Our blog has been a bit quiet lately. It isn’t that nothing is going on. It’s just that what we are doing is harder to write about. The topics we’re discussing at the dinner table have morphed from heart-stopping wildlife sightings and bird species identification to things like:

“Given all the problems up here, what are the realistic and workable ways to improve conservation outcomes and achieve sustainable economic growth? How can we use NRT’s Livestock to Market business or tourism development as catalysts?”

“Who are the political stakeholders that need to be involved in increasing the number of teachers in the pastoralist communities and how can we keep teachers in schools when they’re being harassed by local warriors, they don’t have places to sleep and they get paid about half the time?”

We’ve moved from the wonders of the place to the nitty gritty of the work.

The hands on work of keeping track of cows when there are no computers available.

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.

Guest Post by Julie Curtis:

I sleep beneath a mosquito net, under a blanket that was originally intended to be a garment for a Masai warrior, in a house with no indoor shower, and electricity that cuts out at 10:30pm and then whirs noisily on again at 6am, filling the room with light if I left the switch in the on position when it quit, which I do, because I can’t remember which position is “off”. There are bush babies in the trees outside my window, enormous white cricket-like bugs plastered to the windows dreaming of getting in, and who knows what else roaming around at night. It seems unfair to expect the wi fi to work here. And yet, it kind of does. Enough to make me believe in the possibility of it. Enough to allow my clients in Japan to expect me to meet their quick-turn copywriting deadlines.

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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.

Guest Post by Julie Curtis

The smell is a mix of something burning, exhaust, and food of some kind, maybe meat. The highway outside the sliding door honks and whines all night, past a cylindrical building with its roof angled like a lipstick and letters on top of that spelling out “INTEGRITY CENTRE.” Jet lag clutches the right side of my forehead like talons, and my feet, swollen from three consecutive long haul economy flights, beg to be elevated.

So I skip the complimentary breakfast they serve at the Sarova Panafric, which the bellman, Collins, highly recommends and hopes I will rate favorably on Trip Advisor. He spent more than a few minutes last night telling me which Kenyan foods to try at the buffet, adding that I really ought to wash it all down with beer.

My driver, Sammy, will be here early to take me to the little regional airport where I will board a 16-seat flight from Nairobi to Lewa Downs. I am too tired to shower, but I showered last night when I arrived, so I should be okay.

Kenya’s golden Integrity Center

About once or twice a week, I lie awake at night pondering the scale of the task I volunteered to take on last summer. How on earth, I worry, am I going to keep my growing list of fledgling businesses moving forward? When we arrived in September, that list consisted of livestock trading, bead craft and micro-lending. Tourism hovered on the horizon. There were business plans for wild silk and bananites seed processing sitting on my desk. Then came mangos: 40,000 metric tons or 93,000,000 of them rotting on the ground in a poor conservancy on the Tana River. Then fish: boat loads of them freshly caught and spoiling on the beaches of our coastal conservancies, all for the want of ice and refrigeration. The pastoralist herders in the NRT conservancies just south of Somalia and those in the Turkana region below the South Sudan want access to reliable and fair markets for their cows, sheep and goats. “Green” brokers are hot to harvest carbon credits from our conservancies’ vast grasslands. I’m sure there are more coming. What’s a girl to do?

Pray (and make calls) and Angels volunteer.

Angels appear

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.

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