It’s strange, because we live in a city. We’re not out in
the bush in grass-thatched mud houses – we’re in the second-largest city of the
DRC, the seat of the mining industry, economic motor of the country, with a
population of about 2 million. We live in a modern-style apartment, with tiled
floors, indoor plumbing, and electricity. Yet the infrastructure is so poor and
services so unreliable that sometimes our dependence on these amenities is a disadvantage; the system does not have resilience built in.
At our
old place, the power would be out almost every day for several hours, which
meant no running water and no way to cook food unless the compound’s generator
was turned on. The lack of water was easy to compensate for after we were
caught short a couple of times: there, as here in our new place, we kept large
buckets and basins of water on hand. If the power went out mid-shower, we could
switch to a bucket bath. The first scoopful was always breathtakingly cold, but
it wasn't so bad after that. For the last several
weeks that we were in our old apartment, we had hot water to the kitchen, but
not to the bathroom, so we routinely took bucket baths – but at least they were
warm! I liked it, but Eric got tired of it fast, and was happy to have “real”
showers when we went to Kenya for vacation.
On the other hand, with the power out, it wasn’t so easy to
compensate for the lack of hotplate and microwave to cook with. Most locals
cook with charcoal fires that are immune to the vagaries of SNEL, the Société
Nationale d’Électricité. The charcoal fires are an important source of air
pollution that contributes to high rates of respiratory disease – one of the
graduate students I work with at the UNILU School of Public Health is
fine-tuning a protocol to study this issue here in Lubumbashi – and the
harvesting of wood to make charcoal contributes to deforestation. In any case,
not having a charcoal brazier at our old place, we were out of luck if the
power went out, especially if we were the only residents home in the middle of
the day. We'd eat cheese sandwiches or cold leftovers while we watched the staff
(guard, driver, gardener, housekeeper) cook up their bukary (fufu) and sombe (manioc leaves) over hot
coals. Sometimes we asked them to turn on the generator for a
little while, long enough to boil water or nuke the previous night’s lentils. Extravagant.
Our old place was in the Golf subdivision, so named for its
proximity to the golf course. That’s the part of town in which many ex-pats and
upper-class Lushois (the adjective for people who live in Lubumbashi) live,
with lots of fancy, big houses with swimming pools and manicured gardens behind
high walls. Being somewhat on the periphery, though, it is notorious for
unstable electricity, and every compound has a large diesel generator. Down the
side streets off the paved road are homes of less-affluent Lushois, who
presumably just make do when the power is out, assuming their homes are even wired
for electricity.
I've made only a few forays into the farther-flung districts
where the bulk of Lubumbashi’s population lives – the “communes” of Kenya, Kamalondo, Kalubwe, and others – but from the little I've seen, it’s
clear that the overall standard of living there is very poor. Only the downtown
roads and a few of the main routes heading out of town are paved, and that only
in the past 6-8 years, we’re told. My impression is that many people live on
barely passable dirt roads in mud-brick houses with tin roofs that may have
electricity wires jerry-rigged to them, but that don’t have running water. I've
heard that the government has a goal of getting running water to the city’s
residents, and we have seen places where the road has been dug up and it looks
like water pipes are being put in. Whether the water is potable or not is
another question; one of my classmates at the Alliance Française works for
REGIDESO , the water authority, and he said that the water leaving the plants
is potable, but that there are so many cracks in the pipes, in some cases from
the pipes having been laid too close to the surface and being subject to too
much pressure from passing traffic, that the water quality at the point of use
can’t be guaranteed. There are periodic
cholera outbreaks in some of the communes. The water here is very hard. Most
ex-pats drink only bottled water, but we drink tap water, disinfected either
with a UV gadget we brought from the States, or by boiling it in an electric
kettle. Lots of scale on the kettle, or even after boiling water to cook pasta.
We know the soil is contaminated with heavy metals from the mining activity, so
the water may be, too.
The main hospital doesn't have running water. It’s the tertiary referral hospital for the province, named for Jason Sendwe,
who opposed the secession of Katanga after Congo’s independence and was
assassinated in 1964. Actually, just last year, the hospital did get running water to the OR,
though I’m not sure how consistent it is. In the rest of the hospital, any
water has to be carried in from a pipe outside and up the stairs in buckets. I
haven’t seen the patient wards, but can imagine how difficult basic hygiene,
not to mention infection control, must be (article from 2006 here; things have
improved since then).
School of Public Health Faculty/Staff bathroom
There is no running water at the School of Public Health,
either. My office is on the second floor. There’s a bathroom at the end of the
hall with a big blue plastic drum that the cleaning woman fills by filling the green bucket on the floor in the photo above from the hose outside and carrying it up the stairs on her head. Smaller buckets are on the floor to use for flushing the toilets, and
a bucket fitted with a spigot with a basin underneath it is set up on a stand
with soap for handwashing. The toilet stalls in this bathroom, by the way, are
locked. I don’t have a key of my own and if the folks in the office where the
key is kept are out or gone for the day, I’m out of luck – one reason why I
haven’t been putting in long hours at the office. The TP situation is also unpredictable: occasionally, there is some, but otherwise, it's BYO. Judging from the contents of the wastebasket beside the toilet (no seat or lid on the toilet, by the way), what most people bring is printer paper.
