Return Is Inevitable

In town yesterday, I received a wonderful birthday package from a returned Peace Corps volunteer yesterday (Thanks Kelly!). The afternoon was sunny, but not too hot, and I did not have anything pressing to do at school, so I walked leisurely. Included in the package were some granola bars. I picked an almond flavored bar out and started to munch as I walked.

At that moment it struck me, my return to America is inevitable and eating granola bars that come in nice little packages with all sorts of captivating nutritional information will once again be common place.

This means that I have been in Kenya for over a year and a half. The thing is, I have like 6 months left, but right now, 6 months seems like nothing. Phrasing it like this makes me think of other times in life when we are given set arrival and departure dates. One such notable analogy is prison. The problem is, I do not know which side is prison. Do I gain freedom in 6 months or do I lose my freedom? Of course it is not as simple or as complicated as that. The dichotomy is artificial though. There will certainly be a lot of external changes though. I will have more choices of how to use my money, but I will also become more of a slave to monetary choices.

Maybe the scariest aspect of returning home is that I do not know anything about my future life. I do not know if I will get into grad school, if I do get in I do not know where in the country I will be, I do not know what I will do before August of 2011, and how I will spend the little money that Peace Corps will give me.

Thinking about those things now, while I am seated in the staff room in front of my laptop, I am scared. Yesterday, strolling down a dirt road munching on a delicious granola bar, I was excited. Maybe this means that I need to spend more time outdoors eating granola bars...

Garbage Truck

Cruising away from Meru town the matatu that I was in followed a dump truck full of garbage for about a kilometer. The truck has just been loaded up with garbage from the town and was piled high.

It might be hard to imagine how much garbage there is spread around public areas in Kenya, but a few months back they removed something like 50 tons from a creek running through Nairobi. Meru is as dirty as Nairobi and I applaud the efforts that these people had made in removing garbage.

Most of this garbage is in the form of small plastic bags, due to their ubiquity in Kenyan markets. Each time you buy an orange, a drink, biscuits, or tomatoes, the purchased object is put into a bag, which is instantly discarded by the buyer.

This dump truck was not tarped and at 80 km/hr these bags were forming a perpetual cloud above the bed of the truck. Hundreds of the bags in this cloud would lose equilibrium and would shoot out to the sides of the truck, gently falling to the ground on either side of the road. Simultaneously more bags would be dislodged from the ever decreasing pile in the truck bed.

Maybe this garbage truck is not actually headed for a specific dump site; maybe the journey is the end of the line and the goal is to redistribute all of the manufactured goods that had converged on the city.

Maybe they were trying to make the statement that what they were doing to the forest is what all of us are doing to the forests, or, more likely, they just don't care.

Perpetual Road Work

As we cruise along the road in a matatu, there is a man ahead with his back bent towards the road, jimbe (hoe) in hand. A cigarette is hanging loosely out the side of his mouth, as him an another man spread dirt inside of a pothole. As the matatu approaches the man holds out his hand asking for the driver to pay him for the work that he is doing to fill the holes. Instead of stopping, the driver maintains speed, and as we pass over the hole dirt flies out, pushed by the wheels and rising as a dust cloud in back of the matatu.

This happens every time that a car passes, but the men continue to refill the hole, hoping that someone will give them money.

I haven't written much for about a month, in part because the school term has begun and I have gotten into what appears to be a routine: get up at 6am, plan for lessons from 7am, teach and work on curriculum until 4pm, play volleyball or help officiate a club until 5:30pm, go for a run until 6:30 or 7pm (By the way, I am training for a half-marathon - or maybe full marathon? - at the end of June), eat a little, bathe, read, and meditate until bed. As a write this, it is dawning on me just how many of my days in the past month have followed this exact pattern...

So that is my excuse for why I haven't written more, but what I really want to write about is this book, Born to Run, which was lent to me by another Peace Corps volunteer.

Ever since I ran cross country in high school I have ended almost every season/period of training with an injury. Even now, as I am training for this run I have been ending each run with sharp pain in my groin muscle and an aching right knee. I have always blamed my body for not being able to run without injury, but it turns out that I have just never known the proper way to run... As soon as I got the hint from this book I changed my stride and since then the aching in my knee has subsided and the pain in the groin has entirely disappeared.

The book chronicles Christopher McDougall's research into a tribe in Mexico that routinely runs 50-100 milers. As he studies them, he also studies ultra-marathoners in the United States and anthropologists who are studying our evolutionary roots.

