I think there's a Paul Simon song about photos like this.
Considering it leads to a jewel in a country in need of tourism bucks from the outside, the road to Maasai Mara National Park leaves a lot to be desired. When a driver chooses the dirt road to the side of the paved highway rather than the prescribed lane, you realize there's going to be a little extra time to "enjoy" the ride.
It's not a bad view to waste those extras hours on, driving past Maasai tribesmen still herding goats and wearing red cloth blankets as they must have done centuries ago, and watching the wide savanna open up as you head south toward Tanzania. And a bumpy six hours after leaving Nairobi — with just two stops our driver "offered" us to "stretch our legs" at roadside curio shops as we entered tourist territory — we were on the doorstep of the park.
At sunset that evening we watch the wildebeest migration, labeled in Kenya as the "eight wonder of the world." (Though Wikipedia says a few dozen other things lay claim to the title as well.) And, remarkably for a small tree stand in the middle of a vast plain, we had cell phone reception. (Which I consider the ninth wonder of the world, since I can't get reliable reception in my own home.)
The guy who lined up the safari asked if we were ok with "a tent." Um, I guess we were all right with roughing it for a few days. Here's Timm before the table filled up with breakfast.
Among the other wonders were a shower and flush toilet in the "tent" we had reserved, the safari driver's uncanny knack in finding exactly the animal we were looking for, the three course meals served several hours from civilization at Ilkeliani camp, and of course, the wildlife. It's like The Lion King in person.
The two moments from our safari that stand out in my memory aren't really captured in the photos below. As we drove into the park that first evening there were a few thousand wildebeests ("gnus" in Swahili, or "government cows" in the words of our driver Joseph), making their way on the annual famed migration from the Serengeti to feed on the grasslands of Maasai Mara before returning to Tanzania. Joseph wasn't far off with his joke; with the grunting and standing around grazing it was like a really large head of especially hairy cattle in Kansas.
But as we peaked over a small hill the view opened up to what must have been a hundred thousand gnus, just thick in every direction. There's six million of them or so migrating together (hence the "wonder" myth), so who knows how many we really saw. It was a brown ocean, slowly moving ahead.
After we'd driven around following wildebeests and happening upon giraffes, zebras and antelope for a few hours, we were headed back. We turned on a trail near a stream and Timm yells "hippo!" Joe slammed the brakes, and the startled hippo, which are huge in person, reared up nearly completely out of the water, turned and darted the other way into the water. The whole thing lasted seconds.
The protected gnus move a lot more casually when the ubiquitous safari rigs drive by them, so the hippo encounter got our hearts pounding. The animals in the photos below are moving slowly, fortunately for the amateur photographers, but they are still pretty amazing.
The wildebeest clean-up crew. We timed the safari just right, running into such a large herd on our first trip into the park. A day later they had already moved on, leaving maybe a few hundred stragglers.
Giraffe takes a little bite. A few minutes later another joined him.
Acacia tree and a lingering gnu.
This was as close as we came to the classic television image of the migration. They really do just line up by the thousands at rivers and streams, and someone says "go" and it turns into this living, pulsing (and grunting) flow of beast.
As Joseph would say it, "zeb-rahs."
The safari traffic was inconsistent, but would usually flock when a pack of lions or something rare like a rhino was spotted. We found lions with these two, and were lucky to have such a sparse crowd.
Vultures in an acacia tree. They are really ugly, but the vultures kind of fascinated me
Caught this girl just waking up, with her den of 14.
Then she went hunting while the others slept. She had a gazelle in her sights (its right behind the bush), but made a loud move and blew it.
From our van, Timm looks out over the horizon as the sun sets.
Black rhino. This was the one animal I thought could do some permanent damage if he felt like we deserved it.
Hippos hanging out just under the water on a warm evening. They were pretty shy, but it seemed like they were multiplying under there by the way eyes kept popping up.
Sun roof! (This was the one place in the park our driver let us get out and walk around. There's probably no rule one way or the other, but it felt kind of cool to be walking where the hippos could come get us.)
Another nap we broke up. The lions give you this annoyed look that says, "Are you a wildebeest I can eat? No?", then roll over and go back to sleep.
