I visited Nairobi, Kenya almost three years ago and during my stay shot quite a bit of footage - primarily of the Masai Mara park in Kenya. At any rate, I have finally gotten around to editing the footage so I’m going to start sharing it through Drift Reality.
The first clip is basically a composite of some footage of the streets I took while driving around in Nairobi. The track is ‘Cheroko,’ by Nyoto Ndogo.
It’s Monday morning and I’m back in the United States. The Conference ended last Wednesday, and on Thursday, we took a taxi to the domestic airport in Nairobi and got aboard a tiny charter plane that seated about twelve people. The French pilot handed a basket of caramels back to the passengers and then began making preparations for take-off. We were headed to Masai Mara.
We arrived at the park and were greeted by a guide in a Land Rover who was accompanied by a Masai hunter.
The Safari itself was actually quite amazing and I saw some of the most amazing things, including a pride of fourteen lions lounging on the road at sunset, a cheetah mother with three cubs, and I even saw three female lions eating an ostrich they had just killed.
The Safari driver contained a wealth of knowledge about the animals in the park and I was fascinated to learn about the different types of social behaviors that the animals exhibited. One of the most interesting things I learned was that the only animals that mate for life are Jackals and Dik-Diks (a small creature in the antilopinae subfamily). Allegedly, if one of their mates dies, they become depressed and essentially commit suicide by offering themselves to a predator.
In the evening, we returned to the campsite for dinner and watched a “leopard baiting” - a process in which a hunk of meat is hung up in a tree with the intention of attracting a leopard. Apparently, leopards have an extremely keen sense of smell and can detect fresh blood from up to five kilometers away. That night, the winds didn’t carry properly, and we went to bed without seeing the leopard but eyes wide from everything else we had seen that day.
After two days on safari, I returned to Nairobi for a night. Getting ready for bed, I flicked on CNN and saw that Gary Coleman had decided to run for governor of California. After the wonders I had seen and experienced in Africa, it seemed like some sort of twisted reminder that I was returning home, to turn the television on and see Gary Coleman being interviewed on CNN.
Hearing a political hopeful saying things like, “Well, my friends wanted me to run and I thought it would be pretty cool,” and “No, I’m not serious about running but I do believe in a flat tax,” made me wonder what people around the world must be thinking about us. I finally drifted off to sleep, thinking that concerns about my country’s international perception wasn’t anything a one-night layover in Amsterdam wouldn’t be able to fix.
Masai Mara is a large natural reserve in the southwest section of Kenya, on the Kenya-Tanzania border. As we flew over the park, we could see large herds of wildebeest and zebras roaming the park. I fell asleep, but I was told by my travel companions that there was even a herd of about twelve or thirteen elephants roaming below.
During my stay at the Safari Park hotel, I had been fortunate enough to meet a Masai hunter who was working at the sushi restaurant and he had taught me a lot about his tribe, including the following points of interest:
This last point presented a conundrum of sorts, one that I would spend the rest of my time in Africa trying to figure out. The problem with one man having eight or nine wives is that, in a population that contains a roughly equal number of men and women, if one man has eight wives, that leaves seven men who won’t be able to have any.
After asking about six different Masai hunters how this ratio was possible, I got the following answers:
I’m currently sitting in a conference on how to communicate in the scientific community. This is a long conference. At any rate, I’m fortunate enough to have an Internet connection here so it is allowing me to check my e-mail and write about my trip for the first time in several days.
Since my first letter on Wednesday, I’ve lead four six hour-long seminars/workshops on Information Technology and Web Development. The class has consisted of a diverse group of about twenty-five stakeholders in the field of Biochemistry ranging in occupation from scientists, to staffers, to media professionals. I’ve felt a bit odd, being twenty-five years old, teaching a class to people who are old enough to be my parents, but I’ve found them all to be eager, enthusiastic, and tremendously intelligent.
This teaching experience has been an extremely positive contrast to my previous teaching endeavors. Then again, after teaching basic English to Korean children and fundamentals of Math to fashion students in Southern California, there’s no other way to go than up.
The conference got off to an amusing start, as I sat up in front of the audience, sandwiched between the two keynote speakers: the head of one of the Science conglomerates (one of the sponsoring groups) and a former Kenyan Minister of Foreign Affairs, wondering how I got myself into this situation.
My original presentation materials consisted of a systematic approach to understanding and strategically leveraging the online environment with regard to particular issues and their relevant stakeholders. What I soon found was that all the students wanted to learn HTML and Web site design. So after seeing glazed looks and yawns during my presentation on the first day, I quickly changed the agenda so that the second day would consist of basic HTML.