According to their research, homo-erectus evolved as persistence hunters (read the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting). This means that we ran animals to death... We have the unique ability to dissipate heat on the run, where as most other animals have to stop and pant in order to expel excess heat (example: dogs have to stop and pant). So all of our ancestors were regular marathoners. On the great open plains in Africa they would run after a gazelle just fast enough that the gazelle did not get time to rest, until finally, after between 10 and 20 miles, the gazelle would die of heat exhaustion. They even found a small tribe near South Africa that still persistence hunts.

These guys run these distances until their 60's and they do it bare-foot. We, on the other hand, buy $150 shoes and get injured after running regularly for 5 months... The reason is because these shoes are so padded that they allow us to use the worst running form ever known to man.

The book has changed my life because I know have a slightly better idea of how to run, and how to run long-distance. I also have a better idea of who I am, because I have a better sense of how we evolved into what I am today.

The writing is totally gripping and I lost sleep in order to continue to read the book. I think that the book would be interesting even if you are not particularly interested in running.

Crash Course In Mid-HOOVEry

Last night I was preparing to read a book in bed when the school watchman started talking to me through my window.  I couldn’t really make out what he was saying, but it was clear that he saying something about the school cow and that he wanted me to come.  Feeling slightly annoyed I put on a jacket and headed outside.  He led me to where the school cow was laying on the ground, with what I think you would call a dilated birth canal. 

Before my very eyes part of the sack enveloping the baby started coming out, and within a few minutes I was staring at two hooves.

As we watched this happening our watchman and the primary school’s watchman decided that we needed the animal doctor to come and assist us with the birthing process.  As the watchman and I kept vigil the primary school’s watchman hurried off.

After a few minutes with the two of us watching the calf it became clear that the doctor may not come in time.  Despite this, I was slightly disturbed when the watchman grabbed the placenta and popped it, causing a small flood of fluid.

As all of this was happening, the mother was periodically becoming disturbed by a dog that was circling around her.  This caused the mother to jump up and hobble around with two hooves sticking out of her.  She looked so unstable that I thought she might seriously break a leg, but she never did and after each of these movements she settled back into a birthing position.

Then the watchman decided that it was time to, figuratively, take the baby-bull by the horns, or literally take it by the hooves, and separate it from it’s mother.  As he grabbed the head to keep the mother from jumping up, it became apparent that I was to be an integral part of this magic trick.  From his shouting I gathered that I was supposed to grab the hooves and pull, which I did.  The mother didn’t seem to enjoy this much, and I guess I don’t blame her.  I quickly found out that the hooves I had been seeing were the front ones and after about a minute of frantic pulling, I soon saw a head.  I do not know how many of you have ever tried to do this before, but it reminded me of trying to catch a greased pig at the country fair.  I have never tried to catch a greased pig, but I think that this would be a good analogy, so long as your greased pig had gotten himself wedged inside of a hole with an opening a third his size. 

Somehow I succeeded at this unlikely fair game, and once the calves' shoulders emerged the mom seemed to relax and the rest of the calf slipped right out.

Not a bad performance for my first time performing the pull-a-cow-from-another-cow trick!  The doctor then arrived in time to confirm that we had done good work. 

What I was noticing at this point was that the mother did not seem very interested in her new-born calf.  The doctor had a solution to this though.  He got a big handful of placenta and he smeared it all over the mother’s mouth. Instantly upon tasting this seemingly gross blood-water mixture, the mother became so excited that she hopped right up from where she has been trying to sleep and started licking that calf clean with a vigor that is possibly only matched in cows during the period when the bull is trying to mount the female.  This was a lot nicer to watch though, and I seriously cannot express my surprise at how energetic this mother became just from tasting placenta.

Below is a picture that I took of the calf about 14 hours after it was born.  With all that the calf and I have been through together it is sad to think that it will grow up for a few years only to be slaughtered.  Such is the life of cows though.

Travels in Turkana Land

The first bit of travelling that I did in April was to the region west of Lake Turkana, a huge lake in the desert of northern Kenya.  We spent as much time awake on public buses and matatus as we did on the ground, but it was well worth it.  It was exciting because the region is so different from anywhere else that I have been in Kenya.  There are not a lot of tourist sites in the area, which is fine with me, and most of what we did was travel to nearby towns and talk with people we met there.