Silhouette, huh?
Cape buffalo. I think these are in what's called "the Big Five," along with rhinos, elephants, lions, leopards and giraffe, though I have no idea why. They don't seem cool, or particularly rare. I'd put hippo in the club instead.
A family of elephants. This was our last quest, we spent the whole last morning looking for elephants and finally found this group of three.
And then we found this guy all alone. He must have wanted company, because he got pretty close.
One of the first to-dos Timm and I had when we landed in Nairobi was to buy a cell phone. Our friends Matt Peterson and Luke Bruckner, who've made this trip before, had recommended we carry one with a Kenyan number.
That became brilliant advice when we were dropped off at a different place than Walgio expected in Kisumu town. I'm not sure we would have tracked him down before dark by simply asking around at the shanties next to the bus terminal. ("You know, black guy in his 60s, drives a blue car? Have you seen him?")
The line at the downtown Safaricom store was out the door when we arrived, which seemed a little odd for a ho-hum Tuesday morning. But apparently that's the norm, even though there are Safaricoms everywhere. Absolutely everyone has a cell phone, and between upgrading (Internet-equipped phones seemed to be the new thing at Safaricom) and adding airtime (everyone also seems on the pay-as-you-go plan) the cell phone stores are as busy as the matatu roundabout during rush hour.
I got more text messages over four days in Kenya than I do in a month here.
And people seemed to be using those cell phones constantly. This is just me speculating on culture differences (really, an incredible unwise thing to do based on 12 days in a country, I know), but my theory is that Kenyan cell phone etiquette differs from ours because of the lack of home telephones over the years. In particular in rural areas, the sudden access to one another when mobile phones became common must have been an incredible change from the days where someone would have to track down a public phone to make calls. They aren't burdened by the memory of telemarketers calling and being ignored during dinner, for instance. Which made every call, it seemed, vital to answer.
You know that American guilt we share when a cell rings during a meeting, or the polite way movie theaters demand we turn our phones off, or how we'll automatically hit "ignore call' when we're having a face-to-face conversation? None of that exists there. I saw one person screen a call. One, and he called back 40 second later. Phone rings in the middle of our conversation? It's answered. During a meal? Answered. During church? God goes on hold.
As a result Kenyans are very much in touch. Again, I'm speculating, but that characteristic seemed to cross over to national conversation. When we finally found a newspaper, what impressed me was that people from different walks of life, over the course of a few days, had talked to us about the exact issues on the front page. The agenda of the day, even though newspapers don't circulate everywhere, seemed to get around to everyone pretty seamlessly.
This is an awful transition, but that Kenyan curiosity I'm still speculating on seemed to apply also to people's interaction with us. Or at least we were asked a lot of interesting questions, and hopefully we did an adequate job of representing our country with the answers. Like these:
Do we know Shakira, Will Smith or Beyonce? You have two guesses as to who asked this, and the first doesn't count. The teenagers at Kamasengre are familiar with Western pop music, apparently. We explained the geography of the West Coast from Alaska to Los Angeles is as way of excuse for not being able to personally greet Jay Z for them, but the follow up question from one of the girls was the one that got me: Aren't you a journalist? Why don't you just go interview them?
Have the Twin Towers been rebuilt? It was hard to tell how much news from the U.S. is circulated in East Africa. The Kenyan papers didn't have much and the British or international news didn't give us much play either. (Other than Obama, of course, you may have heard he's popular there. Do you own birth certificate joke here.) But they knew about 9/11, obviously.
What does a beard or mustache mean? This was my favorite question. Since Timm doesn't travel with a razor and other Americans had showed up in the past with beards or at least some of that traveler's scruff, they were curious about what statement a little chin hair means. In Kenya, it's one of two things: you're a Muslim or a village elder. For us, we told them, you're either a hockey player during the Stanley Cup playoffs, you're lazy, or just a guy who likes a beard. In America a mustache, Timm told them, means you're a cop.
What is Yellowstone like? For a country so beautiful and full of animals and national parks, that was a really interesting question. It's like many places in Kenya, in a way, though our buffaloes have fur and the trees have needles rather than fruit. Summer traffic in our national park reminds me of some of the jams we sat through as well.
