Pantomime?

I know it is Christmas but this is academic dress for staff. Who chose the colours?

Students celebrate with all sorts of garlands, badges and decorations. These are undergraduates.
And these are some of my postgrads.

Donkey racing

The Lamu Cultural Festival has much artistic content but what really excites the crowd is the donkey racing along the sea-front. The donkeys are raced between lines of spectators, with no barriers and not much warning they are coming.
There seemed to be complaints about the rider on the left; I think he used his stick on the other donkey or perhaps on the rider.




Spectators tried every vantage point possible; the finish line is somewhere down there.

Moon and planets

Jupiter, Venus and the Moon all in a line on December 1st., but not necessarily in that order, just above the trees at the edge of my compound.

Magadi golf course

Magadi Soda is a town which exists to mine soda for export, largely to Japan for glass manufacture. It's the hottest part of Kenya, about 2 hours from Nairobi in the Rift Valley. Their "golf course" is renowned for it's quirky nature, very stoney and no grass. Here is a curious notice and the general scene. What's the problem with cycling?

50 years mug shots

Nairobi Baptist Church was founded 50 years ago today and we had a big celebration. From 20 people of 4 nationalities (mostly Brits) it has grown to 3-4,000 with over 40 nationalities and mostly Kenyan. In addition, a number of daughter churches have been created in various parts of Nairobi. A few of the original members are still around or came back to visit.

I eventually succumbed and bought a souvenir mug. I was surprised and fascinated by the great change in colour when I add hot water; I have seen these things before but never such a startling change. (White is hot but the really curious effect is when I run cold water over a hot mug; the fleeting green pattern is really odd!) The flash photo tends to show the green as lighter than it really is.

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What are they?

Ok., the pink one is an artificial flower, but what is it made of?

And what’s the purpose of the other one?

Hot Springs

Here at the Rift Valley Soda Lake, Elementaita, there are hot springs (40-50 ‘C) which have various uses.

Some just sit in it and chew the fat

Some children come to wash clothes (and some come to be scrubbed up themselves)

And some come to use the water to de-louse their goats.

The water has a soapy feel and is certainly very hot bath temperature. There are tilapia fish near the hotter parts and a flotilla of pelicans feeding on the tilapia.

Flamingos eat algae and tilapia in the cooler, saltier parts.

Great grammar, one giant leap...

Here is Kevin, a 6ft tall Maasai guide armed with traditional knife, staff and mobile phone at Elementaita.

The notice is clear, the grammar excellent (semi-colon, apostrophe), the spelling slightly awry, but what a leap!

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Bicycles made for two

Here, near Naivasha, you see three bicycles each carrying two people. One is carrying the passenger on the crossbar and another on the pillion but the real question is, why is the nearest person being taken on pillion while they freewheel their own bike?

Even the baboon seem slightly perplexed.

Answers?

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Truckin' Mara

Getting stuck is routine, OK for a few minutes but not if it takes a couple of hours.
We had a 2 wheel drive truck, big but vulnerable - even with chains.You can see why... no stones to pack under the wheels or support the sand tracks.

On the way back to Nairobi we found a truck, loaded with spuds, well and truly stuck in a rut. The spud bags took 3 people to lift, no wonder we had more success when they had off-loaded a dozen of them.

Security precautions

Lake Baringo camp must have lost a lot of toilet rolls to use a padlock! The nocturnal crocs and hippos prevented much use of the toilets anyway. <<...>>

Kibera Clinic

Chemi Chemi ya Uzima (Spring of wholeness) is a clinic run in Kibera slum six days per week by Nairobi Baptist Church. It used to be a brew house and is in a sector of Kibera dominated by Sudanese and other Nubian groups. I have been a few times and am on the management committee now (until I decide I can’t contribute anything useful).

The slum is mostly corrugated sheets or mud-brick walls and very tightly packed. Sanitation is the biggest problem; “flying toilets” is the euphemism for plastic bags that are used as toilets and then thrown over the roof tops.

Recently I went with two visitors (incl. Maiya who took some of these pictures) for an immunisation clinic (picture of kids waiting).

Recycling and rubbish collection

Rubbish collections here are private and paid for. A van comes twice weekly to pick up black sacks of household waste. There may not be any formal recycling system here but there are plenty of informal ways of making sure little goes to waste.

When you buy a bottle of Coke, you only buy the Coke, not the bottle. If you want to take the bottles or the crate home you pay a deposit and then trade the bottles for the next batch.

My home help takes any unwanted glass bottles, newspapers etc but I haven’t asked what she does with them.