By the third day, I had more or less skimmed through my presentation on mapping and monitoring the online environment, initially intended to be a three hour-long presentation, in about forty minutes, instead resorting to the creation of a class-wide Yahoo Group throughout the remainder of the day.
The fourth day went from a media training and science communications workshop to a daylong Dreamweaver (a popular HTML editing software) course in which I helped the students to each create their own Web site and post their site on a free Geocities server.
So after the end of four days, I had basically scrapped countless of hours of seminar preparation in favor of ad-libbing Yahoo Group and web design classes. That being said, at the end of four days, I’ve managed to create a permanent tool for this class to communicate and interact online with one another and also given each of them their own personal web page.
The first half of the conference is over and the second half, in which the conference has been joined by Kenyan Parliamentary Members and prominent stakeholders from around the world, has begun. Last night, a few international colleagues flew in and we went to a dinner show in which we were served game meat such as antelope, zebra, and gazelle, while a group of African dancers and acrobats pranced around on stage. The dance routine was unusually post-modern, evidenced by the fact that at one point, the entire dance crew broke into the running man. Somehow, I managed to resist the urge to leap onto center stage and do the Cabbage Patch.
The tableside conversation has basically focused on issues management. Subsequently, I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet as of late. It’s a bizarre thing, to listen to people talk for long stretches of time, just bizarre.
At any rate, I’m distracted by this guy talking into the microphone so I should probably cut this short and wait for a time when I can actually concentrate on writing.
The Hotel (Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi) has been one of the nicest resorts I’ve stayed at. On the second night, I managed to find a Japanese restaurant with first-rate chefs and promptly decided to eat there for the next three nights, despite being called “crazy” by my colleagues for eating sushi in Nairobi. I’ve taken my daredevil exploits one step further, by using tap water to brush my teeth and refraining from using my mosquito netting. Yes, I’ve become a real risk-taker over here.
Hi all, I left Dulles at 5:30 PM on Monday and after fifteen hours on two planes and a four-hour-long layover in Amsterdam, I arrived at the airport in Nairobi. Apparently, it is about midnight over on the East Coast and that may explain why I feel like a zombie right now. Or maybe it is the fact that my diet for the past twenty-four hours has consisted of airplane food, Imodium, and CVS generic brand sleeping pills.
The airport reminded me a bit of Sri Lanka’s airport for some reason. We had a nice fellow named Paul waiting for us at the exit gates and we headed out of the airport. The airport is in an industrial area of Nairobi and I was amazed at how developed the area was. Not that I was expecting huts and zebras as soon as we got off the plane, but I also wasn’t expecting huge car dealerships on both sides of the road.
We drove through the downtown area of Nairobi and my curiosity at the nightlife was tempered with the words of my co-workers who were traveling with me - “Don’t drink the water! Don’t eat anything that may have been tainted with water! Don’t go out by yourself! Brush your teeth with spring water, etc.” I wondered how much of this was scared American syndrome and how much was the reality of visiting Kenya.
About two months ago I had met a Georgetown alumni who had been born and raised in Kenya and had mentioned how non-essential employees at the US embassy in Nairobi had been given the option of returning home. He scoffed at the notion and told me that the fears were completely overblown. It made me think about how when I had been living in Korea, I would occasionally see herds of American tourists traveling together in tightly knit groups, pointing and gawking at everything as they headed to the local TGIF.
The Safari Park Hotel is absolutely beautiful and contains about seven restaurants, four bars, spa, etc. After arriving, I went to one of the bars and had a few beers. While sitting at the bar, I was shocked to hear a wailing sound coming from behind a closed door. “What the hell is that,” I asked the bartender. “Is that a bunch of Koreans?”
She smiled and nodded. “They like the Karaoke,” she responded.
The one thing I can always seem to count on no matter where I am in the world, there is always going to be Koreans singing Karaoke nearby.
I went back to my hotel room after an hour or so and lay in bed while my poor brain wondered why I was trying to fall asleep at what it thought should be about 10:00 in the morning. I stared at the mosquito netting for about two hours before drifting off to sleep.
Anyway, I’ve only been gone for about twenty-four hours and even though my poor brain is utterly confused (even more so than usual) by the time change, I feel completely refreshed in some strange way. I haven’t had this feeling in about two years nor have I had the urge to really these updates in about two years. It just isn’t as inspiring when you’re talking about spending the weekend in Balboa Park.
Well, I’ve got loads of work to get through during the next few days, when I’ll be explaining to a classroom of Africans how to use the Internet to communicate (and no, this doesn’ t mean walking them through Hotmail) - but things should lighten up by the weekend and hopefully I’ll have something interesting to talk about.
