Resilience (by Karen)

When we moved to our new place in January, we were thrilled to have a full kitchen, complete with stove and oven. But Eric was hankering after a grill to roast eggplants for baba ghanouj, so R got us this little one and a bag of charcoal.

This is what most Congolese use to cook all the time – more about the charcoal economy in another post.

Mmm ... smoky eggplant!

Fresh pita from Nazem, the Lebanese bakery

Tasty baba ghanouj!

We soon realized we weren’t going to use all that charcoal, and since the nights can be cold (even more so now), we let T, our night watchman, use the brasero (the hibachi-type thing) and charcoal to keep warm.

However, when the power goes out here, the generator doesn’t always get turned on, and if it is turned on, it’s only at night, and it’s only strong enough to run the lightbulbs and (yay!) the wifi router. No electric kettle, no stove or oven. So, a few weeks after its eggplant debut, the brasero was called back into service for dinner.

Resilience

We’ve only had one more brasero dinner since then, since this is not Eric’s favorite way to cook, and he’d rather get take-out from the yummy Lebanese KFC (KFC = Katanga Fried Chicken, but we usually get their falafel or shawarma) or from Galito’s.

Over the past month, we’ve had several days with only a few hours of power and nights with none at all. With no reservoir of hot bath water from the electric water heater, we’ve put the brasero to use to heat water for our morning baths and coffee. Too cold these days (or we’ve gotten too soft?) for a cold-water bucket bath!

Weather (by Karen)

We haven't posted much in a while, but I have lots of bits and pieces floating around in my head. So I've started to write them down, and will post them little by little.

Here's the first (from May 10th):

We both sleep under a blanket now, a thick shaggy polyester blanket made in China, and in the early mornings mist rises from the ground inside our compound. It burns off quickly, and the days are blue-sky clear with cotton-wool clouds. It’s warm in the sun, even hot, but the air is cool and dry. Doors that were swollen and needed a sharp push or tug to open or close during the rainy season now slide with less effort in and out of their frames. A couple of months back, the last of the avocados from the tree in the yard plummeted to the ground, then the tree was covered in cream-colored spikes of small flowers, and then baby avocados the size of grapes started falling. The drops are getting progressively bigger; maybe some will be edible by the time we leave at the end of July.

Zim-Zam Addendum: Livingstone Railway Museum

I found some pictures from the Railway Museum in Livingstone. We arrived after it had closed, but we could look at some of the exhibits through the fence. While walking back to town, we saw the working coal-fired steam train that still runs as a tourist attraction go by. The coal smoke really stank. The train crosses the Victoria Falls Bridge, which supports road, rail & foot traffic.

Zambia State Railways.

Obviously, if I had Photoshop, I could try to stitch those together. The engine above and the one visible below were different, but identically painted steam engines. You can read "Rhodesia Railways" on the passenger car. Northern Rhodesia became Zambia in 1964.

One more photo. This was taken this morning in Lubumbashi. Our little friend found itself in a predicament. We released it into the wilds of our backyard. Too cute to flush.

Our Zim-Zam trip (by Eric)

(It should really be Zam-Zim because we traveled from Zambia to Zimbabwe, but Zim-Zam sounds better.)

