My matatu fleet would be chemistry themed - periodic table and organic mechanisms...

Photos: 1. at the Great Rift Valley with a Christian-theme painted blockade; 2. Lions at Lake Nakuru National Park; 3. Lake Nakuru - pelicans in the front and lesser flamingos further into the lake

The past two weeks without internet has been very busy, so this will be an unprecedentedly insanely long entry. Pole! (sorry in Kiswahili)

I thought KBC was amazing, but then we went to NPS. The bandas at NPS also sleep four people, but there is a thin wall in the middle so you really only sleep with one other person but can hear two others. The chumba has an upstairis tv room with a COUCH (well, a makeshift one…it was still awesome given that the most comfortable things we sit on are the car seats). NPS is smaller than KBC, but because there are no elephants there, we are allowed to walk outside the fence without supervision! I actually don’t think it makes sense…elephants are really only a danger here at night whereas you could get attacked by a lion or a hyena or charged by a buffalo any time of the day at NPS. Regardless, there is a long loop outside the fence that you can walk/run on and a soccer field at the top of a hill nearby. There’s real grass on the field and goals! No thorns! Although there sadly is no beautiful view of Kili at NPS, from the soccer field you can watch the sun set behind the Ngong Hills, a beauty which I think compensates very well. It is such an open area (as is much of Kenya) that from the top of the soccer field you can also see Nairobi and other urban centers like Karen and Kitangela in the distance. Whenever we played, some of our Kenyan neighbors would join us, adding new excitement to our games. NPS also borders Nairobi National Park, so there is a lot of wildlife at the site. There are pesky vervet monkeys that try to steal your food and bushbabies that appear just after the dinner bell and jump from tree to tree above the outdoor shower (peeping Toms…) Oh yea, a completely outdoor shower. And a pit latrine choo (toilet) which was surprisingly pleasant. Clearly, I was a big fan of NPS.

During the first week in the region we had two non-program days, mostly because several guest lecturers cancelled on us. The first one I had very mixed feelings about. We went to an elephant orphanage at Nairobi National Park. A woman from the orphanage spoke to us about the successes of the institution and what they do while adorable infant elephants were paraded in front of us. But most of what she said about their successes were lies – none of the reintroductions are successful as the elephants cannot fend for themselves and die. I was also annoyed because a lot of the students in the group chose to spend $50 to “adopt” an orphan. People can spend their money however they want, something I’m still trying to become accepting of in the group, but why not use your $50 to help one of the orphans in Oloitokitok or even just sponsor a student in our group ranch to attend secondary school? But I do have to admit, the elephants were cute. Especially a baby black rhino that literally romped around like a puppy. Then we went to a giraffe center where they display the endangered Rothschild giraffe for “educational” purposes. This really made me upset and uncomfortable. The educational part was essentially non-existent – a woman who knew nothing about the giraffes briefly spoke to us. The main attraction of the center is that you get to feed the giraffes. If you put the food (little pellet shapes) on your lips, the giraffe will lick it off, making for a fantastic facebook picture. But it’s a terrible conservation program, if you could call it that. They’re causing an already endangered species to lose their natural ability to forage. I was surprised with how few people in our group were bothered by this, given all the classes we have taken and that everyone would consider themselves a conservationist. To finish the day, we went to the Kazuri Bead and Ceramics factory. This was a good way to end the day as it was an excellent program. They employ 340 mostly single mothers and provide health care and such for all of them. And their products are beautiful, unfortunately they were a bit out of my price range (but still cheap because it is Kenya after all). To end the day, my car convinced our driver Daniel to stop at a fast food pizza joint we found. So yummy, but it was strange just how Western it was, especially since we had just come from living in rural Kenya for two months.

One day we went to Nairobi National Park. It was very small and it is almost completely surrounded by human settlements. It literally borders Nairobi itself. You can imagine the negative impacts this all has (I’ve just written two essays on it…oy!) But it was a really fun park, although we didn’t see rhinos or big cats as we had hoped.