The access point for the region is Kitale, which is in the northern Rift Valley.  At Kitale Eckhart and I went to a museum of local history.  The museum seemed to basically be someone’s personal collection of Kenyan crafts, most of which Eckhart and I had already seen.  We did learn a few new bits of information, as the picture below highlights.

  Who knew that African paths are characterized by narrowness and meandering?

From Kitale we arrived in Lodwar, the biggest town in the region.  From there we went to Kalokol, which is just 5km from the lake.  There is not a road from Kalokol to the lake.  Eckhart and I found ourselves crossing desert and passing by Turkana herdsmen in our search for the undrinkable water of Lake Turkana.  Along the way we met a hut of Turkana men hiding from the scorching sun.  The hut really belonged to a guard.  Turns out that 50 plus years ago an investor built a huge pipeline from Kalokol to a resort they were building on the lake. Unfortunately the region did not attract very many guests, being located so far away from other tourist infrastructure and the pipeline was never utilized.  Now, an Indian investor has bought the pipeline and is having it deconstructed in order to melt the steel and sell the raw material. 

At the lake there is a community of turkana people.  Traditionally they are pastoralists, but this lake-side community consists of about 200 mostly young turkana (I think the oldest I saw was in their early 40’s, which is very different from the other communities I saw).  There is a refrigerated truck that drives the 20 hours from NRB to the lake in order to buy fish from these people.  The turkana fishermen only have to put out their nets, reel in the catch, eat their fill, and sell the rest to the waiting truck.  It looks like a much easier, and different, life than the turkana that herd goats.

We were ferried to the peninsula that the camp is on by a boat (similar to the one in the above picture).  Below is a picture of boys swimming alongside the boat and a boy imitating my camera. From Kalokol we headed up to Kakuma, a Sudanese refugee camp in Kenya, and Lokichogio, which used to be the headquarters from all relief work in Sudan.  Now that the security situation in Sudan has increased the relief programs have moved inside of Sudan and Lokichogio is left with a great deal of infrastructure and few guests.  Basically, it reminds me of a typical Kenyan town.  I do not know the story of the truck in the picture, but it was parked outside of a very lonely post office and next to a government of Kenya immigration office.  To give a feel for the degree to which the post office is isolated, we were talking to the post master; then he decided to go on break and went to town without closing the door to the post office or leaving any other worker behind. After returning to Lodwar we spent a day walking through the neighborhoods.  On the outskirts of town we came across this graveyard.  If crosses a the head of the grave are a sign, it appears that about a third of the dead were Christian.

Also, we sat under a tree in one of the “suburbs” of Lodwar and chatted with the locals.  Some of them were very friendly and showed us around.  I don’t know how, but somehow they got the idea that because we are teachers we are coming to Lodwar to build a school.  They made sure to outline the prices and availability of land as well as introduce us to a few students and wazee (old men).

The traditional turkana men wear a circular knife around their wrist, they always carry a walking stick, and the majority of them carry a small stool (although this man does not have it).

The women usually wear beads around their necks and more than half of them cut their hair into mohawks.  According to me, this combination makes them some of the most beautiful women in Kenya.

Then we returned to Eldoret, passing through a national park created for the preservation of a now seemingly extinct variety of antelope. 

From there Eckhart and I headed our separate ways, and I had a peaceful ride back to my site, other than being stranded on a matatu that broke down for three hours.

April – Break After the Third Term

I know that I have always been an irregular blogger, sometimes not blogging for 2+ weeks, and some days (like today) writing three posts.  All the same, I feel an obligation to say that you may not hear from me for a while. 

This month is our break from teaching and on Saturday I am heading up to lake Turkana, which is in Northern Kenya. 

After that I will be in Nairobi for the volunteer advisory committee meeting and the diversity and peer support meeting, as well as session and training.

Then I will be visiting another volunteer’s site to talk about ways to teach meditation in our schools.

Here are also a couple pictures you might enjoy.  The first two are from a trip that I took to the forest with Mr. Gitonga (mathematics teacher at Athiru Gaiti) and Mr. Ndreba (board of governors’ teacher in physics, mathematics, and agriculture at Athiru Gaiti).  I think you can tell in one of the photos that I did not feel well.  In fact it was very unfortunate because we had been planning this trip for sometime.  The good thing is that I got some medicine to destroy all of those pesky food-borne viruses from my system and now I feel great!

The forest is government property and you are only allowed to go there if you have permission from the police.  It is about 8-10km from town, and is the source of the water for most of the region around Maua.

Below is a picture of a table at Athiru Gaiti primary school that is built around a tree.  How cool!