Last October we got an invitation from an old friend of Karen's to go hiking in Zimbabwe in April,  so we've been planning on this practically since we arrived. We went overland through Zambia to Livingstone with A, Karen's colleague from the University of Lubumbashi. On the way, we stopped overnight at the Chikuni Mission, where Seattle University has a connection. After a couple days in Livingstone, Karen and I flew to Harare for the hike, while A returned to Lubumbashi overland. The trip was about two weeks in all.
Our primary taxi driver, R, was having car trouble, so at 6:30 am on the Saturday before Easter our "understudy" taxi driver, M, came to get us and A to take us to Kasumbalesa – the town at the border between Zambia and the DRC, about an hour away. We had gotten our visas before we left, so it was pretty straightforward to walk through the border crossing and pick up another taxi on the other side. We went to Kitwe where we bought bus tickets for Lusaka. This was our first time in Zambia, and during the ride we quickly noticed the similarities and differences between Zambia and the DRC.
Overall, things were pretty similar: the cars were similar, but in Zambia the cars drive on the left and have the steering wheels on the right while in the DRC, the cars drive on the right with the steering wheels on the right, which just isn't optimal [Karen: not safe!]. The buildings were pretty much the same and in the same basic condition, but the roads were more consistently paved in Zambia. The agricultural sector in Zambia seemed to be more robust, with lots of produce available along the roads. We saw huge pallets of tomatoes on trucks in the town across the border – probably for importing into the DRC.
The bus to Lusaka was fairly modern. After 7 hours, we arrived in Lusaka, the capitol, after dark. Most of the way the bus played some choral music sung in either Bemba or Nyanja. Just like French is the official language for the whole DRC – while individual Congolese mostly speak their local language at home and with friends – in Zambia, English is the official language for the whole country, but a number of local languages are spoken in different regions. This linguistic compromise between unity, diversity, and European languages was made by many African countries. For example, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Kenya all use English and the traditional languages. One notable exception, Tanzania, unified the country by standardizing on just Swahili. We hear this did reduce tribal/regional differences, but it also may have made economic development more difficult vis-à-vis the West.
The hotel was only a few blocks from the bus station, which was the reason I chose it, but we were reluctant to walk there in the dark, so we paid too much for a 5-minute taxi ride. For dinner, we just walked across the parking lot to the food court at a shopping mall – not something you see in Lubumbashi!
On Sunday the three of us walked to the Zambian national museum and then took a cab to the Sunday Crafts market. The museum was kind of lame, but the craft market was pretty nice – like the similar "thieves market" in Kinshasa but without the hard-sell we felt there. [Karen: since we were traveling ultra-light with just one daypack apiece, it was easy – or necessary – to avoid temptation and resist buying the granite birdbath with a hippo's ears and eyes peeking up from the bottom, or the carved traditional-style stools or chairs. Eric bought a small piece of malachite, though, which probably came from the area around Lubumbashi but cost a fraction of what it would go for in L'shi.]
Our hotel was a corporate hotel situated next to a shopping mall, and that allowed us to watch a movie in a theater for the first time since we arrived in Africa: Danny Collins, with Al Pacino. After the film ended, we left the theater suffering from culture whiplash.

Monday we took the bus from Lusaka to Monze, where we were getting picked up by someone from the Chikuni Mission. Karen is planning to write more about our visit to the mission, but I'll give an overview from my perspective. The Chikuni Mission was founded in 1905 and currently has primary and secondary schools, a radio station, clinics, and a health center that was upgraded to a first level hospital by the Zambian government in August 2014. Karen's colleague A was interested in seeing a top-notch health center in Zambia because, unlike the US or Europe, Zambia's health system is only a bit better than the DRC's and so the clinic at Chikuni provided an example of realistic improvements over what is currently available.
I'll mention one more detail about our visit: we also learned about the home-based HIV/AIDS care program the mission runs, and in connection with that we visited the rural home of a patient. For me, it was interesting because it reminded me of visiting the home of a coffee farmer in Nicaragua. Both houses were small, poor, rural, actual homes used by people working the land, but it was also clear that Nicaragua was a bit more developed.
 Tuesday, we were driven back to Monze and made it just in time to catch the bus to Livingstone, which is the town on the Zambian side of Victoria Falls. This time, the bus played some videos and I discovered that the choral music we had heard before was actually the Zambian army chorus and the songs were either religious or patriotic. They also showed Wes Craven's film, "The Breed," which was a stellar example of American cultural imperialism. [Karen: I just thought it was a stellar example of a ridiculous horror film, but several cuts above the over-sexual B-movies I used to be subjected to on bus rides in Egypt.]
In Livingstone, we stayed at a nice, affordable place called Chanter's Lodge. We arrived early in the afternoon and immediately got a taxi to take us the few miles to the falls. Ponchos and rain slickers were available, for a price, and we (foolishly?) opted out.

