I know I haven’t written anything in ages, but these past few weeks have been absolutely ridiculous. Our grant proposals, which we’ve been working on pretty much all semester were due Monday, so we were working like 13 and 14 hour days to try to get everything done. I’ve also been trying to get surveys back from dancers and acrobats, organize a workshop for December, and get this photo lobby display to actually happen and I don’t think I’ve ever been as stressed/frustrated as I was in the middle of last week.

Then this weekend was Sarakasi’s big Umoja Festival, where they bring together acrobats and dancers from the Netherlands, Norway, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zanzibar, and have a two week workshop with the Sarakasi artists. The last Saturday of the program, the groups put on performances in different neighborhoods and informal settlements all over Nairobi, and on Sunday, there was a huge performance of all the groups at Uhuru Park. So I was at different events all weekend, helping with ushering a little on Sunday, but mostly just hanging out and enjoying the shows.

Then, yesterday evening on the way to class, an older street kid was following me and asking for money, and then as I was about to put my wallet back in my bag, he grabbed it out of my hand and started running. I didn’t even stop to think about anything; I just dropped all my other bags and started sprinting after him. I almost caught him, but then he jumped into a ravine that goes into the underground sewer, and I was pretty much like- okay, the chase ends here. I tripped and fell in the process and scraped and bruised my hands and knees pretty badly, but I am sooo lucky, because literally all I had in my wallet was some hand sanitizer, chap-stick, 100 shillings (less than a $1.50) and my apartment keys (and one of my roommates just happens to have a spare for some reason)… no ATM cards, credit cards, my phone, etc. I’m sure they guy that took it is kicking himself for taking my wallet and not someone else’s.

So for Thanksgiving weekend, I’m going to Uganda to go white-water rafting on the Nile, which I am soooo excited about! We’re taking an overnight train this afternoon, and then we’ll be rafting and camping out for two days. There are supposed to be class 4 or 5 rapids, and I think they might also have rock-climbing there as well… We literally have soo much work to do in the next week and a half, but how could you possibly pass up an oppourtunity like that?

We did have a little Thanksgiving dinner last night, with my apartment, and some of Justine’s friends from ISSA (where she works). We made mashed potatoes, stuffing, roasted vegetables, rosemary chicken, apple strudel… it was pretty excellent and almost like a real Thanksgiving. And they guys from ISSA are great; we stayed up until like 2 (which seems about like 5 this week) playing spoons and mafia and thumper and laughing hysterically.

I’m sorry this has been a very jumbled posting, but that’s about all I’m good for right now. I hope you all have great Thanksgivings where ever you may be! And hopefully I’ll have some good pictures soon from rafting…

Sunday we had a group excursion to Magadi Lake, Olorgesaillie, and Olepolos. Lake Magadi is this salt lake, in I think the bizarre-est little industrial town I have ever seen! (The salt factory there uses the salt from the lake, and is essentially the source of income in the town). There is no grass or dirt anywhere; the ground is entirely covered in these little white stones, and it was a cloudy-ish day to begin with, so everything was white. There were donkeys everywhere and although everything in their tiny little grocery store looked dusty enough to make you believe nothing had been touched in about fifty years, outside everything was incredibly clean (unlike Nairobi!) and the apartment buildings all looked really new. Then at the actual lake, which was incredibly beautiful, there were tons and tons of flamingos everywhere.

Olorgesaillie was this pre-historic site where they had tons of old Acheulian hand-axes still in the site that the were excavated and a humerous bone of an ancestor of an elephant. I'm not a huge palentology fan, but the site itself was incredibly beautiful. And there was a pre-human skull on display that was 2.4 million years old, which was pretty cool.

Finally, on the way back, we stopped at this restaurant (I guess you would call it) called Olepolos. It's a very authentic nyama choma place (Kenyan roasted meet), where you literally see goats walking around when you walk in, and then see them cooking them for you on their grills. It took forever for them to cook our food, but it was good, and the view there was phenomenal too!


I posted some pictures form Sunday on Picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/denisemoriba/LakeMagadiAndOlorgesaillieOlepolos

Well, Obama day and the peak of the post-election drama is starting to die down here, but things are just as busy as ever. (Pictures of people from our group were in the national papers and there was a segment with all of us in on the national news though, which was pretty cool.)

Anyways, Friday was back to work, except I took a day off from Sarakasi to go to interview people at this organization called Kuona Trust (for this NGO paper I have to write). Kuona is similar to Sarakasi in terms of programs, except their focus is on the visual arts, so I got to meet a bunch of artists there, and see them working away in their studios. They were working on everything from cartoons and sculptures of things from recycled materials to charcoal drawings and paintings.

