A herd of more than fifty Impala joining us for breakfast

Anne and I have returned to the Lewa Conservancy in northern Kenya. After a long and uneventful flight, we landed in Nairobi, passed through a quick and efficient immigration and customs procedure, picked up our six bags and headed to the UpperHill Country Lodge to spend the night.

The next morning, Sunday, we gathered up our luggage and a mountain bike that Tom Gleason had generously left for us, climbed into our Land Cruiser with our driver, John, and made the four hour, 240 kilometer drive to Lewa Conservancy. Despite it being dry season, we had an afternoon downpour during the drive.

Hopefully, that ends the boring bits of the post.
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Friends and Family,

Do you have any DVD movies or TV series sitting around that you think are fun, interesting, or otherwise worth watching that you probably won’t be using for the next year or so that you could lend to us? If you do we would appreciate it if you would let us know before we leave for Kenya.

As we quickly approach our time of departure, September 13, it has occurred to Anne and me that we are going to be sitting in our hut in the conservancy together with no TV, restricted ability to stream from the internet and no ability to head to the movies in the evening. Our plan is to try to keep ourselves busy but being able to watch a show occasionally would help us pass the time. We will play the DVD’s on a computer which I believe will play both regular and Blu Ray DVD’s.

If you are willing to send us any, please contact us by phone, e-mail (jknapp@usinternet.com), or by making a comment here. I can then give you our address so you can send them.

Thanks in advance.

John and Anne

Samburu women

“Our bead program gives these women dignity and hope,” Celina said, eyes blazing as we discussed NRT Trading’s bead and micro-finance program over a cup of coffee in a Meru café. “Once they reach maturity, the girls are circumcised and married off by their fathers in exchange for cows and goats. They enter homes that are ruled by the men. They are powerless. When they join the bead program we teach them about household finances, about business disciplines and about the outside world. We give them a way to get together with other women to make money and to gossip. What they earn they use to buy food, to help pay the education fees for their children and to earn respect from their husbands.”

OK, hold on a minute, back up: Circumcised? Female genital mutilation (FGM)? I thought that was illegal in Kenya.

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John petting Nicky, an orphaned 13 month old Black Rhino.

There are 3 orphaned black rhinos on Lewa. Anne and I met two of them, Nicky and Hope. Nicky is 13 months old and blind. He is an orphan because in the wild he couldn’t see to find his mother. Hope’s mother was poached when she was a week old. Her mother’s horn was worth $35,000 USD to the poacher who killed her and had a street value of $120,000 in places like Vietnam. The third was born to a blind mother and was being picked up by the rangers the day we met Nicky and Hope but hadn’t arrived yet.

The orphans at Lewa are not kept in a cage during the day. They have two full time nannies who follow them everywhere. At night they sleep in a Boma to protect them from predators.

Nicky is the larger rhino and Hope the smaller one on the bottom left.

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On most of the planet, it is money that makes the world go round. In the pastoralist communities in northern Kenya, it is cows. The region’s future — it’s community health, peace, land conservation and wildlife preservation — depends on bringing these two systems together.

You can’t drive in Kenya without being aware of Safaricom or M-Pesa. Buildings everywhere are painted bright Safaricom or M-Pesa green and emblazoned with the companies’ logos. We quickly figured out that Safaricom is Kenya’s version of AT&T; we now have Safaricom phones and local phone numbers. But M-Pesa? That remained a mystery until we attended a community livestock sale.
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I love to walk and here I am in a beautiful, open grass land with miles and miles of red dirt road stretching before me. It looks perfectly peaceful, beckoning even.

“Can’t I just walk the kilometer from Ngiri House to Lewa Headquarters?” I ask Lydia, our server, at breakfast,

She looks puzzled, like I asked a question she didn’t understand. “Walk?”
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“So,” I ask,” Lions, rhino’s, elephants, buffalo, and leopards are all very dangerous, is there anything else that can kill you here?” Anne and I were having dinner with a film crew staying at Ngiri house like we were. Having finished another day of filming a documentary show to be aired on British ITV and on CNN in the US on September 15th, they were interviewing the six finalists for the Tusk Conservation Awards.
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We arrive about 2 pm on Saturday and are shown our thatched roof hut at Ngiri House. Then we are left to our own devices for a day and a half with the keys to a khaki-colored, four wheel drive Toyota Land Cruiser sporting an industrial-sized cattle guard and no instructions other than always close the hut door or the monkeys will get in. Our small semi-circular veranda looks out onto a swamp where we can see large black and white cranes taking off in the distance. The air is filled with the sounds of unfamiliar birds, buzzing insects and monkeys chattering and chasing each other around the lawn and through nearby trees. The place feels deserted and 62,000 hectares stretch out in front of us. What to do?

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We left our home in Brooksville Maine at 11:03 on Thursday morning, June 6, 2013. The drive to Pam’s house in Belmont, Massachusetts (Boston) took 4 ¾ hours.  After unloading the minivan and dropping off the keys we headed to Logan airport at 4:05. Our 7:15 pm flight schedule meant we had plenty of time. “Bing Bing” Anne’s phone signaled that we had an e-mail from Delta. Our flight had been pushed forward to 6:55. Still plenty of time.
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