For the next non-program day, we went to Kitangela Glass. What a surprise! We were all really just expecting glass-blowing, which is cool, but it was much more. It was like a fantasy land – kind of how I always envisioned the secret garden would look like. There were glass sculptures everywhere. They use old glass bottles to make gorgeous crafts. I didn’t get anything because I only envisioned catastrophe trying to travel with it after the program, but I still enjoyed myself watching the glass blowing and looking at everything. Randomly, there was also a suspension bridge (like the kind in those outdoorsy movies when there’s a bear at one side and the scared campers have to run across it and they say things like “don’t look down!” but the always do…) It was nuts!!! Sarah the student affairs manager (SAM) was freaking out as she is our risk management person, but she told us that if our hearts told us we had to, we could. Well my heart could not resist. What a rush! And I did look down and it was terrifying. The best part was when we got to the other side, the employee from Kitangela Glass gave us waiver forms to sign (which Sarah shouted to us “don’t sign anything!!!) Needless to say I didn’t, and I kept it as a funny memento of one of the gutsiest things I have done in my life.

The remainder of our time away from KBC was mostly spent on expedition to Lake Nakuru National Park. On the drive there and back we drove along the Great Rift Valley. It was beautiful and it felt really cool being there – the cradle of humanity! We took some fun pictures as our professors showed us the places we’d be visiting in the basin and as we battled off persistent curio shop owners. At LNNP, we stayed at the Wildlife Clubs of Kenya youth hostel. It was really cool – right in the middle of the park. We had dorms, a kitchen, a chumba…it was a lot like our sites except, well, in a national park. And squat choo’s and minimal running water, which I find fun. From the hostel you could see both the lake and Nakuru town, making for interesting campfires. It was a fun and different place to stay.

Lake Nakuru is fantastic, a “bird-watcher’s paradises”! As a new and novice bird-watcher, I was in love. It is filled with flamingos, pelicans, plovers, storks…We could have spent hours in one spot scrambling through our bird books to identify and observe them all. The park as a whole is pretty cool as well. We saw both black and white rhinos in the wild for the first time, and Guereza black-and-white colobus monkeys, which I now think are my favorite monkeys. But the park is completely fenced and also borders urban centers, making it kind of like a really large zoo. It also faces a lot of problems, as does every other conservation initiative or land use practice in Kenya, as I have now written at least ten papers on.

One day during expedition we went to Lake Naivasha and Hellsgate National Park to learn about more of these issues. The Lake Nakuru expedition as a whole is a new addition to the SFS Kenya program, so it still has a few kinks, such as time. Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to really explore these two places. Lake Naivasha we just briefly learned about. At Hellsgate we went to a geothermal power plant, which was actually pretty cool. We didn’t get to game drive because it started to rain (yay!!!), but it cleared in time for us to hike through a gorge. It was technical at points, especially because it had just rained. But every inch of it was beautiful, from the towering layers of rock to the steaming hot springs. Some movies have been filmed there, and people have carved their names into the walls of the gorge, sadly enough, but I still really enjoyed it. The hike took longer than expected, so we had to drive back to LNNP at night. We NEVER drive around at night. It was very disorienting being on a highway at night rather than a bumpy dirt road in the day – a lot of us felt like we were sent back to the states, except that we were on the wrong side of the road. It was an odd experience, and I hope I don’t have to drive on those roads at night again.

The last full day at Lake Nakuru was April Fools. So when Daniel and Sarah in the morning told us that our center director Seno had called them to say there were lions right outside our camp feasting on a kill, we thought they were yanking our chain. Some people (the “gullible” ones) immediately jumped into the land cruisers to get a look. Us “smart” ones decided it was a great joke, but got in cars anyway hoping to get an early morning game drive out of it. But it was true!! Two lions devouring a waterbuck! Way cool. We had to return for class but then we came back to watch them chill out under the shade of a fever tree. We were hoping to see leopards because every other SFS group had seen them at LNNP, but we didn’t. A lot of people were bummed out, but I think that we still have seen plenty of other cool things.

We ended our time in central Kenya with another day at NPS. It was a non-program day. Most people went to an ostrich farm, but after my distaste for the elephant orphanage and giraffe center, I decided with a few other people to skip out. Because of previous unrest in the country, SFS headquarters won’t allow us to go into Nairobi or any of the other urban centers, which severely limits the possibilities for non-program days. So instead, one of the NPS askaris, Abraham, took us on a long hike around the area. We walked along a river that borders Nairobi National Park. It was a really cool opportunity.

Now we are back at KBC and are finishing up our last papers for classes and starting up directed research. I’ll write about that later…I still need to reread two papers before turning them in tonight. It’s funny how this entry turned out to be the same length my papers need to be, but I wrote this in an hour and the papers took several hours each…