One guy I talked to, who made these huge charcoal and pastel images, was working on a series of pictures about the pre-post-election period, before all of the violence in Nairobi last winter. He did one image depicting politicians, one with the media, one of the religions intuitions, one of the international community, etc. He said he had originally named the works, “Who’s to Blame?” but said he didn’t want to judge anyone, but rather document what had happened, and let each group speak for themselves. I thought it was a very interesting perspective on something that happened so recently and was so disturbing to society.

It has been raining like crazy the past few days; I guess it’s probably officially rainy season. The thing is, when it rains in Kenya, it pours and everything becomes a huge muddy mess. And the other thing is, Nairobi has a serious infrastructure problem, especially in terms of the roads, and for some reason when it rains, traffic gets absolutely ridiculous. What might normally take fifteen or twenty minutes to drive can literally take hours when it rains. Luckily, this is only the short rainy season, and by the end of November we’re supposed to be heading into summer.

obama day...

As amazing as it would have been to be in DC during the election, I have to say, Nairobi definitely did not let us down! We got invited to the American Ambassador’s Residence to watch the votes coming in, so we all got up at like 4 this morning, and took cabs over there. We needed our invitations and passports to get in and there was quite a bit of security, but almost 1,000 people ended up coming, so we were glad we got there early. Apparently a lot of the big people from parliament made an appearance, and although we didn’t actually get to see her, Wangari Maathai was there too. (She’s famous for winning a Nobel Peace Prize and being the first women in Africa to get her doctorate, and she started the Green Belt Movement, which has helped women’s groups to plant billions of trees all over the continent.)

Anyways, we watched the votes coming in till about 7:00 in the morning, when they announced that Obama was officially the new president-elect. I cannot begin to explain the energy in compound then, and when McCain and Obama gave their speeches; the Kenyans were excited that their brother was going to be leading America and we were excited to actually have something to be proud of in our country for once. Everyone was laughing and crying and excited (and tired)—just generally a crazy time.

After that the Ambassador made a speech and some Kenyan high school girls who had won a essay-writing contest read letters they had written to Obama. And then, a representative from the Kenyan government spoke briefly said that Kibaki, the president, had announced that tomorrow is an official holiday, in honor of Obama!

It’s been crazy being in Kenya for the election, firstly because in the US, the nation is split between Obama and McCain, but in Kenya, literally everyone is a fan of Obama. And secondly, it’s crazy because we’re so much more important here. We would never get invited to the home of an important dignitary to watch the elections in the US, and even walking down the street today, people are all cheering and excited and wanting to shake our hands. I’m not sure all the Kenyans we’re interacting with fully understand that having Obama as president is not going to dramatically change US foreign policy towards Africa, but it still is cool for them that someone whose father is from Kenya is going to be president of the US.

It seems like there have been holidays left and right over the past couple of months: Kenyatta Day, Moi Day, Idd, the Indian holiday Duwali (which we’ve been hearing fireworks for, during the last week), Halloween, and the election (which I feel like will basically be a holiday here- with people probably going crazy either way. Halloween was pretty anti-climatic, because everyone was exhausted by Friday night, but the rest of the weekend was very relaxing.

On Saturday, I went to the Maasai Market with my roommate Justine, and then we went to Kibera, the slum where she works. It was perfect weather and it’s actually a really nice place to walk around, because there’s always so much going on and it feels much more like a community than the rest of the city.

Anyways, Justine has been working with a women’s group in Kibera, trying to help them get their accounts together, so I was going to go with her to meet them. (They have a merry-go-round system, where all the women put a little money in each week which goes to one person, as well as a doll-making business— but they’ve been running into some challenges with their book-keeping.) It turned out the women’s group wasn’t meeting that day, but there was a parents’ meeting at the school which we got to sit in on instead, which was also very cool, since we would never normally have any reason to go to something like that.

This school that we were at literally has holes in all the roofs, and struggles to pay a couple of dollars a day for firewood and food for the kids for lunch. There used to be school fees that covered all those expenses but they got rid of them altogether, because some kids who weren’t able to afford to pay anything weren’t going to school at all. So now, it’s this women’s group, and a share from their merry-go-round that is completely supporting the school.

Sunday morning, I went to this amazing modern art gallery called Ramoma, because I need set up an interview with someone there for my NGO paper. It’s in this very Indian neighborhood called Parklands, with tons of Sari shops and Indian food places everywhere. It’s kind of like India in the middle of Kenya and it’s very bizarre to walk around there because there are virtually no Kenyans anywhere. (There's a huge rift between Indians and Kenyans here, because the Indians supposedly own a lot of the businesses in Nairobi, and have a reputation for not treating their Kenyan workers very well.)