Beauty and the beast

Many kenyan birds are beautiful, and some are beautiful only to their mothers.

Here is a weaver on a security wire outside my apartment block and a stork patrolling the rubbish area in the doctors' residences.

I have posted a number of pictures in publically-viewable albums hosted by Picasa (Google's web album facility). if you are keen, please go to http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/townfurze and see what is there. I'll update them slowly and add more as I get around to it.

you should be able to see them without logging in but please let me know if it works.

 

Feb 12th

Well, I’ve had a number of messages lately:

*Birthday cards and emails (many thanks, I’ll reply soon)

*Christmas cards and letters (arrived at last! Overlapping with birthday cards)

*Complaints, that I haven’t added to the blog recently.

So, here is a quick update. It’s pretty peaceful locally, the peace talks are moving on, and life is getting nearer to normal. (That is also true in the bad areas of Rift Valley, but they are a lot further from normal and the situation there is still very poor with a lot of people unable to go to their homes or work. Some are moving back to their ancestral tribal areas and so ethnic cleansing is happening by stealth. Many people have lost all/much of what they owned and many have been bereaved in several waves of violence and revenge.)

My teaching is going ahead and I am looking forward to a weekend away with a colleague in his home area and to a safari trip with visitors around Easter. The weather is mixed but mostly warm without a lot of rain. So, pretty good in my part of the world!

My darkest passions

It’s good to get used to different fruit. In Oxford one can buy all sorts of things but here there are more varieties of everything. The names vary slightly too. These passion fruits are known here as ‘passions’ and so they are dark passions or yellow passions. I prefer the dark ones.

Likewise mangoes come in at least 4 varieties that I can recognise. Some are better for eating, others for juicing. Here are a tommy mango (left) and an apple mango.

I just can’t differentiate all the bananas, though I can identify plantains and matoke, which are both for cooking.

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