Is there corruption? Yes, but... There's corruption, and then there's Kenyan corruption. Talking about politics in a developing country is always a good way to gain perspective on the relative health of our political system. We don't have to pay to join the military or police force, they were surprised to hear, you actually get paid to sign up. And our elected officials pay taxes like the rest of us (at least they're required to by law, unlike in Kenya's parliament, which is a huge issue there right now). Actually, I think Kenya is in a really interesting position as a country only a few decades old, with a year-old constitution and elections coming up. Though no one kids himself about commonplace government malfeasance (breaking news about corruption makes page three in the paper, if you can imagine), people also seemed pretty hopeful that a new generation of politicians are on the way. Having Western oversight of that process through embassies and the UN helps, we were told.
Washington, D.C.? No, Washington state. Again, more geography. Timm's explanation of how seasons so drastically change the amount of daylight during the course of a year in Alaska fascinated people. If you live along the equator, you apparently don't give much thought to the tilt of the earth's axis.
How is college paid for? Again, a question the students were really interested in. Our mix of student loans, grants, scholarships, work study and upfront payment by the student or family is similar in some ways to the Kenyan system, and very interested to those students contemplating college. Being allowed to chose among so many options seemed to grab their attention also. Students in Kenya who do qualify for college usually don't go right out of high school either, we were told. So an 18-year-old taking a loan out to leave for a big university isn't really familiar to them — and given the rising cost of tuition here, maybe it won't be for us either.
Can I have your email address? Really popular question, even with people we'd barely met. But the answer was always yes.
After all, they already had our cell phone number.
Above is a message to Operation My People from Rebecca and Janet, two of the girls who are in school because a group of Americans are paying their school fees. For anyone involved with that organization, your donations are being spent well. We met with ten of the 20 students OMP sponsors; every one of them was grateful to you, seemed very happy to share with us about their lives, and several are doing very well in class (and that's according to the principal, not just the students). Not to mention they were just really nice kids.
For those of you that don't know about OMP or this relationship with Kamasengre Mixed Secondary School, here's the story of the school and students we visited.
Form Ten at KMSS, or what we'd call sophomores, all in one classroom.
Like I've written in other posts, Kamasengre is a rural district near the far west end of Rusinga Island. For years there was no school for secondary students there. This school, which is called "mixed" because boys and girls attend, is just four years old.
About 200 students fit in the four-room school. Do the math, or look at the picture above to see what that means in terms of class size. Eleven teachers rotate in and out of the four rooms at 40-minute intervals for each subject, during a day that lasts from as early as 6:30 a.m. for students looking for early tutoring help to 5 p.m. if the students stay for extracurriculars. (Which they do. Friday of our visit was drama club day, and at least half of the school stayed until almost 6 on a Friday night to watch their peers put on a play. Friday doesn't necessarily mean weekend, however, since most classes also meet Saturday as well. Also, you American teachers or school administrators may like to note, the students take a break in the morning to help clean the building or the school grounds. And of course they have a tea and mandazi break at 10 every day.)
Fifty students per class? A day that begins at 6:30 a.m.? This is the faculty at KMSS, who may be the real heroes.KMSS struggles to retain teachers because of its remote location, low pay, and lack of teacher housing.
Eighty-three students at KMSS are girls, who drop out at a much higher rate than boys. Pregnancy, the need to care for a family that has lost a parent or a lack of money for school fees, often because the student is an orphan, are just a few of the reasons. Operation My People addresses one of those issues (fees), community groups like women's clubs try to help teach girls to avoid pregnancy or HIV with education classes outside of school, and some orphans are able to live with others in the community who support them in school. (That was the case with our host, Sabina Otiendo, who had four girls living with her.)
Vivian Ochieng, an orphan who lost her parents to political violence in 2007, and Odira Francis Ranger, a Form Three who wants to be a computer engineer. (Or an actor, after the play we watched him in Friday night.)
Having a school in Kamasengre has helped the community immensely, it seemed. Principal Peter Okomo said many students nearby could not travel across the island to the other secondary school, and being within proximity of a child's home allows him to talk with parents about the value of education, or negotiate school fee payment in person. We were told that students from the surrounding area often ask when they'll be able to enroll, and are turned away because there isn't room or the child can't afford the fees.
