Cows in the Streets

Hamjambo warafiki na jamaa,

Two blog posts in three days? Quite a luxury to be so close to an internet cafe, and this time.... I don't have a sticky keyboard, like all of the other ones in these cafes are. So you may very well be granted with my characteristic long windedness. Huzzah!

I just watched through the open windows of the cafe as a herd of Massai cows passed by in the busy Kabira Street outside. As I was typing, I heard a "moo", and being from Carroll County, the sound was quickly dismissed in my mind. But then I thought about it and wondered, why am I hearing a cow in the middle of a city?

Quite the same story all around the city. I hear that the drought here is so bad in the highlands that some of the Massai have had to abandon their traditional routes and stake their claim in Nairobi, where they presumed the conditions were better. Unfortunately, they are not. The herds that walk around are like ghosts of cows. Ribs stare at you through tightly pressed skin, and their eyes are not the glass-like balls we are accustomed to laughing at as we make eye contact with the cattle of home. Distant eyes, languid movements, dust kicked up behind them. The lack of water is indeed killing many things, and not only people.

I am already feeling bad for those showers I took in our very Western hotel at the beginning of the trip. And I am now quite content with the warm pail of water that I have in the morning, and my Dr. Bronners and camp towel that I use for bathing. I don't think I'll be able to look at water the same way ever again after this experience.

Speaking of Dr. Bronners, I lost my small tube of toothpaste yesterday (I have since found it), so to brush my teeth this morning, I decided to try to use the Magic, All-Purpose, 42-Uses-In-One Soap on my teeth. Eucalyptus flavor, just so you can imagine it better. Just because something says it can be used for a certain purpose, doesn't mean it should. At least I was attractive to the pandas (though unfortunately, there are none here....)

Ah, one more thing on cows. One of my friends today was offered a cow for 500 shillings (which is about 7 dollars) by someone on the street. Very skinny cow, I can only presume, but still, I laugh to think of one of our students coming back to houst family bearing an entire cow. Humor aside, this is indicative of a much larger issue that I mentioned before: people are being driven from poverty into desperation very quickly, and if the rains don't come soon, Nairobi is in deep trouble.

Yesterday I played a legitimate game of soccer with some locals. Well, it wasn't quite legitimate.... the goal was a rock and a shoe, and the field was ridden with potholes and wandering goats, but nonetheless.... still was a beautiful game. The real field was in use by some intense, super talented Kenyans, so the group of us four wazungu (plural white people) and a group of about eight or so friendly Kenyans set up our own little impromtu field. One, I had forgotten how much I absolutely love that game, and two, I had not realized how my only slightly developed futball skills are no match whatsoever to these players with no training whatsoever. The craze with soka (the swahili word) or football (they call it the right thing! Yes!) is incredible, as I have mentioned before. I returned home with my feet the color of the red soil (I played in my Keens), feeling great. My next goal is to teach some of the locals how to play frisbee -- no one here has any idea what they are supposed to do with that flying disk of plastic.

Class continues to be fascinating. Our history class is covering nearly every one of the topics that I am intrigued by from an environmental perspective. "Development" (or we have no decided to call it "well-being"; who is going to tell an African that they are "under-developed, or "developing when all they want to do is continue their traditional way of life?), traditional vs. modern takes on what should be valued (Nairobi is the center of this, and East Africa is in a state of extreme flux right now regarding what is actually going on with their culutre. Still reeling from the effects of colonialism and trying to establish their own sense of "national identity" even though the borders of the countries themselves were shaped by the colonizers. Super interesting time to be over here), environmental ethos, water use/preservation, and on. Our class is also tying in very closely with the thesis of a book I recently read, Ishmael, on the clash between the "Takers" -- western society, agricultural, settled, and essentially a society that is hurtling towards the ground in it's ever present attempt to supress the forces of the environment -- and the "Leavers" -- the people who did not follow the agricultural revolution, and kept to their own pastoral lifestyles, ones in which the thread of thought on how to live -- "ancient knowledge", as we might call it -- is unbroken from the creation of their kin. Intriguing book, and one that certainly left me with chills. I've been thinking about it the whole time I've been here. Anton also read it over the summer, and we're both really excited to come into contact with one of the few remaining Leaver peoples -- the Hadzu (if I have spelled it correctly) -- later in the trip. Check the book out if you want a deeply thought-provoking take on population explosion, and what it all may entail for cultures and peoples around the world.

Swahili is proving to be more and more difficult, and we all left our four hour session this morning feeling thoroughly saturated -- to the point of over-saturation -- with verb constructions and all manner of foreign sounding words. The think with learning, say... Spanish, is that it is still very close to our language, being based on a Romantic lexicon. Here, nothing sounds the same, and their are no cognates to go off of -- it's all new. So at first, it seems doable, but as the time has gone on, and the verb list has grown to 70 some verbs in less than a week, I'm feeling a bit overwhelemed. Not to mention a significant test on Friday. Welcome back to college!

I've been taking very few pictures, mainly because I look so so so white when I take my camera out. We're not in a touristy area of the town at all; it is right in the middle of a well established section of Nairobi. So I need to be very covert with my picture taking, which makes me all the more suspect. 'Tis a dilemna. Hopefully I'll get some pictures in soon, and will try to upload them if I am able to. If not, I hear that Ken, our professor, has been uploading some pictures to our trip website (lclark.edu/~clifton/EA09/). It doesn't look like there are many up there now, but I know he'll put some more up soon.

So, for all my avocado lover back home, think back to what you paid for the last one you bought. Here, they're 10 shillings, which is about 15 cents. A bit absurd, eh?

Also, in Swahili today, we learned that there is no word for the adverb "late". For example, you cannot say "I woke up late." Instead, you have to say "it was late when I woke up." This nuance takes all possesion of being late off of the person, which I had to laugh about. So incredibly indicative of the culture ... everything in its own time.

Enough for now, eh? Glad to see that everyone is enjoying what I'm writing; keep up the comments! I love hearing from you.

Kwa herini sasa (goodbye for now). Amani.

Love,

Zach