Day 4

The slums were a powerful experience. The poverty was almost unreal. I could go on forever about depressing minutia that would likely mesh with your preconceptions of African slums, but in reality, the Soweto section of the Kibera slums we saw were full of people living normal lives (albeit ones wrecked by poverty). The people were friendly for the most part (which is not to say we didn't get a lot of angry looks) and everyone was more than willing to talk about life in Kibera with hopes that we would spread the word around. It's hard to explain via blog, but some of the optimism for the future (through community and UN programs) is unreal. As long as the world, the UN and Kenyans are actively forcing the hand of the Kenyan government to work towards sustainable slum improvements there seems to be a good chance that the lives of the people in Kibera will show signs of improvement over the passing years.

Anyhow, those who want to know more can talk to me later (I have no pictures, it felt too voyeuristic) when I get back. I'm off to Uganda soon, which means no e-mail for a while. I will, however, try to post my phone number tomorrow morning. If not, you'll catch it when I get back to Kenya.

Cheers

-Dave

Day 3

Whoa, the past few days have been a whirlwind. I'll be brief (since this is one of 3 journals I'm supposed to be keeping), but I'm having a good time. We head to Uganda at the end of the week, but this week we've been checking out Nairobi. Tuesday was spent at Nairobi National Park looking at giraffes, lions, buffalo and waterbeasts from affar. I talked the politics of gazetting parks with our guide and took lots of pictures. Today involved visiting University of Nairobi and a lot of free beer. We learned a bit about the geography of the city and got a short tour of the campus and business district with a few of the students. After that was a meet and greet with the students at ISIPE (mainly biologists and math guys) that involved tasty samosas and a lot of free Tusker. I wound up spending most of the night talking South African politics with a Cameroonian named Felix, who had been studying in Pretoria. So yeah, I'm off to set up my cell phone and write in my travel journal. Tomorrow, visiting the UN and the Kibera slums.

Cheers

-Dave

First post

Here we go! After some awesome delays in Montreal and Amsterdam, I've lost a day of my life (Monday got killed by the time change) and I'm in Kenya! The weather is absurdly nice, with flowers and whatnot everywhere, and the whole group seems to be fighting jet lag pretty well. Today we're hitting up a park so "we can get gawking at giraffes and stuff" out of our system and hopefully getting an itinerary for the trip. We're at ISIPE (an insect research post) for a week, after which no one really knows what will be going down.

I'm missing y'all already and I'll ride a hippo or something for ya.

Cheers

-Dave