Initials explained!

Just in case I forgot to mention this before, SFS has two sites in Kenya--NPS and KBC. NPS stands for National Park Site and it's right next to Nairobi National Park and twenty minute (or three hour) drive to Kitengela. KBC stands for Kilimanjaro Bush Camp and it's in between Isinet and Kimana. KBC is where we spent the first two months of the semester and returned to after three weeks at NPS.

So, you know when people come back from other countries having survived very sketchy situations that make for really good stories? This wasn't quite like that, but I held a baby cheetah.

Three of us decided to visit the animal orphanage outside Nairobi National Park in the twenty minutes we had between activities. We even talked our way in at the resident price (200 KSh or ~$2.50). We were walking around and one of the staff members decided to give us a personal tour (i.e. we were white and looked like we had money). After leading us through the entire orphanage, he asked us if we wanted to go into a cage with a cheetah. There were two cheetahs that had been rubbing against the fence and chirruping for attention (we were scratching their chins and rubbing their sides through the fence), so we all assumed he meant those two.

Before we knew it, he was leading us through a fenced-in area behind the orphanage and into a little building where they kept all the baby animals that were too young to be on display. They brought out this two-month old cheetah named Mac from Narok. All three of us (all girls) started cooing immediately and sounded surprisingly like Mac. Mac was a bit nervous about all the new people and calmed himself down by licking our fingers. Needless to say, we were a little late meeting the group. Once we decided we really, really did have to go we started to leave the building and were not so subtly reminded that we had had a good time and should compensate "our friend" for that. Bribes are extremely common in Kenya and I had seen that coming a mile away. Someone else paid because they thought it was worth it and fair, but I didn't and I still haven't figured out how I feel about two things--being singled out as a person who has money because I'm mzungu AND the zookeepers at one of the most prominent animal sanctuaries in the country letting total strangers pass a wild animal around amongst themselves for about ten bucks.

I guess I hope that money went somewhere useful so that it was a win-win situation.

(P.S. Hi Izzy and Tommy's families! These are for you! The first one is Daniel, Devin, Wendy and Izzy's volleyball team. The second one is Tommy. Riding an ostrich. This was at the ostrich farm on his twenty-first birthday.)