There are plenty of folk who collect plastic, cloth, and anything else they can re-use, sell or trade. What is left will be burned on the verge, after it has been thoroughly picked-over by Dickensian-looking characters dressed in filthy tattered rags. (No pic of those folk but the fire is in the Kibera slum, in the run up to the election.)

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No smoking

Smoking is pretty strictly controlled in public areas and there are small zones marked with wire for smokers. I think you’d have to be dedicated/addicted to use this spot in Uhuru Park after the rains. 

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Quiz part 2

Please translate these Swahili nouns into English. It may help to remember that i is pronounced like ee (roughly) and no letter is redundant. You may also need to know that many tribes here confuse l and r.

Motokaa

Ofisi

Wikendi

Baiskeli

Karoti

Daktari

Hoteli (oops, no that isn’t what it seems, it’s a food kiosk)

Oksfordi

Uingereza

Quiz part 1

This advertising quiz, or one very like it, appears in the local cinema listings each week. If you find it too hard to read the cover picture, do look at the clue they offer.

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Modern students: plus ca change...

While I was sitting in a car park on the main campus, a couple of students came to the tree next to my car, and one climbed it to get the guavas, which are very ripe and sweet-smelling at present. The other made a receptacle out of his sweatshirt, quite ingenious, but still missed a few when they were thrown down. They offered me some of the loot and then wandered off with laptop and scrumped guavas over their shoulders. <<...>> <<...>>

Lorry turning

I had intended to go down this side-road. There are some very long lorries here but fortunately there were lots of people ready to give advice and directions. If only they’d all given the same advice and direction. <<...>>

Collapse of passion

Breakdowns are not at all uncommon. One wonders about the effect of overloading. There are no MOT tests; if there were, I wonder how much public transport would remain. <<...>>

Mousebirds

I am fortunate that my compound has many visiting birds, often in the small corner near the swimming pool (the one almost no-one uses). Even this week I found a new (to me) species. These Speckled Mousebirds are not so new, but they are good fun to see.

 They are generally in groups and walk through bushes, dragging their long tails behind them.

Here are two being friendly on the electric fence. <<...>>

Plenty be found within our borders

I was surprised to see this slogan in lights over a Government ministry door; it was the Treasury.

Actually, it refers to the national anthem (see a few entries further down) and was one of a series of slogans and cheery greetings that flashed up in turn.

Damaged tyres and burnt hotels

We were meant to fly to Lamu from Malindi but when the 32 seat Saab turboprop came in from Nairobi the captain came in (it's a tiny lounge at Malindi airport) and said he didn't like a tear in one of the tyres and so he wouldn't fly to Lamu. "It might last one more take-off and landing". We were therefore shunted to a hotel for the night to wait for the next day’s flight. (“Scorpio Villas” was fine, but initial impressions were not favourable; there had been a fire in December and the first buildings we saw were burned and crumbling.) When we returned next day, the plane had disappeared, and lo-and-behold it arrived with passengers from Nairobi. I asked what had happened; had a tyre been brought up before the plane went to Nairobi? Apparently not, the plane had simply gone to Nairobi after we had left. As we were about to board the plane to Lamu, please note, the girl told us the pilot thought he could land the plane at Nairobi but Lamu was "a bit rough"!

On landing at Lamu the fire tender was on hand, but parked under a tree with its cab up for servicing the engine, rather than prepared for action. The ground staff just changed their fluorescent jackets to suit the incoming flight and picked a handcart with the label of the relevant hotels to carry passengers’ luggage. There was a mechanical weighing machine and even an X-ray machine with a generator to power it, all under a thatched roof with no walls.

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An excellent book

Quite long but easy to read in chunks. Shows trends in behaviour across the continent and fits all too well with what has happened in Kenya and is happening elsewhere now.

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Stuck vehicles

In no special order:

A stuck lorry near Masai Mara. Irony: the lorry was carrying rocks to improve the road!

Our land cruiser broke a bracket supporting the rear fuel tank; passers-by gather to assist and it is sorted out with a piece of rope.

A road is under re-construction, a lorry jams in the muddy by-pass and the villagers erect a thorny pole to block the better route until they get money.

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Termites and Doom

The rains have started with a couple of torrential downpours, one on the day we got back from safari.

Outside the flat there were swarms of insects in the dusk, something I’d not seen before, but then a few dozen of them came in.

They shed their wings, or in some cases only one wing, and revealed themselves to be termites looking for a new nest.

There were more piles of wings on the communal stairs and pretty much everywhere we went in the next couple of days, though never in vast numbers.

Those who came into my flat were met with what I sometimes say is my second favourite smell: Doom. (“Stops all Dudus dead”). Just for the record, my favourite smell would be DEET, the only insect repellent that works.

(They must work, I’m glad to say I’ve had very few bites while in Kenya.)

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