Back home in Kasigau - Week 1

Our last couple days in Nairobi before coming to the bush were quite full with the kind of activities that make tourists feel they have really gotten to know a place. We took Claire to a Giraffe Center for endangered Rothchild's giraffe that is a favorite place from our last visit because there is a viewing and feeding platform where the giraffes come to be fed from visitors' hands.
We also took a day trip up to Lake Naivasha and Hell's Gate Canyon, a game park and an adjacent hike though a gorgeous canyon in Masai country. At Hell's Gate there was some welcome exercise walking and rock scrambling and we even visited a site called the Devil's Bedroom. David's brother SK (so named to prevent confusion with another Ken) walked with us around Nairobi for a day, too, which was much preferable to driving. We saw Uhuru (Freedom) Park, the burial place of first President Kenyatta, and all the other major landmarks.


We’ve arrived at our Kenyan home in Kasigau, with 8 college students:

*5 Western Washington University teaching interns who will be in Kasigau schools “around the hill” for two months

*Niece Jenny and her roommate & adopted niece Macaela, recent graduates of University of Idaho who are moving soon to Jora village banda for working with preschoolers, women and children for two months

*Daughter Claire who will be here for another week before returning to school at Humboldt State in California. And of course Professor Ken and Kristine...

All the young people were “picked” in Nairobi on the evening of the 30th, and we made the long trip to the bush the next day, arriving late on New Year’s Eve. Here on New Years people stay up all night at churches or bars to ring in the new year. We opted for a party on New Years Day, a very big affair with soda, Tusker (Kenyan beer), and even a roasted goat that came to the banda on four legs and left in people’s stomachs. (That is his little head o the grill with Jenny's astonished expression. My personal preference is not to eat anything I have had eye contact with, so I reverted immediately to being a vegetarian.) There was also a cake for our wedding anniversary, which we had both forgotten in all the the activity of the previous two days. But Grace Chari, our very good friend who is cooking for the group, remembered for us.

This very competent and intrepid group of interns has spent the week conquering jet lag and getting to know the community of five villages around Mt. Kasigau. We reviewed greetings of day, very important here, and practiced with one another at the banda, while walking around the villages and when visiting each of the five schools.

Our dear friend Ben, an elder who was an askari at the banda when Becky and I were here in 2006, was invited to come and give us an oral history of the Taita People, a highlight of the orientation week. At the conclusion of the talk, Ken presented Ben with a cane from my father's collection that has a dagger screwed under the cobra head handle.

We have also met with the area education officer, visited all five schools and arranged our schedule for working with students who are performing poorly in math, reading, and writing. Our efforts here in summer 2010 are remembered as being quite successful in improving performance, so there is a fair amount of enthusiasm for this term’s work.

On the home front, the banda is quite comfortable and everyone is getting used to the occasional scorpion, lizard, cockroach (the latter only in the toilets), and spiders (OK, one was a huge tarantula!). Water lines from the mountain are broken, which involves a lot of water hauling in the pick-up. We are figuring out transportation and communication, and generally settling in and reconnecting with friends from the villages, including class 4 teacher and long-time friend Faith and her baby Little Kris, pictured here. We can now use our local Sararicom phones on a huge rock kopje that sticks out over the bush, and if we drive 5 miles toward Rukanga. Our rented car is always full of people “balanced in color” when we drive from school to school, dropping patients at the health center in Rukanga, picking teens who are walking miles with heavy buckets of water on their heads, mothers and babies and bags of maize, older women with bundles of sticks, men with heavy packages, children who have never been in a car before...the rental car can be a microcosm of village life on any given day.

I have a good start on the narrative for week 2 but haven't any more time today for finishing up and adding the photos. So expect weeks 2 & 3 in a week, with more individual attention to the group of interns, safari to Tsavo East, and our work in schools.

We miss you all

Kris