Picture Post!

I've talked a couple of times about Amboseli National Park so far, so I'm finally providing pictures! It's known for its elephants and this was the best picture I got of them. You can see Kili in the background. These three guys were about ten meters to the left of our Landcruiser. A couple of minutes after I took this picture, they walked in front of our car. You can see the one in front is playing with a branch with his trunk. He picked it up for a bit and started walking toward our car. Our driver for this trip is named Sipiya. He's worked for SFS for seven years and he had the car ready to go just in case the elephants decided they didn't actually like us there. As you can see from the next picture, we're all hanging pretty far out of the car.
We actually saw these zebra on our drive into KBC (Kilimanjaro Bush Camp) from Nairobi, but it's one of the better pictures I have of zebras.



One of the hallmarks of the Kenya SFS program in particular is how scheduled it is. In a lot of the other programs, their proximity to towns or safety in the country makes it possible for the students to have free time outside of the camp and in the country. I've never not felt safe here, but we're still not ever allowed outside of the camp without an SFS escort of some kind. Our daily schedule varies, but it's usually:
6:30 AM Sunrise and cook crew (once a week)
7:30 AM Breakfast
8:00 - 9:30 AM First class
10:00 - 11:30 AM Second class
12:00 PM Lunch
2:00 - 3:30 PM Third class
6:30 PM Generator comes on
7:00 PM Dinner
7:30 PM Reflections, Announcements, and Presentations (RAP)
11:00 PM Generator turns off

The meals, especially lunch and dinner, are pretty fixed if we're at camp. Breakfast tends to move earlier if we're doing a lab or field exercise in the morning. The afternoon schedule between lunch and dinner is usually pretty flexible. We've done a couple of our trips to Amboseli in the afternoon and in those cases, we're gone from after lunch till just before dinner. If we stick to the basic schedule, though, the afternoons are usually when everyone plays sports, jogs around the perimeter of the camp, "works," reads, sits on the chumba porch and watches. One of the boys in the group decided we needed to get more organized about the sports and set up a volleyball tournament. Each team is made up of four people (staff and students) and most people, myself included, are hilariously bad at volleyball. Each team was also required to come up with a team name, uniform, and song. My team is The Pajammers. We won our first two games and beat the (second) best team in our bracket, so we might have a chance. This was our team picture!

L to R: Me, Nic, Liz (who's in my banda), and Lindsey


As to our weekly schedule, we don't have weekends at all; we have non-program days. We get about one every week although sometimes it's more often and sometimes it's less. We had our third non-program day yesterday and went to an AIDS clinic in Loitoktok and then to a bar. The AIDS clinic was incredible. They provide free testing, medicine, and counseling for anyone who shows up. Their support group is just under sixty people and five women from the support group told us their stories yesterday. They also make bead work and other crafts to support their families because they can't do the hard labor they would normally do (everyone here farms). Our group as a whole spent a TON of money there and nearly bought out the bead work. I definitely picked up most of my souvenirs there.

On an entirely less sober (pun intended) note, we ate our packed lunches and then went to the bar. Sarah (our SAM) calls everywhere ahead of time and tells them 34 muzungus (white people) are showing up. The bar then calls a guy who sells carvings and other trinkets out in front of the bar. High comedy is watching a bunch of college students walk right by him into the bar and then spill out a few drinks later and drop thousands of shillings on things they ignored two hours before. Smart guy! The bar even turned the generator on for us yesterday so that they could play music. The power has been down in Loitoktok for the last two weeks or so, so if a place is going to have electricity, it has to come from a generator.




Last thing, the big "crisis" in camp right now is that our SAM (student affairs manager) Sarah is currently off. She's gets four days off a month, so she's in Nairobi and the students are beside themselves. She's a 24-year-old American who's been living in Kenya for the last two years. She's the perfect go between between the students and the rest of the Kenyan staff because she speaks/understands Kiswahili and has been the SAM for the last year. She's also awesome and acts as the mom. She counts everyone anytime we go somewhere and takes care of everyone's medical issues and issues in general. If you tallied how many questions she gets asked a day, it's probably over four hundred. Anyway, she's gone and now we have about five Kenyan dads. (Sarah is also one of three female staff members in the entire camp. The other two work in the kitchen.) Our five teachers are Daniel (Swahili), Tome (Environmental Policy), Kiringe (Wildlife Ecology and he's the one lecturing in the picture in the chumba below), Okello (Wildlife Management), and Seno (Culture). We went on a traveling lecture this morning where we drove to different sites and we'd stop for the teachers to lecture. I was in Okello's car and he spent the entire ride talking about his family and what responsibilities he believes fathers have to their daughters. Tome and Okello had apparently been arguing about whether or not one of them was going to give a lecture about the AIDS problem in Kenya and in the end Tome set Okello up for it. After threatening Tome a couple of times, Okello gave one of the more direct (and impassioned) speeches I've heard from a Kenyan about sex (very taboo subject) and the responsibility fathers have to tell their daughters about AIDS and resisting pressure from men. Women have a much higher infection rate than men and every single woman who told her story yesterday had contracted the virus from her husband. It just goes to show you that somethings that feel like a step you're not ready for yet (Sarah leaving) can give rise to opportunities you wouldn't have had otherwise (we've all definitely been bonding with our Kenyan dads since she's been gone).

Longest. Blog. Ever.