I am in a different world completely from when I woke up yesterday morning.  Yesterday morning I woke up to the singing of birds.  The sun was rising over the Ndoto mountains.  I could here the goats and camels at the neighbors.  I packed up the car, climbed in and drove South.  The first part was through desert on dirt roads.  I saw only a couple other vehicles and lots of grazing animals.  Then I got to tarmac and the world started changing fast.  I reached Nanyuki for lunch with a group of people on tour from Colorado.  One is Karen, who I met in January.  It was really good to see her again and meet her friends.  She also had ordered a box of baskets so I was able to deliver that and get a good lunch at my favorite restaurant in Nanyuki, Le Rustique.  Delicious food and they let my dog, Mouse, join me at the table and run about in the garden.  My hotel and restaurant rating always includes how friendly and accepting they are about me having my dog with me!!  After a long lunch and meeting another friend, I continued on my journey.  About 12 hours after I left Ngurunit, I arrived in Nairobi last evening.  Long drive.  Now, I am in a completely different world.  Spent almost an hour stuck in traffic trying to get to the mall.  I'm sitting at a coffee shop working on my computer and having instant internet access.  I have basically one day to do so many things and my first meeting has been delayed by almost an hour as the guy I'm meeting has been stuck in traffic.  So I am taking the time to catch up on connecting to the world of internet!!  So many layers of worlds in my life.  Mind boggling sometimes!!  At least it keeps life interesting.  My latest challenge was running out of power on my computer last evening and discovering that I had forgotten my power cord somewhere in the North!! Oops.  A quick call for help to Nairobi friends and contacts procured me the loan of a cord that fits this morning.  So now all is well and I will accomplish my goals this short Nairobi trip.  I have half an order of baskets with me that needs boxing up and dropping at the shipper.  Need to record them all first for which my computer is essential.  Tomorrow I pick up my daughter, Naiboku, from her school for a mid-term break.  Then meeting up with my new partner for a big Rotary project we are working on getting started.  She is arriving tonight from USA and tomorrow we hash out a few things on the application.  Then Naiboku and I head north to Maralal.  Crazy life sometimes.  But again I say, I never get bored what with all the travel and challenges keeping me on my toes.   I will sit and watch the busy life swirling about me for a bit.  No birds, goats and camels here, but lots of interesting people from all corners of life.  The person I'm meeting is almost shook free of the traffic and will be here soon.  On with the day in this different world....

Another Ngurunit time post...

16 June 2017

I just finished cooking dinner to the accompanying music of U2.  Songs of Innocence album.  I went to the concert for that in Chicago in 2015 with my friend Janice.  It was amazing.  Beyond words.  This year U2 is in the midst of a 30 year anniversary tour of Joshua Tree.  I went to the concert 30 years ago, again in Chicago, when I was in University at UW Madison.  When this latest tour was announced, I so tried to sort out how to go to it.  I simply could not get the dates and places to meld with my summer schedule of having Loiweti home and my fall schedule of taking both kids to Wisconsin for school starting up again in September.  I resigned myself to missing this U2 event.  Last week the universe moved and suddenly I was made aware of a new set of concert dates added for the Midwest.  One of these dates was September 8^th in Minneapolis!  Wow.  I will be in New Richmond at the time, a short distance away from the venue, so now I have tickets to the Joshua Tree 30^th anniversary tour!  Crazy and fun world. 

A world away from USA in Northern Kenya, at the moment I am sitting out under the amazing stars of Ngurunit.  I am gazing at the constellation of Scorpio as it is appearing over the horizon.  I had never known this constellation before coming to Kenya.  It is my star sign but in the Northern Hemisphere of Wisconsin, it is basically too close to the horizon the wrong time of year in order to see it.  Here it rises high and visible in the early evening between May and September.  It is so distinctive and really does look exactly like a scorpion, unlike so many other constellations which are harder to correlate the stars into the picture of what it is supposed to be.  I certainly have been reminded the last few days of what a scorpion looks like and what it can do.  The first day we arrived, Bruin dog was stung by one chasing another dog in the scrub brush by the fence.  We didn’t actually see it but the symptoms were clear.  Poor dog was in extreme pain.  We could see the sting on the top of the left front foot and he wouldn’t let us touch it at all.  I instantly gave him an antihistamine and pain killer.  He didn’t want me to leave him.  If I did, he would come hopping after me on three legs.  So I sat with him on his bed for a couple hours.  The medicine seemed to do its work and he slept through the night.  In the morning, he was walking fine.  I was so relieved.  A few years ago little Mouse got stung and she almost died.  I hadn’t a clue then what medicine to give so only had hope and prayers.  She spent the night retching and retching.  I was so worried.  But she pulled through to my great relief and recovered with a little help in the morning from hydrocortisone shot from the local clinic which I learned helps a lot.  Scorpions are many here in Ngurunit and lots of people get stung.  I have been lucky so far.  Especially last night.  I had put my exercise mat outside and after a bit of stretching, was lying on my back watching the stars with a dog curled up on each side of me.  They both suddenly jumped up and went running off into the dark chasing something.  I turned on my flashlight to see where they had run off to and to my great horror, there was a scorpion on the mat right next to where my bare feet had been a moment before.  Amazing none of us were stung!  I jumped up, grabbed the dogs, locked them in the house to keep them safe as I grabbed a heavy shoe and went to take out the scorpion that was still sitting on the mat where I had left it!  Yikes!  My son had been oblivious through all the excitement as he was listening to music on his noise canceling earphones on a cot across the yard a bit.  I will definitely be using a cot from now on too.  He hadn’t heard all my shouting for help so was surprised when I showed him the dead scorpion as I took it to throw in a place where the stinger, even dead, could cause no harm.  Not sure if it could, but always better to be safe than sorry….

The below written in Ngurunit a few days ago:

15 June 2017

Countless.  The flow of people through my house this morning is countless.  I am in Ngurunit.  Loiweti and I arrived with dogs Bruin and Mouse last evening after a long trip from Maralal.  We had to make several stops along the way to drop boxes of Rotary project books off at Primary schools so it made the travel time a bit longer than usual.  Since this morning, I have had countless visits from various local family and community members bringing milk, eggs, baskets for sale or nothing at all.  Everyone with their hands out looking for a bit of cash to help buy food for their households.  This is a common practice within the Samburu Culture and even has a specific word for it: mparin (approximate spelling as I hear the word that I can barely pronounce correctly).  It is a social networking practice more than simple begging, which many outsiders take it to be.  In the past, mparin was a way to help those who were having difficulties survive through it.  People would help by giving out a goat, a cow or whatever they had.  Then, if disaster struck them, they would be able to have their past favor returned when they went on mparin.    It was a great form of welfare for everyone and bonded communities together.  It is still there within the culture but the way of implementing has greatly changed since the advent of education, formal jobs and a cash economy.  It tends to be skewed towards everyone without a job coming to those with jobs and asking for money.  It is rarely turned around as a favor given and a favor returned later.  It can become a big burden on those who have the jobs.  When one starts working, it is not just for your own family, but the whole community.  We have had to deal with this issue always.  It can be a huge problem if no boundaries are set.  We have dealt with it in several ways.  One is by me letting all the members of the groups I work with know that my home is off bounds for mparin.  I am working with them on income generation projects and to have them come ask straight out for money would be very hard on me as I work with over 500 women.  If everyone came regularly, I would never be able to help myself, much less them.  By and large everyone respects that.  Sometimes a desperate case of illness or other family emergency comes up.  For these, we can do a case by case assistance.  School fees requests are referred to the PEAR Innovations school bursary program.  Then there are the regular old people we affectionately call our pensioners.  A select group of very old mamas, and a few men, who really have no support from anywhere else are given a bit every month to help them survive.  There are no old people homes here so the community social structure must watch out for them.  We do our part with a bit of cash or food now and then.  Others help them build houses and generally take care of them within the homestead structures.  They live and survive the best they can on peoples’ kindness.  All of this works very well for us, except lately there has been a drought and everyone is hurting.  That is one of the main causes of my constant stream of mparin seekers this morning.  We have had some rain, but not enough really and livestock is still recovering so not producing much for people to live on.  Market prices for livestock are still low with animals also still too thin really to fetch a good price.   One good thing I have seen this morning is that milk is starting to flow.  I had several people bring milk with them so it was more an exchange of gifts than one way cash from me to them.  I now have a pot of camel milk and a pot of cow milk.  I have been getting camel milk all through the drought as camels can produce throughout, but this is the first cow milk I have seen for over a year.  So happy to see it.  But not sure how long it will be available if it doesn’t rain some more.  Everything is green, but only on the surface.  We still need a lot more rain to soak deep and keep things green for longer.  Mperiyon, my sister-in-law, was saying yesterday that grass is still scarce and the cows are surviving more on leaves that the owners cut from the trees with back breaking work.  She warned that the cows are fat now, but most of the leaves are gone now too, so unless we get more rain, the cattle will start to grow thin and die.  One of the jobs we have for Loiweti on his home visit is to collect together all the marketable bulls and go sell them before they start to lose condition.  One can never depend on the rains these days with climate change very, very evident in our part of the world.  No predictability any more on seasons.  I want to sell all the goats we can too.  Better to have the money in the bank than on the hoof.  Less likely to lose it that way.  Though to do that, we have to argue with the family as in the pastoralist life, they feel more sure about their wealth when they can see it grazing around them.  In good seasons, the increase is faster too in the form of calves, kids and lambs, but in bad seasons (drought), this ‘interest’, as well as the principal, can disappear fast.  So this time, we hope to convert as much as possible into a more secure form!