Satellite view of Victoria Falls; the white line is the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe

The right side of this photo is Zambia, and there is a metal walkway that runs along a ridge line to the point of land you can see across from the falls on the right. We got absolutely soaked walking across it. The water was mostly falling straight down, so I was convinced that it had started raining very hard, but it was just the spray from the falls. Very impressive. Karen discovered her rain jacket wasn't waterproof. We also walked down the to river, sort of below the bridge, to a place called the boiling pot and we also walked along the upper part around to about where the bridge is, too. There were many baboons along the path here and I was a little nervous getting too close to them. We did enjoy watching the young baboons wrestle and chase each other. We returned to Chanter's and had a disappointing dinner there.

Wednesday we signed up for the "Rhino Walk" which was pretty much what you would expect: we were picked up at the lodge and drove to the second-smallest game park in Zambia, where we drove through the park, saw some birds and antelope, then parked and walked to where two rhinos were grazing.

Rhino sisters

White rhinos are not aggressive and not particularly endangered. It's the Black rhinos that are nearly extinct. The guide suggested that, although the 2 species are the same color, the wider mouth of the White rhino may have been the source of the name: wide becoming white. These are 2 sisters. The younger was about a year old and the other about 4 years old. The mother died of natural causes a few months ago and at that time the younger joined her sister.

Thursday we said goodbye to Karen's colleague, who headed back to Lubumbashi by bus, and Karen and I crossed over the Victoria Falls Bridge into Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.

The bridge between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Can you see the bungee jumper?

We only had one night in Vic Falls, but on this side we could walk to the falls. The views from the Zimbabwe side were just as stunning as from Zambia, but we only got "rained" on for a short period, so I was able to take some pictures.

Victoria Falls. Karen providing scale.

Although we didn't see any baboons on this side, we did see these affectionate beasts:

Warthog love

More affectionate beasts:

Our honeymoon at Victoria Falls?

Friday we went to the Vic Falls airport and flew the discount airline (FlyAfrica.com) to Harare where we were picked up by Karen's friend S and S's friend J. Karen worked with S in the Philippines many years ago and J is Zimbabwean. They had organized the trip to the Nyanga National Park in the eastern highlands next to Mozambique. The first night we staying in a wonderful rental cottage set in a beautiful location near the park.

The idyllic cabin before the grueling trail

We would have been happy to have stayed there for more than just one night, but the next morning we drove to the main campus of "Far and Wide" which was a large complex of 2-bedroom and dormitory style cabins set up to provide outdoor experiences for students and corporate team building offsites. They even had a ropes course. Besides the cabins, Far and Wide also provides other services including the porters that we used to carry most of our gear. Karen and I have gone backpacking before, including a 9-night trip in Wyoming, but we had never used porters before. [Karen: I did, for a couple of days on Mt. Kenya ...] It felt a little odd to trot along with just a day pack while hiring young guys to carry huge packs. But the senior porter had also built the trail himself and loved backpacking, so I grew a little more comfortable with the arrangement.
From Far and Wide base we left to hike the Turaco Trail that loops through the Pungwe river valley and adjacent ridges. Along the trail we didn't see any larger animals or many birds, but we saw some interesting insects, including this spectacular lavender praying mantis.

A praying mantis disguised as a flower.

Karen also spotted a dwarf chameleon walking across the trail mottled brown, black, and grey like the leaf litter. It was about 4-5 inches long, but I didn't think to take a picture. I also found a porcupine quill, but the dominant feature was the flora: the trees, ferns, and vines seemed exotic to me, having done little hiking outside the northwest! We spent two nights in tents and three days hiking – the last night we spent in one of the cabins at Far and Wide, which was also a treat.