At our old place, we were thrilled to have near-continuous
electricity from a couple of days before Christmas up to the time we left for
our delayed Kenyan holiday on the 28th of December. It wasn't clear whether the power was up in
honor of the return of the governor, Moïse Katumbi, after a 3-month absence, or because of relatively lower demand by mining companies, other businesses, and absent ex-pats, but it felt like quite a luxury.
Our new place is closer to the city center and in a more
established neighborhood. The power is more consistent; it goes off for only
short periods a few times a day. We have access to a shared brazier if we
should need to cook when the power is out, and there is a generator on the
property, though it hasn't been run since we moved in. The apartment is bigger
than and not as streamlined as our old one: there are uneven spots in the
floor, the TV cabinet is warped from past flooding, and the heavy wooden
furniture with brown plaid cushions is reminiscent of a basement rec room circa
1970 (per Eric). There’s no hot water in the kitchen, and no cold water in the
bathroom sink. But we have a 4-burner stove with an oven, and a washing
machine!
Sunday-morning pancakes
Yum!
It’s surprisingly gratifying to be able to wash our clothes
ourselves again. At the old place, we'd hand over our laundry hamper to the housekeeper, and it might be several days or a week before we’d get
our clothes back clean. The delays were mostly linked to the lack of power or
water, but it was frustrating not to know when they’d be back … Of course, most families here wash their clothes by hand. We could hand-wash small things, but had no place
to hang them unless we borrowed a drying rack from the housekeeper. She wasn't
there on Sundays, so if we’d forgotten to ask, we’d have to wait. Small
things, but for we who are accustomed to having control over all the details of
our lives, a lesson in patience.
The washing machine in our new place had some lessons for us, too. It’s a nice machine – a Samsung with a “fuzzy
logic” setting, high-tech. It’s designed to drain from the bottom, but the drainpipe is about
2 feet up. There isn’t a water pump, so there is a gravitational challenge
when it comes time to drain the drum: some user participation is required.
That is, after the wash cycle, the first rinse cycle, and the second rinse
cycle, when we hear the machine stop running because it’s full of water, we have
to take the end of the drain hose out of the drainpipe and run the water into a
bucket. When the bucket’s full, we hook the hose back in the pipe, carry the
bucket to the tub, dump it out, and start over again. The last bits of water
are at pressure so low they won’t drain into the bucket, so we have to coax
them into a basin until the machine is satisfied and moves on to its next
cycle. The first time we did this, we left the hose in the bucket after the
first rinse cycle, confident that we’d hear the water running when it was time
for the next rinse cycle -- we ended up with water all over the floor! We
were quite the sight, the two of us still with sore quads from climbing Mt.
Longonot in Kenya a couple of days before, gingerly lowering down to our hands
and knees and mopping up the water with every towel or rag we could spare.
Eric on washer-draining duty. Note the similarity of the plastic buckets at home and at work -- brightly colored, cheap, imported plastic is everywhere!
First-world problems? In a way. We can observe things with
detachment, even amusement, knowing that whatever happens, we have the
resources to recover and will only be here a short time. As I haul buckets of
water from the washing machine to the tub, I fatuously think, “exercise!
strengthening my core!”. But I remember
all the women – the cleaner at the School of Public Health, R’s wife regardless
of her abdominal surgery – who heft these buckets from the ground up to their
heads and walk distances over rough ground several times each day, and my
perspective shifts. We live in a city, but it’s one rife with inequalities at
every scale. We may think of the
challenges we encounter as amusing anecdotes, but they are tiny eddies at the
edges of the huge river of challenges that washes hopes and agency and
potential away, eroding the human and physical capital of this country. There
are brave souls who paddle upstream*, and signs that the current is slowing in
places, but there is a long way to go.
Update! R found a carpenter who built a table so we could set the machine up high enough to drain on its own. We were pretty pleased with ourselves, until we realized it's a top-loader -- duh. Here I am standing on a night table fishing out clean clothes after running our first self-draining load.
Little frog I found in the bathroom (which has running water and TP) at the Italian Restaurant at the zoo.
Women selling red mushrooms like chanterelles. Pretty tasty, but hard to wash the fine dirt out completely.
These guys are trying to rock the van out of the hole it drove into. This is near the new HyperPsaro, a huge supermarket that just opened. This isn't the only car we've seen stuck in this hole .. it's finally been cordoned off and it looks like the city may fix it.