"If not for this school," Okomo told Timm and I when talking about the Form Four students who had been at KMSS since it opened, "these kids wouldn't go to school."
When we asked Ranger what he'd be doing if not for the OMP scholarship, the boy who was smiley, outgoing, and joking with us completely choked up. He couldn't finish the thought or put it into words.
Bryan Onyango, an OMP scholarship recipient. Dozens of students apply for the OMP money, and to qualify they must maintain a C+ average.
On the first day we were at KMSS the Form Fours were taking their exit examinations, which college entrance in Kenya is based upon. At least four OMP students were expected to qualify, although college placement is assigned depending on how well you do in the exams. The school is also ranked against its regional peers, and Okomo proudly walked us through the latest comparison, showing KMSS at number 4 overall. They even rank individual students through the region, and Okomo pointed out an underclass girl from Kamasengre in second place. Janet, the girl in the video above, was ranked eighth among Form Four students in six district schools.
Steven Ngesa shows us the new science lab, build with the help of an organization called 'One Kid One World.' The small inventory of books are stored in those back cupboards, though, as Ngesa put it, "A building without any books is not really a library."
With that much riding on scores they take the numbers game seriously, and most Form Four students don't participate in extracurriculars (the school has drama, soccer, handball and cross country) because they are too busy preparing for exams as they close their secondary school career. All Form Four classes, incidentally, are taught in English, making it a bit more difficult for kids who's native language is Swahili or Luo. So the students clearly work hard. One girl in Sabina's home, Brenda, would wake up around 4 each morning to work on her reading, in hopes of qualifying for the OMP funds next year. It's remarkable dedication, and from the sounds of it not all that uncommon.
Timm, Ranger, Bryan and Daniel talk geography. Perhaps it's obvious, but they needed him to point out Noatak.
But the facilities and resources haven't caught up. Daniel wants to study biology and be a doctor, Ranger likes computers, Jesslyn wants to be a CNN anchor. Pretty typical teenage ambitions, except this group, like much of Africa, I'd assume, pursues those dreams without a school library, without electricity in their classrooms, without indoor plumbing, and with two laptops available on the entire campus.
Still, when the career alternative is the local fishing industry, with 12-hour shifts in the dark on small boats catching buckets full of a tiny fish called omena, motivation can't be hard to find. We sat through an English class one afternoon, and a lesson on how punctuation use can change the meaning of a sentence had the room enraptured. There wasn't a peep other than to legitimately question the teacher's explanation.
"You are not a failure," Ngesa told us was the mantra they preach to the students, focusing on early grades, as we do here, to build the blocks that will turn Kamasengre into a more pretigious secondary school.
Okomo said that OMP's foundation — Theodora left Kenya to teach American students, and years later those students help Kenyan children — is the same worldview he tries to impart.
"Our aim is that they succeed in life," he told us our last morning at the school. "We tell them, 'OMP has extended a gesture to you. In three or four years, you will extend a gesture to someone else.'"
Aileen and Jesslyn, the Kamasengre actors, rappers, scholars, athletes, and, apparently, models. (We loaned the camera to the kids for awhile, so it was buddy picture day.)
The lunch spread in Kamasengre. Note the mound of ugali in the middle of the table, it was record-setting.
At the end of the first day I jotted down what we ate in my notebook. I thought it would be interesting to have a little diary of meals to help remember all the exotic Kenyan foods we were going to try during the trip.
The entry went something like this: fried eggs, toast, coffee and tea. For lunch, at a downtown Nairobi diner, we had chicken curry, rice, ugali and passion fruit juice. And for dinner with Alice and Faybe, at the Vitalis' home, it was ugali, sukuma wiki, a chicken stew and oranges.
Remarkably, that diary wouldn't change much (so I eventually quit writing down what we ate). That's no slight against the Kenyan diet, despite being somewhat basic we really enjoyed what we were served a never walked away from a table hungry. Clearly the cultural staples are important there, and were consistently served whether we ate with poorer rural people or at a city restaurant. We really became hooked on a few of the dishes, so I'll share some of the highlights.
