I flew back to Kenya yesterday after a month long visit to the US. Other than my transporting a Nora virus from one grandchild in Texas to me to two grandchildren in Minnesota, it was a great trip.
Anne took a walk today so I thought that I would show you what that means.
We decided to try and get photos of a Long Tailed Widowbird and a Hoopoe on the drive to the airstrip. We were successful.
Long Tailed Widowbird
Hoopoe
Friday night Rehema asked me if I could drive her into Isiolo on Saturday morning to attend a funeral. This was her second one in a couple of months. I got to thinking about mortality both here and at home. In the USA the life expectancy is 79 years and most of us have infrequent experience with untimely death. Here in Kenya the life expectancy of someone born in 1990 was 59 years, it dropped to 52 years by 2001 due to HIV and has risen to 63 years for a Kenyan born now. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. In the seven months that we have been here untimely death seems to be a relatively frequent occurrence.
Our community is fairly small, I would guess that 2 to 3 degrees of separation would be around 10,000 people. In the seven months we’ve been here Rehema has had two friends pass on, the first was a 40 year old woman who died of aids and Friday’s was a 24 year old man who hung himself after being diagnosed with hiv. There have been 3-4 poachers shot. The mother of one Lewa employee and the aunt of another have had fatal car accidents. And a local herder was drunk and stumbled upon an elephant. In the course of fleeing, he literally bumped into a rhino and was killed. That makes nine untimely deaths in seven months. People have funerals, cry, and get on with life. It is not as if life is considered less valuable here. The sadness and tears are real. It just seems that some early deaths are expected. They are saddened but not shocked by them. For me, as an American, it is taking some getting used to.
Fear is not an issue for Anne and me and shouldn’t be to visitors. Since we are not poachers, don’t have unprotected sex with strangers, avoid getting drunk and wandering around elephants and rhinos, and drive conservatively our actual risk, here in Kenya, is little, if any, different than it would be in the US. It’s just that early death still comes as a surprise and shock when we hear about it.
It’s been a while since my last post. I got sick (a bad piece of goat or homemade honey beer?), so I had to re-load my intestinal system. Then my computer got sick (all my office programs just quit), so I had to re-load my operating system. Both took about three days.
Anne left for the US to visit with kids and grandkids and here I am finishing up the story of Bush Adventures.
I was the best spear thrower of the three of us. It must have been the hat.
The safety talk was serious. We were using actual Maasai spears (unsharpened). Don’t stick them in anybody. Look behind you before you throw because the back end is as dangerous as the front. When you fetch them after a throw, approach them from the side so that if you trip you don’t impale yourself. When you are walking in a line, carry them either vertically or hold them with the point off to the left so that if either you or the person behind you stumbles no one gets stabbed. This is probably more than anyone wants to know but I find it fascinating that there are taught safety rules just like in a shop, the military, or anywhere people are working with potentially dangerous equipment. The tools may be different but societies work out similar ways to insure safety.
The biggest lesson about actually using a spear is to figure out the range at which you are effective, then wait until the enemy reaches that point. It doesn’t matter if you get the lion 10 meters or 2 meters away, just be sure you don’t miss.
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Last week Skylar, Quinlan (two of my step grandsons) and I went to Bush Adventures in Laparua. There we met our four Maasai guides. Born and raised nearby, Silas, Saita, and Kortol are moran (warriors) and Roslynn is Silas’ sister. We were to be trained as Maasai warriors in the daytime and talk about Maasai culture around the campfire in the evening.
Our Trainers from the front; Silas, Kortol, Saita, Roslynn
Saturday Anne and I went with Mike and Jo to the Maasai Mara. It was ostensibly a business trip to look at their cattle and grassland management but we intended to include a bit of touristing as well. The first step was to squeeze into a little yellow plane, bounce down the runway, head south west, and labor up a long slow climb to 12,500 feet to go over the Aberdare Range. It felt like a flying version of “The Little Engine That Could”.
The little plane that could.
Yesterday, Mango Bob and I were driving into the office. As we came near the swamp Bob noticed three safari vehicles off to our left. Wondering what they had found, I stopped and we grabbed for our always present binoculars. There in front of the lead vehicle was a large healthy Cheetah.
Our first sighting of the Cheetah. Watching out for safari vehicles is a good technique for finding things of interest.
Every once in a while things are said that we would never have heard in Minnesota
“The elephants tore up the plumbing again!”
“John, can you hear the running water?” Anne called out at 5:00 am. Wearily climbing out of bed I joined her to investigate. “The elephants tore up the plumbing again!” I sighed. I walked past the fire pit, ducked and squeezed up a short narrow path through the brambles to the water tank and turned off the water supply to the entire compound. I went back to bed.
I changed the format of the Bird Page and renamed it the “Bird Gallery.” I hope you like the change.
After much prodding we have finally added a subscribe feature. If you look at the bottom of the right sidebar you will find a “Subscribe” button. Enter your e-mail address and press subscribe and you will get an e-mail whenever we make a new post.
We hope this makes it easier for you.
Last week I visited all the schools in Biliqo Bulesa, a conservancy northeast of Lewa, large in area and small in population. My driver, cook and I packed up our camping gear, food for a week, plenty of water and headed out. One hour of tarmac road and four hours on dirt found us in Merti. We spent the first night in a small hotel. I had the expensive room, Ksh 600 ($7.20) with indoor plumbing. Simon, the driver, and Faith the cook stayed in the Ksh 300 rooms. They had the better deal. Their board walls with gaping holes, paneless window openings and thatch roof let in a cool breeze while I sweltered in my block construction with sheet metal roof which absorbed and retained the daytime desert heat.
My room was in the white building in the background. Simon and Faith stayed in rooms to the right of the shaded terraces. Faith cooked us a dinner of canned corned beef and shredded cabbage. We didn’t get to share in the goat the man was skinning.