Eric trying out his new shirt with a couple of the staff from the tailoring/seamstress shop. We bought this pagne (fabric) back in November, but have only just now had it made up into clothes. The shirt, to our surprise, was finished off with big silver snaps.
Me, modeling the jacket and skirt I had made from the same fabric. Three visits later, the skirt is finally big enough that I can wriggle into it, and the buttonholes on the jacket finally fit around the buttons. The woman in the white shirt is the owner (she and her staff gave us the OK to post their photos).
After four days in Maasai Mara and a day in Nairobi, we headed to Lake Naivasha, which is northwest of Nairobi at 6000ft elevation. We stayed at Bilashaka lodge, a very quiet and very nice spot. The Dutch owners of the lodge grow roses and export over 100,000 stems per day to the Holland flower auctions. The immediate grounds of the lodge were visited by giraffes, baboons, zebra, and hippos while we there there and when we walked to the lake shore we also saw vervet and Colobus monkeys, waterbucks, and dik diks. I was fascinated by a line of safari ants crossing about 5 meters of the forest floor from one tree to another.
Bilashaka also offered a safari vehicle and driver that we used to get to the boats that take people out on the lake. The driver was an experienced birder and we saw many water birds (in addition to a few hippos).
Giraffe wandering the grounds of our quiet lodge at Lake Naivasha.
One of the greenhouses growing roses.
Mount Longonot
Fairly close to Lake Naivasha is the Mount Longonot National Park , where we went with the car and driver. The driver appeared to have little trouble with the hike, but we struggled and were pretty sore the next couple of days since we hadn't walked up any hills since leaving Seattle.
We hiked the trail around the entire crater – about 7km in addition to the 3km hike to rim.
It reminded me of Olomana Ridge on Oahu, but it wasn't nearly as treacherous.
Summit of the mountain. Just above 9100ft.
Whistling-thorn Acacia. Large thorns, black bulbous growths that provide food and shelter for an ant species in exchange for defending the tree.
Back to Nairobi
After the quiet stay at Bilashaka and enjoying the outdoors both by foot and by boat, we headed back to Nairobi for a final night before returning to Lubumbashi. However, there was one last stop on the way back. Karen and I had both done some volunteer work with a group in Seattle called CAGJ that has ties to a bio-intensive farm in this area called G-BIACK, so Karen arranged for us to visit. It is in Thika, a moderately large town northeast of Nairobi, and the drive from Lake Naivasha to Thika was along the "forest road" that passed through beautiful forests and lush fields. Kenya's number one export is tea, and the bright green tea bushes growing on steep hillsides were stunning. We also saw pineapple fields and other crops.
Our driver was pretty concerned about getting caught in Nairobi's notorious rush-hour traffic jams, so we were in a hurry to get back. However, we took the time for a pretty complete tour of the G-BIACK site and test gardens, including some fish farming test ponds
Back to Lubumbashi
We took our early morning flight back to Lubumbashi; R picked us up and drove us to our new apartment. We had moved all of our stuff into the new place, but hadn't actually stayed there before we left.
We've been back for a couple of weeks. This past week has been interesting on the political front. On Monday, the national assembly voted to require a full census before federal
elections could take place, which was seen as a sneaky way to extend
Kabila's second term. Protests engulfed parts of Kinshasa, Goma, Bukavu, and
Mbuji-Mayi, but not Lubumbashi. Today, the senate pruned that clause out
of their bill, but we'll see what the final bill looks like.
The government shut down the internet and SMS texting this week. It's been partly restored now, and we hope that we will have more consistent internet access. The government shut it down to prevent people from posting images or text, but it also had a very negative impact on business!
Nairobi, and Kenya in general, was a breath of fresh air. It
was great to be on a “real” vacation – no laptop! – and to be at cooler, higher
elevations. Though Lubumbashi is pretty high at nearly 4,000 feet, Nairobi is higher,
at 5,500, and Lake Naivasha even higher, at 6,200.
We had a great home base in Nairobi at Margarita House, a
guesthouse tucked away on a back road in the upscale neighborhood of Karen,
where Karen Blixen, the author of Out of Africa, lived for 17 years in
the 1920s and 30s before returning to Denmark after her farm business failed.
"Our" room at Margarita House -- fittingly, the honeymoon suite!
Karen is where many upper-class Kenyans and ex-pats live. It has pretty streets
– even some with sidewalks! – malls, coffee shops, and restaurants, including a
sushi restaurant where we ate one night.
We were ready for some small
indulgences, and the first of these was to walk around. We end up taking the
car (R’s taxi, usually) so much in L’shi that it was a treat to get out on
foot. Not too much traffic, not too hot even in the sunshine: good prep for our
upcoming Mt. Longonot hike! We also had a somewhat eclectic list of consumer
items to hunt down in Nairobi’s malls – yarn for me, a watch, measuring cups
and spoons, new jeans for Eric – and hoped to meet up with a couple of my old
friends. We spent a day there before
heading down to Maasai Mara for our safari and had a day and a half between
Maasai Mara and Lake Naivasha, as well as one final night before flying out
early in the morning.
With most of our errands and a visit with a friend I’d known
when we both lived in Cairo 13-14 years ago completed on our first day, we had
time to be tourists on the in-between day after Maasai Mara. While Nairobi – aka “Nairobbery” – is known for being unsafe everywhere at night and some places even
in the day, Karen is generally acknowledged to be quite safe in the daytime.
The morning was sunny and clear, perfect for walking. Fresh from the Mara, we
had our eyes peeled for birds. We set off from our hotel to walk to the Karen
Blixen Museum along the well-traveled Karen Road, along which a couple of
matatu and boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) drivers honked to see if we wanted
rides, but we were happy walking.
Kazuri Beads necklaces -- also available in the US
photo from http://www.spurwingkenya.com/kazuri.html
We took a side trip to the Kazuri Bead factory, a project that helps women earn income by making pottery beads, and walked past sweeping driveways that led to large estates. We nodded to a couple of security guards and a trash collector we saw along the way, and at the Kazuri shop, we each picked out a hand-painted coffee mug to bring home to Lubumbashi.
Mug shot.
As we headed back to the Karen Road, we continued to marvel at how green and peaceful it was. I was pretty blissed out, strolling along, just the two of us … though I did point out to Eric the menacing signs advertising security and alarm systems on each of the gates we passed that belied the tranquility. Along this stretch of road, we didn’t see anyone else, until we were about 20 yards from the Karen Road, when a boda-boda turned off the Karen Road and came toward us.
I thought I recognized the motorcycle and the driver as one I’d turned down a ride from earlier. It was odd that his passenger was another guy dressed like a boda-boda driver, also with a faded reflective yellow vest and a helmet, and I was wondering whether the second guy’s bike had broken down or whether he was just a passenger the driver had given extra safety gear to. A few seconds after they passed us, I heard the bike again
behind us, and before I had a chance to turn around or to process that this was
Not Good, it had pulled up in front of us.
"X" marks the spot
As they pulled up, we could see that
there was another unhelmeted guy on the bike between the two I’d seen before. We each thought that it seemed a strange place to drop
off passengers ...
Those of you who are on Facebook know what happened next.
Three Guys, Two Guns,
and One Motorbike
The guy on the back of the bike slid off, taking off his helmet, and
lost his balance for a second. I didn't see him recover, because suddenly the middle guy was in front of me, patting me down, shouting, “money, money,
money!” in heavily accented English. He put his hand on what looked like the
handle of a gun tucked into his waistband – it was covered by his shirt and so
I never actually saw it – and said, “I will kill you!”.
I could see out of the
corner of my eye that the other passenger was patting down Eric, pulling things
out of his pockets. A dark van turned the corner off Karen Road
coming toward us, and stopped beside us briefly. Oh great, I thought, here come
their henchmen. But then the van was gone, and “my” guy was commanding my full
attention. All I had on me was my phone; Eric had the only cash we’d brought. I
had a debit card, which the guy wasn't interested in, and a shoulder bag, which
had only a map and a few other items that weren't valuable, though the guy didn't
know or believe that. I had my hands up and turned to see what had happened to
the van – perhaps not a good move to take my eyes off my attacker, but I was
wondering why, if the driver wasn't a henchman, he wasn't trying to help. I saw
that the van was stopped down the road a ways, and it may be that my attacker
followed my gaze then and saw it, too, because about then, the guys were in a pretty big hurry
to leave. Eric’s guy tried to pull off Eric’s wedding ring, but it wouldn't
go over his knuckle, and my guy kind of tried mine but either decided it wasn't
interesting enough or that it was time to go, because he just pulled my bag off my shoulder and got on the bike.
Then they were gone, and we picked up a few things from the
ground that had been in Eric’s pockets. Eric and I were both most annoyed about losing our non-valuable stuff, i.e., Eric’s wallet with driver’s license and bank cards, and my trusty shoulder bag (AR, if you’re reading this, your grey Overland bag is mine no more).
The morning was still beautiful, the
sun still bright and warm. I still felt blissed out – maybe it was shock? But I
was grateful that this thing that had always sounded so frightening, armed
robbery, had happened to us and we were not much the worse for it. It couldn't
have been more than 90 seconds from when they got off the bike to when they
left, and they had been quite efficient about the whole thing. I wouldn't say gentle, exactly, but they were clearly
after cash and valuables, and, except for the threat of the guns – Eric’s guy
actually showed his, Eric told me later – didn't seem to want to hurt us. We were lucky.
We
continued walking to the Karen Road, and it was just like before, except that
now we had no phone and no way to call anyone, and we had no cash. But we still had our Kazuri mugs!
As we were
walking along the Karen Road, a bit dazed, looking for our things in the hope
that they’d tossed all but the money (we later realized that we were on the
wrong side of the road, since Kenya drives on the left like the UK), a dark van
pulled over next to us. “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” the sweet-faced
driver said, and I realized this must
have been the van I’d seen a few minutes earlier. I told him that his
coming along when he had had probably spooked the robbers off, since they made
no real effort to take our jewelry or to rough us up.
The driver offered to take us to the police post to report the robbery.
“OK,” I said, about to get in, but then thinking better of it. “Um – who are you?” He laughed, and told us his name and the
name of the company he worked for. He had been taking tourists to Hemingway’s
Restaurant when they’d happened on our little scene.
Reassured, Eric and I got
in the van. The driver took us to the Hardy Police Post. He came in with us
and made the initial report; both he and the police were surprised that we'd been held up in Karen in broad daylight.
After that, our day was pretty much shot. We were at the
police post for a while making the report, and then one of the police kindly
directed us to where we could get a matatu to go back to Karen. When we said we
didn't have any money, he was surprised. But of course, we’d just been robbed! We
had only 3 Kenya shillings between us – and it’s been many years since the
matatu fare was actually just mashilingi
matatu (3 shillings) per person. So we waited a little longer, and they gave us a ride to
the nearby shopping mall, where I used my debit card to get cash, we got
another SIM card to put in Eric’s phone which was back at Margarita House, and
we got some lunch. Then we went to the Karen Police Post to give them the
report and the case number from the Hardy Police Post; of course, all this
information was written by hand in ledger books, nothing electronic. At the
Karen Police Post, the deputy seemed to recognize the descriptions that we gave
and told us that they had been losing sleep over these guys – probably part of the same gang described in this news report:
If the van driver hadn't come along, I don’t think it would have occurred to us to report the incident, but I think it's good we did. While we didn't ever expect to see any of our things again, the
response of the Nairobi police was comforting insofar as they were solicitous
and professional and seemed genuinely to want to get these guys.
I can’t say I’m glad to have had this experience, but I’m
glad it wasn't worse. It was all over so fast. Although the attackers used guns to
coerce us, I don’t think either of us -- being older, slower, and fewer than
they -- would have resisted even if they hadn't had guns. We weren't physically
hurt. However, it could just as easily have been different. Just as quickly, we
might have been shot, or beaten, or kidnapped, or sexually assaulted, and I think if we had felt we were in physical danger, we would have tried to fight them off or run, for better or for worse.
I titled this post WWW in Nairobi – “WWW” for “walking while
white”, a play on “DWB”, “driving while black”. By
doing so, I don’t mean to trivialize the systemic and systematic racism to
which Blacks in the US are subjected. I do think there are connections, though,
between the legacies of colonialism and slavery and the racism and inequality
that pervade both Kenyan and US society. These guys might target anyone who’s
upper-class or a tourist, but our whiteness, and the fact that we were walking,
which most upper-class Kenyans of any hue don’t do, made us stand out.
Because
the robbers didn't hurt us, and because we do have resources and privilege, this
turned out to be a relatively minor incident for us. But I'm conscious that this was only a flavor of the daily violations
and violence that some others are subjected to, whether in Kenya, DRC, or anywhere, and grateful that it is not our everday fare.
The second day at Maasai Mara we left before 7:30am and didn't return until after 7:00pm. We spent the whole day in the park, frequently stopping to identify birds or watch other wildlife. We did make it to the river where we saw hippos and Nile crocodiles.
This post is primarily a photo interlude with photos from our guide's facebook, our cellphones, and a few pictures from the web.
Another of James' photos of the Cheetah and her cubs from our first evening at Maasai Mara.
Video I took with my iPhone from the car of the cheetah family on the first evening.
[Karen: watch for the little one who's lagging behind and then comes bounding up! This same cub did this several times, both when we watched the group on the first evening and when we caught up with them on our third day -- interesting.]
Zebra near the road in the park.
Buffalo under an acacia tree.
Elephants
Spotted hyena.
Sleepy hyena cooling off in a puddle. We saw a few hyenas doing this.
Three lion bachelors sleeping.. It must have been a rough night!
Warthogs. We saw a lot of these. Most frequently a single adult with 3 watoto (kids).
[Karen: the Swahili for warthog is "ngiri", uncannily close to "nigiri", a word that sushi-lovers will recognize.]
Topi. One ran alongside us for a while. (from Google Images)
The lioness carrying a topi fetus to her cubs. Yes, we watched this!
Grey-crowned crane. Large with a fuzzy crown à la Dr. Seuss. The national bird of Uganda.
Kenya's national bird: the lilac-brested roller.
The lilac-brested roller in flight.
Acacia tree with black-headed weaver bird nests.
Speke's weaver.
Marabou stork. A very stately carrion eater also known as the undertaker. (from Wikipedia)
There were a lot of things that we saw and don't have pictures for. Here are some of the notes I made of the more interesting things we saw:
A dung beetle creating a dung ball larger than it was.
A hippo baby and mother yawning at each other.
Crocodiles basking alongside the river with their mouths open. They don't have tongues, but still pant like dogs to cool off.
A leopard tortoise seen following after an actual leopard.
A giraffe carrying 20 oxpeckers on its back.
A large, dark blue-violet wasp.
A troop of banded mongoose (mongeese?) playing.
Jackals looking like a cross between a coyote and a fox.
Baboons stalking groups of tourists hoping to mooch some of their lunch
Limping zebra with an obvious, large, red, raw wound.
Dead bright green snake with black patterning
Vultures and marabou stork feasting on a dead topi.
Kneeling marabou storks kneeling with engorged gular sacks, digesting bones?
Bright yellow weaver birds building nests from fresh, green grass.
A hornbill dropping lichen into a large hole in a tree where its mate was nesting.
This is my fourth trip to Kenya, but the first time I've
come as a tourist – I don’t count the couple of days tacked on to the end of my
first trip in 2002, when I made a rushed and half-hearted attempt to hike Mt. Kenya, or
the weekend with colleagues at Shimba Hills the following year.
The Mt. Kenya trip was way more than I could do. After a
month working on the coast, I dropped my bags in Nairobi (how did I get there?
I have a vague memory of riding a matatu from Mombasa, but I might have
imagined that) and rode a matatu up to Nanyuki, elevation 6,000 ft. There, I
rented warm clothes and a pack; guides carried food and other gear.
The lower slopes of Mt. Kenya were lovely. I remember wildflowers and hyrax and
plentiful, hearty food. I wanted to turn
back on the second or third day. The guides were disgusted with me; they insisted they could get me to the top, and said I was the first of their clients ever not
to go all the way. But my heart wasn't in it: I was tired, not acclimated, and
in no shape to hike this 17,000-foot mountain, Africa’s second-highest. Plus, I
had a plane to catch!
The weekend trip to Shimba Hills, a small game park in the
southeast, was my first taste of safari. Elephants came to eat food staff set
out for them, and we watched several adults and a baby from the deck of the lodge. They were
quite close, and stayed for some time. The next day we rode around in a Jeep
and looked for and at animals. My clearest memory is of giraffes, though I know
we saw others. It seemed too quick, maybe even a little perfunctory.
So, I count this as my first trip as a tourist. It was quite
a shock arriving from Lubumbashi to Nairobi a couple of days ago – the extensive paved roads, the
commercial centers, the vibrant activity. Along the Ngong Road, kilometer after
kilometer of furniture workshops with nice-looking wooden and cast-iron bed
frames, dressers, tables, and chairs, locally made (if mass-produced) baskets
and pottery. There are virtually no local handicrafts sold in Lubumbashi that
we've seen. There are some furniture makers, selling mostly wooden bed frames and some metalworking shops where gates are made and sold,
but nothing as nice as those in Kenya,
Nairobi is orders of magnitude more “developed”
(for lack of a better word) than Lubumbashi, or even Kinshasa, for that matter,
which is closer to it in size. Of course there are poor sections of Nairobi,
and Nairobi – especially the upscale Karen neighborhood where we stayed – is
not representative of Kenya as a whole.
But even outside Nairobi, there are good roads, and I was overwhelmed
when we saw all the goods at the supermarket in Narok, the last watering hole
on the way to the Maasai Mara. Somehow Congo’s extreme dysfunction was easier
to accept arriving directly from the US: of course we expected it to be
different from home, and we adjusted to the differences, taking them as much in
stride as we could. But seeing Kenya again 10 years after my last visit, and
even thinking back to the week I spent in Ghana earlier this year, throws
Congo’s scarcity into a different light. Of course, Ghana and Kenya are two of
Africa’s shining lights. Dar es Salaam, where I spent a day after a stint in a small
Tanzanian town in 2006, at that time seemed also quite unfinished.
Not that I think development qua development is always a good thing. The term means different
things to different people and in different contexts. I am not a fan of
consumerism, and don’t think that having more goods to buy necessarily equates
with progress. But I do think strong, local economies (shout out to CAGJ) are important, and I do
think all people should have work that sustains them and their families, and
goods and services that enable safe and healthy living. And education, of
course, and freedom of assembly and expression, and a government that
represents and protects them. Kenya isn't perfect – nowhere is – but being here
feels very different than being in Congo.
Anyhow, I meant for this post to be about the amazing first
day of our Maasai Mara safari. I had a prejudice, maybe from the Shimba Hills
trip, that going on safari was sort of like visiting a theme park, and I wasn't
too keen on it. Already it’s turned out to be much more than that, and we've
only spent a couple of hours in the Reserve!
Because our passports were in Kinshasa awaiting our
residence visas well past the date we were led to, or chose to, believe, our
original plan to fly out of L'shi on the 22nd to join a
“Christmaasai” safari fell through. The safari company owners very kindly
agreed to let us apply our payment to another trip, so we signed on for the New
Year’s safari. The other family that had booked it cancelled, though, and so we
were only able to go by paying extra to cover the transportation costs.
Despite the extra cost, we lucked out! [Eric: because of the extra cost.] Now it’s just the two of us and our very
friendly, very knowledgeable guide. He’s been doing this for 6 years and says
he’s never regretted it for a day – it’s his passion. He drove us down from
Nairobi, we checked into our luxury “tent” around 2 PM, had lunch, and at 4 PM
headed out onto the Mara. Lots of birds – Eric’s a great spotter – including an uncommon migrant Eurasian Roller, and also mongoose, Thomson’s gazelles galore,
zebras, warthogs (they have to kneel to graze!), and wildebeest. I don’t know
why, but I was surprised at how they mingled, unlike in zoos, where most
species are separate.
Eurasian Roller -- from this site; couldn't find the shot we took.
I was glad my Swahili teacher had made us watch “The Lion
King” – a helpful primer to the wildlife. We saw a female lion, and later a
group of 3 immature males bedding down for the night, but the real amazing
sight of the evening for me was a female cheetah and her five month-old cubs.
We had a great view and watched them for at least an hour, past the mandatory
6:30 PM return time. Captivating. We saw the cubs play, nurse, hang out … the
mother didn't move much until just around the time we were leaving. Then she
led the cubs across the plain. Plovers were scolding – they must have had a
nest nearby. A lappet-faced vulture flew low over the group: our guide said it
could easily take one of the cubs.
Mama cheetah with 2 of the cubs. Check out our guide, James Muchina, on Facebook -- he's got tons of amazing photos!
It was wonderful to be able to watch this family of cheetahs
and take as much time as we wanted. This wasn't “Wild Kingdom” or the Discovery
Channel, with dramatic music, cheesy voice-overs, and quick cuts to the action
shots. This was real time, slow time, all-the-time-in-the-world time. Pretty
cool! In a larger group, we wouldn't have had that chance.
Tomorrow, to the river in search of elephants and leopards!
The first week of December we flew to Kinshasa, the capital city of the DRC, 970 km from Lubumbashi, for two reasons: to get the visas necessary to stay past January 2, and for Karen to attend a public health conference. We were lucky, because it turned out that a former classmate of Karen's was visiting Kinshasa at the time, and she knew it well and introduced us to interesting places and people there.
Sunset over the Congo River from our hotel room.
Kinshasa is an enormous, crowded, and poor city. It is also a bustling, active, 24-hour city with 8-lane roads added to the standard collection of wild traffic routes. We stayed in the Gombe district, a wealthy and quiet neighborhood where most of the embassies and the fancy hotels are located. One of the fanciest hotels, The Fleuve ("River" in French), hosted the conference, and we stayed there for the first two nights. We estimate that one night at the Fleuve cost approximately what a college professor here earns in a week. It reminded me of the hotels I stayed in when I visited Chennai, India for work, and we soon wanted to escape that expensive, corporate environment. Although neither of us had used AirBnB before, Karen found 2 listings for Kinshasa, and one was available, cheap, and in the same district, so we moved there. We walked from there to the hotel on the last day of the conference, and stayed until we decided we were set regarding our visas.
Five-star bath water straight from the tap!
The first thing we did in Kinshasa was go to the DGM (immigration) to talk to an official about getting our visa extended. Our embassy told us that we qualified for the student/researcher visa. The other types of visas are missionary, tourist, and resident. Initially, we had been told that we needed resident visas, which were a lot more expensive. We thought we had brought all the necessary documents, but the DGM asked for proof that we were married; we were able to retrieve the marriage certificate from Lubumbashi with the help of friends and colleagues, but it delayed things a day or two. Since Fulbright is a program of the US Department of State, the US embassy helped expedite the process. Once the DGM accepted our paperwork (and our money!), we decided to return to Lubumbashi. The embassy told us they would courier our passports to us as soon as the DGM was finished with them, which, our DGM contact assured us, would take about a week. Note the foreshadowing as we return to our narrative.
DGM Kinshasa [note from Karen: this is not a parking lot -- this is the 8-lane road in Gombe and we're stopped at a traffic light (yes, cars usually stop at these lights!) in the farthest left lane.]
