Nairobi Milkshake

As I've often opined, for all the amazing destinations which inspire travel, in the end it's the quiet little moments that make for a memorable trip.  At the end of the recent way too stressful trip to Zanzibar - and side trip to Nairobi - I found myself killing time in the Nairobi Airport.  Since the trip had been so fraught with disasters, both big and small, I made the decision to get to the airport way too early (even by my standards).  I plopped down at the Hardee's, probably drawn by the fact that we don't have Hardee's in Vermont.  Plus, I suspect that after an exhausting trip I was drawn to some comfort food.  Here's a picture of the vanilla milkshake I happily consumed, and to the left is my ancient Kindle which made it through another trip in one piece.  It all made for a nice little quiet moment as I re-calibrated. 

I also had a massive cheeseburger, which had its own dodgy charm.

The college wanted to fly me back directly to Burlington but I told them to just route me back to Dar Es Salaam so that I could surprise Steve and the students at the airport.  We were all happy to see each other, and Steve and I had a pretty embarrassing bromance moment (which the students found oddly touching).  Plus, Steve owed me a birthday Kilimanjaro, and even if I didn't get it at the African House in Stone Town, and instead at the twenty-four hour restaurant in the Dar Es Salaam international airport, it was still a cold Kilimanjaro.

Tribes

One of the most interesting things about travelling in Africa is watching the interplay between the various tribes. Sometimes the tension is extraordinarily horrible as in the genocide in Rwanda ten years ago (although I've always found it interesting that the US and Europe draws a distinction between ethnic tensions, as in the former Yugoslavia (which they view as an unfortunate but almost necessary process of state building), and tribal tensions (which they view as proof of African inferiority and inability to function successfully in the modern world). At other times the tribal differences are much more subtle and generally harmless, but nevertheless always there. I remember going to a Nairobi museum one time with a Nigerian friend and it's amazing how often tribal recognition came up - that is, identifying the tribes of certain artists or predicting the tribes of people we talked to in the museum - not in a bad way, but it was obvious that this how he, and others, processed information and he assumed I would need that information. It came back to me yesterdqy when I was having lunch with my friend Wainaina and we were discussing our efforts over the last couple years to promote the Global Modules at his university. One of the points he made was that maybe too many of the professors, him included, who we had chosen to roll out the GMs were kikuyu (Kenya's largest and most influential tribe) and thus some professors from other tribes would view this as just another prize thrown to the kikuyu. Fascinating. And another wrinkle that makes my job so fascinating/challenging.

At the Conference

I'm finishing up the first full day of the African eLearning conference and it's been a mixed bag, although definitely more good than bad. I woke up around 3:30 and couldn't go back to sleep, which might ezplain the bad. After breakfast I had no trouble catching a taxi to the Mulungushi International Conference Centre - 30,000 kwacha ($6). It took me an hour to check in for a conference for which I had pre-registered and pre-paid, but I take it that things were much more chaotic yesterday. The president of Zambia was supposed to welcome us, nut at the last moment he backed out and we had to wait for the vice-president to show up - which meant that everything got started and hour and a half late. Of all the "times" - India time, Arab time, Africa time etc - Africa time is the most "flexible," so I was not really surprised. On the plus side my presentation was very received. Over one-hundred-fifty people showed up, and around twenty hung around afterwards to get information, I ran into my friend Wainaina and we had a great lunch together. He's thinking about starting a model high school in Kenya and asked me to serve on the board of directors - for some reason I find this very moving and think it's one of the greatest honors I've ever received. Right now I'm sitting through the last plenary of the day before the reception - free food, which helps.me stretch my travel budget. For some reason I have the blues tonight. It seemed that although last spring was really horrible - and I was a million miles from what I wanted - that at least I could tell myself that things would get better. And now I've worked for a year and I think two million miles away (grin). