. Remember this is Africa – safety equipment is in short supply – in other words, no life jackets – for any of us. As we were stepping onto the boat (a feat in itself), I thought “should we be doing this with Lexi?? The grandparents will KILL us when they find out.” The first 30 minutes of the sail were harrowing as the wind tossed us too and fro and the waves crashed in and drenched us. I was trying to figure out what we would do if the boat went over. Would I still be able to hold on to Lexi? Stephen and I could swim well enough, but what would happen to her? I didn’t feel like a very good parent.

I could tell Lexi was also scared. I was holding onto her with one arm and the rope that went up to the sail with the other. She was so incredibly still for the beginning of the trip. She didn’t move around at all like she usually does. Stephen could see her face and said it looked rather blank. When we finally came near the other island, the wind died down and it was a rather pleasant ride. Lexi started looking around like her normal self. The trip back across the channel was much smoother and only took 10 minutes.

We certainly got a story out of it – and saw a nice sunset – but I think if we had been given more information (like what type of boat we would be going out on) – we probably would have thought twice. I certainly feel the crew earned their money for our outing.

Celebrating on lovely Lamu

2008-02-12T18:54:00.000+03:00

We went away for a long weekend to celebrate my 35th birthday (which was Lexi’s 6-month birthday as well). We usually go somewhere for my birthday. This time, in our new home in East Africa, we decided to try Lamu, which had been recommended to us by one of my former coworkers from Geneva, who used to live in Kenya (and who is half Kenyan; you’d immediately mistake him as Barack Obama if he visited the U.S.).

Lamu is a small island just off the coast of Kenya on the Indian Ocean. We left on Friday afternoon and flew there. It took just over an hour to get there in a fairly small plane. On one side of the island are big, white, sandy beaches, and most tourists go there to stay at the resort hotels. We, however, are not beach people – we are not into sitting around in the sun or into water sports – so we stayed at a place in the main town on the island. When you arrive, you land on another small island opposite Lamu, and then you walk a little way toward the water out onto a dock, and the hotel “shuttle,” – a speed boat – comes to pick you up and whisks you across the channel to Lamu.

The unique thing about Lamu is that people have two forms of transportation – because it’s an island, people use boats to get around, and on land, they use donkeys (or they walk). There are really only about three cars on the island.

Our hotel was right on the “waterfront”/harbor. It was three stories tall with a verandah in front and a restaurant and bar on the ground floor. We were upgraded to a sea-facing room and actually had a suite with a big, king-sized bed. The waterfront, or “boardwalk,” as I affectionately called it, was basically about the width of a standard sidewalk that ran along the shore, and there was a wall between that and the water, which rose and fell with the tide. All along this shore were parked speed boats and wooden fishing boats that the locals worked on.

Upon arrival, we took a walk through the town. It’s an interesting place. Overall, it’s like a typical poor African town with run-down buildings, small businesses and a lot of dirt and dust. Don’t think of a quaint New England seaside town or of Bermuda. Take those places, take nearly all of their money away, then put it in an African setting. The bigger and nicer buildings (like hotels) are mostly in an Arab style – with those pointed archways for windows and doorways. The island is a UNESCO World Heritage site because it is a historical Swahili place in terms of architecture and culture. Swahili is defined as a mixture of African and Arab cultures. A unique part of their architecture is carved wooden doorways with intricate Muslim/Arab designs. The island is also largely Muslim, so there are a lot of women walking around who are covered to various degrees. Also there are a lot of people around, especially on the main square, who are just sitting with nothing to do (no jobs, which is typical in towns and cities in Africa).

“Main St.,” just one block inland, is a narrow street and has mostly small shops and stalls selling everything from fresh fruit to clothes and sandals. The sidewalk is paved, but soon after turning off that to go further inland, where most of the houses are, the sidewalks (remember there are no streets for driving) become sand or dirt. We brought the stroller to push Lexi around in and in many parts, it was okay with it, but anytime we tried to go off a main track, we ended up on uneven ground. On the main street, there are narrow channels running every which way, which are basically the sewer lines, we assumed (although the air never really smelled sewer-like).

The restaurant in our hotel was a surprisingly nice Italian place, and we had a lovely pasta meal the first night. The next morning, fishermen were up early getting their boats ready to go out just beneath our windows, but they weren’t noisy enough to disturb us. We walked around again a lot on Saturday, popping into shops selling colorful fabric and clothing that they could make for you and other shops selling carved wooden objects. We visited a historical Swahili house from the 17th century when the island was a trading post with the Arab world, Europe and India and people amassed a lot of wealth. It was interesting to see how rich people lived in Africa centuries ago. In the afternoon we visited the Lamu Museum, which had lots of displays of historical and archaeological objects. We also visited the fort on the town square. We went swimming at another hotel’s swimming pool and had a picnic lunch on the verandah outside our room.

For my birthday, we took advantage of the offer of a cruise (there were a few different cruises/tours we could choose from, going to different places around the islands) at sunset. Now, we never really found out what type of boat we were going on, so imagine our surprise when we were suddenly led onto a heavy wooden sailboat about 20 feet long used for fishing. There was a crew of four on board with us, and we set out from in front of our hotel to cross the channel in a strong wind and with some waves on our side of the shore. It was a lot of up and down over the waves at first, more than being tipped by the wind. But that happened a few times. After we got about halfway across the channel, the wind and waves calmed down, and we got to the other side and sailed calmly along the mangroves that grow on the shores of the other island. A few more times as we changed our direction into the wind, the boat tipped severely, and a couple of crew members had to do some bailing. As we headed back, we watched the sun set over the main town of Lamu, and it was beautiful. When we got back at dusk, we celebrated with a drink at the bar before another Italian dinner – more of a celebration for making it back to land safely than for my birthday.

Sunday was largely a lazy day. We walked around the island a little more and sat on the town square and on our hotel’s verandah for a while. We really had no desire to take another cruise or to take a long tour of other parts of the island, and it was nice to just take it very slow. We had a small and slow lunch in the courtyard of a classy café.

We were quite the spectacle all over the island for a number of reasons, I think. Like I said, most tourists stay on the beach and rarely venture into town, so there aren’t many white people around, especially those wandering away from the two main streets closest to the water. Most of all, however, I think Lexi in her stroller was a strange and rare site for people on an isolated island (in Africa women carry their babies on their backs). We were greeted a lot by people on the street, and many people talked to Lexi as well. They were being very friendly, but it also got annoying after a while – to be noticed so much. We weren’t pressed or harassed too much by people offering us tours or boat rides, which was good. But another odd thing that happened was that we were mistaken once by another boat captain who was sure we had talked before – he knew he had taken out another white family with a small baby.

The breakfasts at the hotel were also wonderful. They always started out with a small plate of fresh fruit. And whenever you ordered juice, it was always fresh-squeezed. It’s wonderful living in the tropics and eating the fruit that’s native to the area!

Overall, it was a fun weekend. We enjoyed getting to another part of Kenya that was completely new to us. We saw many interesting things and experienced some new adventures. And, going away from home and traveling was a good way to celebrate my birthday as usual.

A strange lack of smokers here

2008-02-03T13:57:00.000+03:00

One thing that one usually notices when traveling or living outside the U.S. is how widespread smoking is. Certainly in Europe, we came across many smokers and situations (especially when eating out) in which we had little choice to come into contact with smokers. Maybe I should say that I was a second-hand smoker for four years while living in Switzerland! And that to kick the habit, I had to move out of Europe.

We really expected to find a lot of smokers here in Kenya. But there are very few, which is very surprising to us. Sure, cigarettes are sold everywhere, and they’re easy to get. At the checkout at the grocery store, they have those enormous overhead racks of every brand of cigarette. (Also at every checkout is a wide variety of condoms, so maybe sex is the habit of choice here instead.)

While I haven’t been extremely observant, I bet in our two months here, I could count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen smoking. Maybe here people do it at home instead of out in public. I remember in Zimbabwe 19 years ago, many people smoked, and I thought that in many parts of Africa, tobacco was a good cash crop to grow. Or maybe the anti-smoking campaigns have made strides in Kenya too.

Washing hands as a new concept

2008-02-03T13:50:00.000+03:00

On my latest trip last week to Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya, I was reminded again of something I always forget until I travel to a developing country (if I’m not already in one) or to remote areas in one. In the refugee camp, there are signs all over that are part of campaigns that have been run by the various non-governmental organizations that work there, including the Lutheran World Federation. These signs give messages that are basically public-service announcements and talk about abstaining from sex before marriage (especially because of the spread of HIV/AIDS), keeping living areas clean, or treating women with respect (an important message in many male-dominated cultures). And when I travel to places like this and visit projects run by these organizations, I often hear that messages like this are taught in the work of these projects – things like how it is important to wash your hands before you prepare food or that you should know how to handle one’s cash so you’re not cheated when paying for something.

When I hear of these messages or see them being communicated, I realize again how much we as Americans take for granted. To me as an adult, I don’t even think about such things, but I know at some point they were taught to me, most likely as a child, but even then, it was probably less blatant and direct – perhaps less teaching and instructing and more like just doing it as a way of life or habit. So it seems strange for me to see these practices being taught to adults for the first time. That’s one major difference, I guess, between developed countries and developing ones – that such practices are ingrained in our culture and easily passed from one generation to the next or are more accepted or prevalent. I guess it’s for that very reason that we don’t have to deal with diarrhea or other water-borne diseases – because we address them at their source by washing our hands before we eat or that we get our water from sources we can trust. But if you’re faced with diarrhea in your family regularly or some members of your family have died from AIDS, then someone may tell you that the basics aren’t being taken care of.

It’s just jarring to my mentality to see a place where such basics, things that are so simple and natural to me, are not done. I don’t mean to imply that people in developing countries are stupid or ignorant or backwards, but for some reason, we as Americans can take these things for granted. This is just always surprising to me – to be reminded of this major difference.

Heading north for the "winter"

2008-02-02T08:53:00.000+03:00

From a previous entry on this blog, you know that I spent the last few days in the extreme northwestern part of Kenya visiting Kakuma Refugee Camp and other Lutheran World Federation projects in the country’s Turkana District. Because Kenya straddles the equator, to get there, I crossed the equator to get from the southern part of the country, where Nairobi is, to the northern part.

So that means I went from the southern hemisphere, which is in the middle of its summer, to the northern hemisphere, where it’s winter right now. But, I tell ya, it’s anything but winter there in that bottom corner of the northern hemisphere. I know many of you are in the throes of sub-zero temperatures and snow, so I won’t tell you that, at high noon in the refugee camp, I bet the temperature was pushing 100 degrees F.

My favorite season is summer because it’s warm, and I enjoyed some of that hot weather, but being outside during the hottest part of the day was awful. Two of the mornings I was there, I was up and out seeing some projects very early in the morning, and at those times, the temperatures were cooler, and it was pleasant. At the end of the day, I was very sweaty and sticky. Rather than showering before going to bed because it was very hot inside the house, even at night (there was no air conditioning in the house I stayed in), I just waited until morning to shower. It was nice to shower when it was still cool outside, and at least there was a little bit of time – maybe an hour or so – when I was somewhat cool and clean.

So, happy winter to those of you on the other side of the equator. Back down here below that line, we’re enjoying our warm weather!

Personal encouters

2008-02-01T08:48:00.000+03:00

Today I spent an hour and a half listening to 4 people who had gone on an assessment mission to some of the towns in northern Kenya where the violence has been particularly bad. They were all counselors and were to assess what could be done for the people affected by the violence in terms of counseling, trauma therapy, etc. They described some pretty horrible situations. People afraid for their lives are living in all sorts of camps – some in or near police stations, others in showgrounds. There isn’t always clean water and the toilets are often far away that the woman are afraid to walk there after dark because of what might happen to them. Roughly 30 babies have been born in the last month in one of the camps that they visited; they don’t have scissors to cut the umbilical cord so they had to use pangas – sort of an all purpose long knife: good for chopping down weeds as well as attacking your fellow man (you might have seen pictures on the tv). There aren’t enough blankets handed out for everyone and single woman or old people can’t make it to the lines fast enough for the supplies of food that are being distributed. Nursing staff in one hospital were down to 1 nurse per ward of 50 people during the day and 1 nurse at night. There is a lot of bitterness and worry over the future – “I am too scared to go home, but if I don’t, who will plant my crops? But if I did go home, where would I get the seeds for the crops and where would I stay as my house is burned to the ground?” Some people are definitely thinking of revenge and getting back what was taken from them. No one knows when the violence will stop and it will truly take a long time for this country to heal.

The team also had a rather traumatizing experience themselves. They narrowly escaped from 1 town as the violence was flaring up again. Then they got stuck in a road block – people had taken stones, large rocks and trees and laid them across the road. They were in the road block for 2 and a half hours and I think truly feared for their lives. They saw a large Greyhound type bus get the passenger door ripped off and the back tire flattened. The mob wanted to kill the bus driver who was from the ‘wrong’ tribe. They were afraid that the regular vehicles would be next, but finally, they were allowed to proceed. One of the members of the team was from Sweden – he’s white – and the other 3 Africans think that because he was with them, they weren’t harassed any further. You could hear the emotion in their voice when they spoke of this part of their trip and I gathered both the men and women shed quite a few tears during the experience.

Closer to home, two of the people that work in my office tried to pay their next month’s rent, but the landlady wouldn’t take it. She didn’t mind them living there, but was afraid if she continued to rent to them there would be trouble. These two gentlemen live in the slum nearest the office and neither makes a lot of money. I am sure they rent on their homes was 1/20 of what our rent is. So they have to find somewhere else for their families to live – and fast. They spoke of moving them to the villages where they come from but it is a question of expense and safety in getting them there. You can tell from the last paragraph that travel by road can be harrowing. The one guy has 8 kids – I don’t know how old the eldest is, but I don’t think any of them are independent yet though a couple of them may be in boarding school (which is typical here). They both plan to stay in Nairobi without their families and continue to work. The office may end up storing whatever larger possessions they have as to move them out of Nairobi would be way too expensive.

I feel very fortunate – and a little guilty – for all that I have. I hope you do to.

Life in a Slum

2008-01-31T08:48:00.001+03:00

When people talk about the slums here, I have a certain picture in my mind, though I have never been in one (unlike Stephen). But my mental pictures are all pretty negative. One of the staff in the finance unit here lives in the large slum closest to where we live. At a meeting the other day, someone mentioned the slums (they used that word) and wondered what she thinks when she hears the place (neighborhood) where she lives described that way. It made me feel rather uncomfortable – like she was being put down – but maybe she doesn’t see it that way.

Things are not getting better in the slums though – the small shops that the people would go to have either been destroyed or aren’t opening. At the ones that do open – and have goods to sell – prices have shot up (often at least doubled). There are food shortages and people can’t pay the prices for the food that is there. I can understand people being angry that the election didn’t turn out fairly; what I really don’t understand is all of the violence. How can killing someone better your own situation? Looting makes more sense – though I don’t think that it is the way to climb out of poverty either. I don’t know what type of pictures you are seeing in the media but here there have been photos of people being hacked to death and the paper reported the other day that 10 people were in the hospital with arrows in them. I can understand why people are scared and leaving their homes.

A moving experience

2008-01-30T13:13:00.000+03:00

I’m writing from Kakuma Refugee Camp, in the far northwest of Kenya, where the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Kenya/Sudan program (Sarah’s employer) plays many roles in the management of the camp, which is home to more than 60,000 people these days. I’m here because I’m producing this LWF program’s annual report for 2007 and am visiting most of the project areas in Kenya and southern Sudan to gather information and photos for the report.

This morning I was up very early, before sunrise, to see a group of Sudanese refugees leave the camp and return home. The war in their country is over, a peace agreement is signed, and these refugees are slowly leaving and going back home to start rebuilding their lives and their country, most of them starting from nothing.

We went to watch the final steps of the departure process this morning at the reception/departure center. We woke them up when we arrived while it was still dark so they could be fed a hot meal by LWF and loaded on buses. Some were already awake, however. They were checked out a final time by UNHCR on registration sheets, and each submitted a final “signature” – a thumbprint – on their identity papers.

All the families and individuals had piled up the entirety of their worldly possessions in the open areas between the sleeping shelters and then moved them over to the bus-loading area after eating breakfast. They had apparently loaded some of their other materials and possessions from their homes onto larger cargo trucks – the corrugated iron sheets that had been the roof of their houses and perhaps their sleeping mattresses.

I’m not sure how emotional the departure from the camp was for the several hundred who left this morning, but it was emotional for me to witness. I spoke to one young woman, 20 years old, who has been living in the camp since 1994. She doesn’t really remember anything about Sudan, where she was born. As I watched these people return to their home country, people who have been refugees, individuals without a home or a country, I was feeling a lot of things for/with them – they must have felt some excitement to return to their country, their familiar home areas, but anxiety as well, not to mention some sadness, perhaps, at leaving a place where many have lived for several years or more.

As I watched families scramble and try to keep small children together and round up luggage, I thought of myself and how I’ve moved long distances in my life, doing the same. As I watched these people load onto five buses, I remembered how I boarded a Greyhound bus in Boston at the end of the summer after my senior year of college to move to Chicago, which really was the beginning of my adult life. I recalled how scary that was. I knew Chicago a little from having visited a couple times, but I was going to a new home far from the one I had known for several years to establish myself, basically from scratch.

And I recalled moves I had made to new countries. Indeed, these were voluntary and not forced moves, but there are some similarities between me and my moves and the return of these people to a different country, and there are differences as well, of course. I recalled my feelings of both anxiety and excitement (felt simultaneously) about moving to a new place and country as I began my journey. Of course, when I’ve moved overseas, it has been away from home, so mine has been the opposite situation. The refugees carried the entirety of their worldly possessions with them, and what was important to them – clothing in suitcases, and, for some people, a large wooden cross carried in their hands, or a small radio-tape player, and, for many families, plastic dishes and cups and water cans. One man even had a live chicken bound by its feet by a cord and hanging upside down from his waist. When I’ve moved, I’ve had my luxuries – my extras – shipped ahead – my piano music and favorite pillow and kitchen implements – while my most valuable possessions, what I hold most dear and important, are the laptop computer, my iPod and digital camera. What a world of difference!

What an amazing time to experience with these people this morning, with all the symbolism and practical significance it carries. I felt a connection with them because of the life I’ve lived in the past several years – moving and living in two countries outside my home country and knowing what it feels like emotionally (and some of the practical challenges too!) to leave a place and start new in another country. But I also felt quite distant from them because of the differences between our moves – they as people who left their homes and country by force, and me by choice, and how difficult it is for them to go back, but how much help I’ve had from others to make my move easier. But there we were this morning, sharing that moment together, me with my memories of the past, and them experiencing those same emotions in the present.

My bizarre trip into the heart of the violence

2008-01-25T20:48:00.000+03:00

Last Saturday I took a bit of a major trip - but just for the day - as part of the work I’ve been doing for the past few weeks for my former employer, ACT International, on this Kenya political and humanitarian crisis. There were many bizarre parts to it.

On Thursday, I was asked to come in to the Church World Service office the next morning for an informal meeting with the man I’ve been dealing with, Sam. On Friday morning, he asked me what I was doing on Saturday. “Nothing, really,” I told him. In fact, he had already booked me to fly with him up to Kisumu for the day on Saturday. Kisumu is Kenya’s third largest city and is in the extreme west, on the shores of Lake Victoria.

Now, if you’ve been living in Kenya during this crisis over the presidential election, you’ve been hearing every day on the news, when they’ve been talking about rallies and violence and looting and burning of shops and people killing each other, a few towns, and Kisumu has always been mentioned. Kisumu is where the bedrock of support is for the main opposition candidate, the man who’s in this bitter battle for the presidency, which he says was stolen in the election by the current president. His supporters, mostly of the Luo tribe, which are heavy in the Kisumu area, got so angry at the supporters of the president, who is of the Kikuyu tribe, that the Luos have been taking out the election on the Kikuyus in violent ways. So Sam was taking me into the heart of the violence! Because this is where the violence has been worst, it’s where the people are suffering the most – many people forced from their homes. Sam wanted to take me with him while he assessed the needs for a response by the ACT members and I gathered information and photos for communications purposes. He didn’t tell me we were going until the last minute so I wouldn’t get afraid and back out because of the violence, plus he decided to go quite late on a Saturday, a day the opposition party wasn’t calling for mass action (which has always turned violent). In fact, in the three days before we went there, there were rallies and all sorts of destruction caused.

So quickly to the highlights:

I got up very early on Saturday morning and went to the airport. Who was on the same flight as ours but the member of parliament for Kisumu and the secretary-general of the country's opposition party. And guess who sat next to this secretary-general, one of the top leaders of the Orange Democratic Movement, this well-known professor? Yours truly. It was interesting. All over, even when the plane was in the air, he was treated and spoken to by strangers as a celebrity politician. Well, now that I’ve gotten to “know” him, I see his name all over the place. Since he’s not the candidate who ran for president (and thus doesn’t need to be so diplomatic) but is still a high-ranking leader in the party, he is able to push the party’s aggressive agenda and say the president doesn’t care to cooperate in the peace talks that are going on right now, which I heard him saying on the radio this morning.

In Kisumu, I spent the entire morning with Sam at the compound that is the regional headquarters of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kenya (affiliated with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in the U.S.). Then at noon I was whisked off to another ELCK compound to see a small distribution of corn flour take place to some displaced people. Then Sam and a staff member of the Anglican Church of Kenya came to fetch me and we grabbed some Chinese take-away for a late lunch at the food court above the large grocery store in town. We ate this in the truck on our way out of town to see another group of displaced people 40 kilometers away. So here I was in the back seat of the truck, trying to eat very hot Chinese food out of containers that were impossible to open while driving over extremely bumpy roads. It was hard to guide the spoonfuls of food to my mouth, and I was determined not to spill on my white shirt. It’s a good thing I had my Chinese food to concentrate on, because occasionally I looked up at the road and could see many oncoming large trucks and buses that we were whizzing by at a high rate of speed, barely missing each time.

The other bizarre thing about our afternoon trip was that, behind me, in the bed of the truck, we were transporting a coffin. Mind you, it was empty, but Sam mentioned something about a man in this other town we were driving to whose wife had died and how he wasn’t able to get a coffin to bury her in there or wasn’t able to transport the coffin from the big city of Kisumu, so could we bring a coffin when we came…I didn’t quite understand the story – I just sort of went along with it because it was too strange to ask about. So we had picked up this coffin before we left town in a part of Kisumu where there were many shops that made wooden coffins and displayed them out on the street (I bet they were doing a brisk business in this period).

Believe me, people, I’m not making any of this up!

After stopping several times to pick up various people and goods and drop them off, after two hours, we arrived in Muhoroni, where we met with some government official at a place behind which were living many displaced families. After several minutes of this meeting, I pulled out my flight schedule and declared to Sam and all present that I was going to miss my flight, which was due to leave in about two hours back in Kisumu. Well, there was still some business for our driver to take care of, and we didn’t start heading back until 5:00 for my 6:40 flight. He assured me that I would not miss my flight. So we drove back on the same bumpy roads (luckily I didn’t have to worry about eating a meal of Chinese food this time) and actually got to the airport a half hour before my flight was to leave. I was happy to be there and be on my own, where there were fewer chances of any more bizarre things happening to me that day. Fortunately, this was the case. I was safe at home again by 8:00 after an adventurous day.

I will post on this blog the feature article I write from this trip.

Christmas in January

2008-01-21T19:44:00.000+03:00

Today was Christmas!

Strangely, we got a huge stack of Christmas cards today (we get all our mail at Sarah’s office) from many of you. The bulk of our personal Christmas mail started to trickle in last week. As we’ve been telling people, the country’s been experiencing a bit of turmoil lately, so perhaps mail delivery isn’t a priority when you’re not sure who exactly is the president and when people are being shot and killed in the streets regularly.

We opened the cards over dinner this evening, one at a time like they were Christmas presents.

Thanks to all of you whose cards we received today for the bit of Christmas cheer in our warm January!

A little (neutral) patch of "home"

2008-01-21T16:33:00.000+03:00

As Sarah mentioned on our other blog, we tried a new restaurant on Friday night - Rudy's French-Swiss Gourmet Restaurant. It's in our neighborhood.

What a delightful place. It was cool and damp outside, so we sat inside by the fire. The main room feels like an old, colonial house. All over the walls are photos of Rudy over the years. We sat under the one of him with Sir Edmund Hillary, quite appropriate for the day. On the other side of the table was a picture of him with some others playing elephant polo. He's sort of like a modern-day adventurer, although you never really think of the Swiss as adventurers - they're so conservative. On the other walls were pictures of cities in Switzerland - Basel, Zurich. We recognized most of them.

Rudy himself is, indeed, from Switzerland - St. Moritz, the German-speaking part. He was a flight attendant for Swiss Airlines for 20 years and spent many of them training flight attendants for Eastern African airlines. So he's been all over the world. He started this restaurant seven years ago. He spent the holidays in Switzerland and brought back many cheeses, he told us.

