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.