On Friday night, Karen's classmate N took us to a fundraising party at one of the embassies where we met some expats working in Kinshasa. Karen made some good public health contacts, and N invited us along to see Zaiko perform. We declined because Karen had to be up early for the conference the next morning; we found out later that N's party stayed out until 4am. [Karen: we thought we'd have another chance the following night, but it turned out we didn't, so we were disappointed to have missed it!!] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaiko_Langa_Langa
We visited the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary outside Kinshasa on Sunday. "Lola Ya Bonobo" means Paradise for Bonobos in Lingala. The sanctuary was opened to take care of bonobos, many of which had been rescued from markets throughout the DRC. Some people consider them good eatin' despite laws that prohibit trafficking in bonobos for any purpose. However, before the sanctuary existed, law enforcement officers didn't have a way to protect the animals they rescued. Unlike the common chimpanzee, bonobos live south of the Congo river and are found only in the DRC.
This is the nursery for the older orphans. The bonobo on the left is the 6-year-old who is quite ready to move out and doesn't want to have anything to do with the rest of his family. Yvonne is their surrogate mother.
Set in 30 hectares (75 acres) of forest, the site contains a visitor center, 2 nurseries, and 3 large fenced areas for separate groups of apes. The youngest orphans are in one nursery and the other nursery is used for bonobos up to about age 6, after which they are integrated into the larger troops. These troops include infants born on site – the nurseries are only for orphans, who bond with human caregivers. The program has started to introduce animals back into the wild at "Ekolo ya Bonobo" – Land for Bonobos – in Equateur Province.
The taxi ride to the sanctuary was interesting because we drove across Kinshasa and I got a feeling for the less upscale parts of the city. The size of the markets and the resulting crowds looked overwhelming. No 8-lane roads in those parts of town. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_ya_Bonobo http://www.friendsofbonobos.org/ekolo-ya-bonobo/
Tuesday we walked to the Marché des Voleurs (Thieves' Market), which is the primary market for tourist goods like masks, paintings, various wood and soapstone figures, jewelry. The stalls stood in rows in a large open space, but all of the paintings were displayed at the entrance on the ground. Also at the entrance were some empty bird cages and some birds for sale – notably the popular and vulnerable Grey African Parrot. You can see the parrots with paintings behind them in this photo https://www.flickr.com/photos/teresehart/3900437185/
On Tuesday night, N took us to visit the Kinshasa home of Stand Proud (the English name), which was an amazing experience. Stand Proud helps children with polio and other paralyzing disorders get fit for braces and forearm crutches. We watched as the technicians fitted out a 6-year-old so he could take his first steps since his legs were paralyzed by polio when he was 3. That makes it sound like a hospital. It was a 6-room house with cement
floors, no plumbing, an outside cooking area and little furniture. About
30 boys slept there on mats on the floor while undergoing training and a
Ivorian couple lived in one room as "dorm parents". Older guys that had
been through the program before learned how to make braces & fit
them and would then teach the new kids how to walk. One room was
dedicated to some machinery used to construct and modify the various
aids.
Getting fitted for braces. We asked if it was ok to post this picture and they said it was fine.
They have sites in other cities in the DRC, at this location girls were only served during the day; there wasn't space to accommodate them separate from the boys. After visiting the Stand Proud home, we crashed a Christmas Party at one of the embassies. All of the embassy staff wore clothing made from custom fabric with the embassy logo on it. http://www.standproud.org/
For me, Kinshasa was like Lubumbashi except bigger, more tropical, and more connected to the outside world. We were introduced to a large community of non-Congolese working for governmental and non-governmental organizations, so it seemed a lot less isolated – we haven't broken into the NGO community in Lubumbashi.
Most adult men in Lubumbashi keep their hair very, very short, if not shaved completely. In Seattle, I kept my hair fairly short, but I wasn’t about to shave my head or get a buzz cut. Most barbers probably don’t have any experience cutting hair like mine; we weren’t going to let that stop us, however. We found a salon a couple of blocks from our apartment that looked reasonably good and had a young male barber, who, when we asked, said he could cut hair like mine. Which he could, and he did, but I wonder how many times he had cut straight hair before!
It was the middle of a hot October afternoon, and I got sweaty just walking there. The shop was air-conditioned and wasn’t too warm, but there was no air under the black nylon sheet and the sweat started to run down my back. The barber started with scissors that pulled a little with every cut, then used clippers over my whole head in a single direction. That wasn’t what I was used to. Then he left to get a new “Gillette”, which is the generic term for a double-edged razor blade. He unwrapped it and, pressing it against a comb with his thumb, used it to cut, shape, and thin my hair. It reminded me of a thinning device my mom used on me growing up.
I started sweating again for a different reason when he held the bare blade between his fingers and trimmed the top of my cheeks, my neck, and around my ears. I tried to hold completely still, feeling beads of sweat rolling down my lower back, while he scraped the bare razor blade against my skin.
Karen was having her toenails done and provided some feedback, getting him to thin the back a little bit more. Depending upon the light & and angle, the haircut could look pretty good, but Karen laughed uncontrollably for the first 48 hours or so every time she looked and saw an especially bad angle. We later found out about the hairdresser that all the expats use, and she cleaned me up.