The trail passing underneath a giant tree fern.

It's always interesting visiting other countries and comparing them to what we experience in Lubumbashi. In Zambia, the better roads, cars, and obvious business activity indicated more development. The geography and the emphasis on mining are similar, but, for example, the shopping centers in Lusaka seemed to fall between those we saw in Nairobi and Kinshasa. I imagine the rural hamlet near Chikuni we visited was very similar to what we would find here in the DRC. [Karen: I thought it was more developed -- fruit trees, outbuildings, rabbit hutch, etc. than many rural DRC places would be, at least now that things have gone downhill so much over the last 40-50 years, but I've only been to a few places outside the city and am reluctant to generalize.] I could picture the DRC developing to a similar level within 5-10 years.
Zimbabwe, however, felt different. Being farther from the equator and at 4800', the climate in Harare was much more temperate. The country used to be even more developed, relative to similar African countries; however, as Wikipedia says, "Zimbabwe's economy has consistently shrunk since 2000, in an atmosphere of political turmoil, capital flight and mismanagement." This contributes to the feeling of Zimbabwe being a country going backwards and a pervasive pessimism. I'm hoping to write more about these issues in a later post.

Special Edition!

A couple of posts ago, I gave a shout-out to some of the people and groups who are “paddling upstream” and doing good work here in DRC despite the many obstacles. One of those was Espoir Pour Tous, a Kinshasa-based organization run by Luc Lutala. We were (virtually) introduced to Luc by the director of G-BIACK, a community-based organization promoting bio-intensive agriculture in Kenya. Luc has completed G-BIACK’s training, as well as several others; he is a Global Eco-Village Network ambassador for Africa, and is passionate about working with people to create change and promote sustainable, just development.

Luc is currently putting together his second Eco-Design Workshop in Kinshasa. He’s looking for money to support lodging, meals, and transport for the participants and to buy or rent equipment and supplies for the 2-week course. Luc has already secured about a quarter of what he needs, but to help him raise the rest of the money, we've created a crowdsourcing appeal.

This is where you come in! Please visit the site and pitch in – any amount will help. We need to raise at least $5000 in the next two weeks (the actual costs of the project are greater than that, so don’t be discouraged from giving if you see we've reached that goal). And please circulate this request to anyone and everyone you know who might be interested in supporting this work – for social, economic, and environmental change.

Thank you! And we’ll post a regular blog update soon.

Karen (I posted the appeal) and Eric (I compiled the video)

Click HERE to see the campaign

Luc and his colleagues have excellent credentials, a good track record, and high hopes for promoting positive, peaceful change in DR Congo! To pull off this second workshop, they are looking for some outside support -- let them know you stand with them!

Training in Eco-Village Design/6-18 April 2015/Kinshasa, DRC

Eco-village strategies for sustainable development and adaptation to climate change - To work towards the construction of sustainable communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in central Africa.

Goal! To create a model of sustainable development that will contribute to the formation of those who can work for a holistic change in their society (social, economic, environmental, and global vision of the world). Sustainable communities for sustainable development. Agroforestry and permaculture are essential aspects in our center and in our teaching.

- Formation au Design d’Eco-village -

Stratégies Eco villages pour le développement durable et l’adaptation au changement climatique

Pour aider à la construction des communautés durables en République Démocratique du Congo et en Afrique centrale.

Objectif ! créer un modèle de développement durable qui va contribuer à la formation des acteurs pouvant travailler pour un changement holistique de leur société ( social, économique, environnemental et vision globale du monde). Des communautés durables pour le developpement durable.
L'agroforesterie, la permaculture sont un des aspects essentiels dans ce centre et dans les enseignements.

Powered by 
CrowdfundHQ

We live in a city (by Karen)

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 28^th 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.

* we invite you to support some of them: AFDC, Espoir PourTous, Kimbilio

BONUS PHOTOS ...

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).

Lake Naivasha and Mount Longonot

Lake Naivasha

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!