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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My job here in Kenya is to work with the Northern Rangelands Trust’s (NRT) education program. The NRT currently works with 26 Community Conservancies. These Conservancies are self-governed entities that were admitted into the NRT after agreeing to implement specific governance, security and conservation activities (like elected local boards, cattle rustling prohibitions and anti-poaching measures). In return, the Conservancies receive money, training and services designed to improve their standard of living. That is where I come in. I am part of a project to develop a strategic plan for improving the access to education in the Northern Regions. I will blog more about that on another day.

The Lewa Conservancy established an education program, LEP (Lewa Education Program), in the late 90’s. My first task is to determine what the LEP is doing that is effective and can be replicated in the NRT. To do that I am visiting all 18 of the Lewa partnered schools and talking with the Principal (mostly), teachers, and students. I hear interesting stories. Here is one.
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While visiting schools I ran into this group of girls playing in the yard at Kanyunga Primary School near Lewa. It is one of the Lewa supported schools. They are playing Gechethi.

Using a stick the girls draw a large grid on the ground with 10 squares in two rows of five. Two players start at one end in adjacent squares. Each places a rock in their first square. They step into the first square on one foot and then hop and kick the stone to the next square with that one foot. Hop and kick the stone to the next square and so on. Passing their opponent at the top of the grid, they continue back down the other side. If a player’s stone does not land in the next square (either falling short or going passed) then her turn is over. It is OK if a second foot touches the ground.

If you look closely at the playing grid, they have worn indentations into the ground. The girls have been playing for a while. Kids, in whatever conditions and with whatever resources available, find ways to play and have fun.

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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This is a test of adding videos to the web site. Let me know if it works or not.

In any case we drove up next to several white rhinos and filmed one. This rhino was as close as it looks. No zoom was used on the camera.

Click on the link depending on your connection speed.

Rhino High Def

Rhino low definition

Yesterday Anne and Jane, our gardener, drove to Meru Town to buy seeds for our vegetable garden. While they were away, I set up the umbrella on our deck. That was an involved process. First, deal with the bats. There were four with yellow bellies, about the size of rats and sound asleep. They fell off the underside of the umbrella as I opened it, almost on my head. They curled into bat fetal position and then groggily crawled away. Next, I removed the umbrella from the table and set it on the ground upside down to set the splines in place. I had to sit on the splines to press the center ring down far enough so that I could put a pin in to hold it up. Then I got a hose and Clorox and cleaned the bat droppings off of the table, yuck. Once I put the umbrella in place, I was ready to sit back and enjoy the view.

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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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Rhinos seem to like me. Today I came face to face with Elvis, a two year old, 2,000 pound, blind, black rhino as I was leaving a meeting with Faith, the head of Lewa’s educational program. Faith went one way, I went another. Wouldn’t you know it, Elvis ignored Faith and came after me. He soon had me cornered in the office courtyard. Elvis stepped closer and closer. His snout pressed me back toward a hard, mud brick wall. “I’m going to get crushed,” I thought. What was I to do?
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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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