We had to have the fondue, of course. Sarah thought it was good, but I just didn't think it was the same. It wasn't heavy and thick enough. But it was a good night for a big Swiss cheesy meal. And it was fun to taste a bit of "home" - or at least our former home. It was a bit on the expensive side, however, but, of course, we were very used to that in Switzerland, so even the prices are authentic!

So, if any of you come to visit us and want a taste of Switzerland in the middle of Africa (especially if you didn't get to visit us in Europe), we'd be happy to take you to Rudy's!

How guilt can fill the wealth-poverty divide

2008-01-20T20:30:00.000+03:00

The other day, when I went into the Mathare slum in another part of Nairobi with staff from Church World Service, a member of my former employer, ACT International, to gather information for a story about the violence that’s been occurring there, I had a strange and unsettling experience.

We were shown a patch of land, almost as big as a city block, that had been completely burned down. I was told that on that spot had stood houses that belonged to about 600 families plus businesses. They were all burned down on December 30 in the violent unrest that erupted immediately following the announcement of the disputed presidential vote. The people who burned the area did it deliberately and maliciously, starting the fires from each of the corners of the lot simultaneously, so that even if the residents had tried to put out the fires – which they did – the area would have burned down anyway.

Then we actually walked across the charred remains of many houses to get to another part of the slum. And as we did this, my cell phone rang. I answered it, and it was the satellite TV company. We had a satellite TV dish installed and got this service soon after we arrived, and the person was calling to find out if we were satisfied with the installation and the service so far.

Only in Africa. What a contrast this was. Here I was, standing on the remains – nothing but ashes, in fact – of a place where 600 families (for the total number of people that is, multiply that by 5 or 6, which is the number of people humanitarian organizations use for the average family in the developing world has) were forced out and who are now homeless. And here I was talking to somebody (who was not aware of where I was standing at the moment) about the absolute luxury I have in my house that’s way too large for my family of three.

Well, it’s enough to make you pause. I can’t say that I will now obey the biblical mandate to go out and sell everything I have and give it to the poor. I’m not sure what exactly I should do, because even if we get rid of the satellite TV, then we’ll still have many luxuries here, and our arrangement to have some of these luxuries is a bit intentional. But incidents like this only make it harder to come to Africa to live as an expatriate and to work for a humanitarian organization where, by design, my job is to come into contact with the poorest of the poor, people who have been through some of the worst experiences of their lives, while having one foot back in the world of absolute comfort, only a few miles away.

See the article I wrote after this visit to this slum in an earlier post on this blog.

Welcome to Africa column: My new Kenyan coiffure

2008-01-17T15:58:00.000+03:00

In this edition of this new column, I will tell you about getting a haircut in Nairobi. I’ve gotten it done twice since we moved here, both times at a place at the shopping center close to our house. Parts of it are quite different than in Europe or the U.S.

I’ve gone to a place that’s a bit of a barber shop-salon combination – they cut both men’s and women’s hair – and therefore the haircut itself is like this – a sort of barber-salon cut. Like at a barber shop, they don’t wash your hair (for men, at least) before cutting it. The cutting part is pretty much the same – what I’m used to.

But then as they clean up, that’s when a few surprises come. Last time, but not so much this time (today), the cutter took a towel and essentially batted at my head with a large wad of it, like one would bat against a wall with a folded newspaper or magazine when trying to kill a fly. This was apparently to get the large clumps of cut hair, and perhaps some of the fine snips of hair that cling to one’s face, off my head. He did this a few times last time.

Then they disappear into the back and come back with a small plastic tub full of warm water. Into that they put a few drops of what smells like Pine-Sol – a disinfectant. Isn’t this for cleaning your kitchen floor well, rather than putting on your face and head? Then, as if getting whacked with a towel a few times wasn’t bad enough, they take a washcloth from this kitchen-floor-cleaning solution and wipe your face and back of your neck with it – not gently, but with great pressure, as if scrubbing dirt stains off linoleum (doesn’t it mean you have to use less elbow grease when you use Pine-Sol?). They also scrub your hair/scalp quite vigorously with this washcloth, I suppose as a substitute to rinsing the fine hairs out after cutting. After this step, one feels quite manhandled. No gentle massages while getting one’s hair shampooed at this salon.

I suppose I could try going to a different place, but usually I go during the day while Sarah has the car at work, so I don’t have many choices to get to by foot.