Every once in a while it is nice to stop and savor the small sweet things in life. Today is my 60th birthday – not exactly a small sweet thing – but enough little gems have occurred today that they deserved to be savored.

At about 5:30 this morning I was sitting on the living room couch checking emails in the dim fluorescent glow of a battery powered lantern (the generator comes on at 6). I heard a munching and scrunching coming from the ceiling. That in itself isn’t unusual, straw roofs are good transmitters of animal sounds. This was loud enough, though, that it was definitely coming from indoors.

I took my trusty REI torch and directed the beam at the rafters. There was a fuzzy tail bobbing along behind the braided straw trim where the wall meets the ceiling. That darn squirrel, I thought. But then a head and body appeared with two, forward facing eyes flashing red in the light. This was an itty bitty carnivore. A galago (or bush baby) – a small nocturnal primate – stared down at me, round faced, pointy eared and fluffy. He ran around for a little while and then disappeared through one of the multitudinous gaps between our roof and walls. People spend hours trying to spot the elusive bush babies in trees. This one came right in and introduced itself.

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What would you do if you were a white-haired woman alone in your car, driving along a deserted road and a poorly dressed male stranger jogged up to your vehicle and reached for the door handle? You’d probably do the exact same thing that I did the first time it happened to me: wave him off with a “no, no” and shake of your head and then drive on, not looking back and taking a deep breath to calm you heart. That was then. Today I wouldn’t make him jog to the car. I’d notice him on the side of the road, stop and ask if he wanted a lift.

John and I are rich in transportation; when the locals hear about our two cars, their eyes pop. Our deal with The Nature Conservancy when we signed up to work with the NRT was that we’d each have our own vehicle. How else could we function? They didn’t expect us to share, did they? As it turns out, given our remote living situation, two cars really are necessary. Most days John and I go in opposite directions and need a way to get there. That being said, we are definitely sharing our transportation.

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Imagine yourself on an open arid plain, 100 miles north of the equator. It is the height of the dry season. The sun beats down relentlessly and a steady wind swirls the fine red dirt in every direction. It smells hot and acrid: dust and dung. Scraggly acacia trees dot the landscape and groups of people and animals cluster as close as they can to the trunks seeking coolness in the lacy shade. Herders with intricately embroidered caps and long sticks are separating 250 cattle into groups according to size. They dash around steering the cattle by swatting their backs and rumps and stop the frequent dashes for freedom by waving their sticks and shouting. There is a constant racket of cows braying, people chattering and the wind whistling.

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I said I would report on my trip to the livestock market. Here is Part I.

A little after 5 pm yesterday, I returned home encrusted in a layer of sweat and fine red dust. My eyes felt like they were coated in sandpaper and my lips were cracking. I was parched and exhausted. The entire way back from the airstrip, all I kept thinking was “I want a beer.” I flopped on the couch. “Will you get me a beer?” I whined to John.

“No. You should have stopped at Ngiri House on your way home and gotten one there.”

“I was too tired,” more whining. “I need a beer.”

“I am not driving a half hour each way to get you a beer!” He was rather emphatic about it.

I drank a quart of water and my brain started functioning again. A light bulb went on in my head. “Hey, I bet you could get a beer at Lewa Safari Camp. That’s only 15 minutes away,” I pleaded.

John looked at me, shook his head and a half hour later reappeared with 3 beers.

Actually it was an intense and interesting day; full of firsts.

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If you knew what abattoir meant without having to look it up, you were ahead of me; and I now have the job of leading a livestock business. An abattoir is a slaughter house and a very necessary part of the grassland-to-market cattle supply chain.

Livestock are the backbone of the pastoralist culture and economy. Pastoralists are semi-nomadic because they must follow their cows as they forage for food. Almost 100% of pastoralists’ wealth is tied up in their animals. Whenever a family has cash they buy an animal, whenever they need cash they sell one: they sell a sheep or goat when only a small amount of money is needed – for cooking oil, grain or sugar – a cow for something major like school fees or doctor bills.

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Last night on the ride back to Lewa from a meeting at a neighboring wildlife conservancy, I distracted myself from the terrifying road conditions by thinking about what next to write about. There are endless topics: work, people, rituals, shopping, traffic, living routines. Everything is interesting. But because I am feeling a bit brain muddled by massive doses of intellectual and sensory input, I’m going for the easy target: animals at night.

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Elephant fences – thick electrical wires running about 5 feet off the ground – are supposed to keep the elephants out. At least that’s the theory. Our property is surrounded by an elephant fence.

Tuesday night about 8 pm Rehema knocked on the door and hurriedly entered. “There’s an elephant in the yard,” she said looking flustered, her dinner of rice and stewed chicken in one hand, a weak cell-phone flashlight in the other. “It’s big and I’m afraid to go to my room.” An elephant in the yard! We’d been waiting for this. We grabbed our ultra-bright, heavy duty, REI torch and went outside. No elephant. He’d moved off the lawn at the sign of action. I used the beam of my flashlight to survey the surrounding bushes. There he was behind some bushes down the hill about 100 feet, his eye-shine an eerie yellowish green glow in the dark. We escorted the girls across the lawn and returned to the house. Smart people do not try to creep up on elephants in the dark (or any time for that matter).
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When I started this post a couple of days ago, we had two staff, Rehema and Jane. Now we have one. Jane left. Not sure what happened: the location is too isolated maybe, we hired her as a gardener and she didn’t want to garden, the elephant pushing over the tree and trampling the garden last night was too much for her… who knows. When we returned from work today, Jane and all her belongings were waiting to be driven to Isiolo. John is off doing that now.

When we took this assignment, we knew that providing jobs to people was important and expected of us. Though the extent of our experience with domestic help was limited to an occasional four hour-per-week house cleaner, we resolved to do our part.
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We live in a cottage in Afrika. It is perched on the side of a hill, surrounded by acacia and grasslands, facing Mount Kenya. Our nearest neighbor is five miles away over a 4-wheel drive only road.

It is a one bedroom, thatched roof cottage built as a guest house for Anna Merz, the godmother of Kenya’s rhino protection movement. The main house consists of two, peaked circular huts connected by an arc of windows on one side and three sides of a rectangle on the other. A large fireplace dominates one side of the living room. The kitchen is a seven by ten foot outbuilding three steps from the front door. Our shower and toilet are in separate, rough-stone, circular enclosures about 50 feet up a rise from the bedroom side of the house. Half of the wall on one side of the toilet enclosure is missing. Instead of windows we have a prime, open air wildlife viewing spot. The kitchen and bathroom have running water.
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An elephant parade went through our swamp Monday morning. Dozens of them; large family groups with big males at the front, mothers bringing up the rear and babies sandwiched in between. They moved steadily and determinedly, grazing briefly on the tall grasses in the swamp and then pushing on into the dry grasslands. We were told they were migrating north, using the daylight hours to travel through the “safe” territory of Lewa. By nightfall they would be at the Lewa boundary, positioned to traverse the more dangerous, poacher prone districts under cover of darkness.

We watched from the breakfast terrace at Ngiri House, occasionally picking up binoculars to study a particular elephant cluster or scan the surrounding area for other animals. On one such scan I spotted a lone baby elephant wandering in the grass at the edge of the swamp, heading west rather than north with the rest. Where was its mother? Where was it going? As breakfast progressed I kept track of it, willing it to turn and join the safety of a large family group. I was worried. A baby elephant, I told John, should not be wandering around by itself. There were lions out there more than capable of taking him (or her) down.
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