Dan Nyangweso's sukuma wiki field on Rusinga Island.
The first is sukuma wiki, which means, translated from Swahili, "pushing the weak." Sukuma wiki was always on the table for lunch and dinner, and judging from the ease in growing and preparation I can see why. It's sauteed greens, more or less, made from a plant that resembles our swiss chard or kale. The leaves are chopped into thin slices by the handful and cooked in a small amount of oil with some green onions and chopped tomatoes. We had dinner at Dan Nyangweso's home on our last night on Rusinga. While his wife cooked the main dish outside on a fire pit, he, probably uncharacteristically for a man, gave us a cooking demonstration on sukuma wiki and ugali in the living room by lantern. His two-year-old daughter sat there staring at him, until Dan noticed and laughed: 'She doesn't know what to think,' he said, 'she's never seen me do this before.' But judging by the taste, he wasn't out of practice.
That night Dan also made ugali, which must be the national food of Kenya (and regrettably, doesn't show up in a close-up among my photos. Sorry). On one of the first days one man told us he just doesn't feel right if he doesn't have some ugali every day. It's the staple, and it was everywhere. At one of the safari meals, where they serve a cuisine that's more upscale British and didn't have the standard African foods, Timm and I went and asked the Maasai kitchen staff if we could get some ugali to go with dinner. The guy smiled and brought it right out; of course they had some going for themselves in the back.
Ugali is also very simple, coming from a crop that can be seen growing everywhere. You heat some water and slowly mix in maize flour, constantly stirring until it has a porridge-like look. Then the ugali is allowed to set up and hardened a bit, and nearly every host would place it on a plate shaped into a small dome that looks like mashed potatoes. When it's cool it takes on a thicker consistency, so you grab it with the fingers of your right hand and use the ugali almost like a utensil you can eat (which means it trumps rice as a side dish in my book). It's probably a little bland, but incredibly filling and a little addicting.
Chicken, beef, lamb, eggs: These don't change much in the English-Swahili translation, and we had one (or occasionally two) at every meal. It felt a little meat-heavy at times, actually. Fried, stewed, curried, even barbecued one night. Surprisingly, even at Lake Victoria we ate very little fish.
The morning mandazi in the pan at Kamasengre.
Mandazi was more rare than the other foods, but we lucked out a few times. Mandazi is the Kenyan donut, a small bit of fried bread served early in the day. Less sugary than our Dunkin' Donuts style, but eating them fresh out of the frying pan gives mandazi an edge over maple bars. Just ask Timm.
It's not Winchell's, but maybe that's a good thing.
One other special treat was fruit. Kenya is on the equator and is a very agricultural country, so every roadside stand and most backyards had a wide assortment. Bananas are smaller than what we're used to, growing only about 5 inches but tasting considerably sweeter than what our stores sell; oranges are the size of racquetballs rather than our softball-ball sized orbs; and mangos are maybe half the size of the one Timm and I bought at Metropolitan Market yesterday. Our host Vitalis Ojode asked us one night if all American fruit is genetically modified: we said yes, more or less, though there's a real trend toward organic and natural that does away with some of those genetically modified seeds. He said that Kenya will take 'em if we don't want 'em.
Timm picks a guava during a break in our hike on Mfangango Island.Yes, we were in someone's yard, but it was, like we say, "sawa." Guava from the tree, by the way, is wonderful.
The Ojode's backyard banana tree in Runda.
The last, and most important, that I'll cite is tea. Kenyan tea is a big deal. We drove past tea plantations in the Rift Valley with beautiful rowed hedges of emerald green pushes where tea-pickers were trimming the day's harvest. We saw estates where "tea tourists," like wine connoisseurs in Napa Valley, could vacation to sample tea and see it grown and picked. And everywhere we went there was a light blue thermos accompanying the meal, full of either mixed tea or hot milk to steep your own bag British-style. I haven't made ugali in my kitchen yet or used the kale from the backyard for sukuma wiki, but I've had a Kenyan black tea every day since returning.
A Rift Valley tea farm. There's maize in the background as well.
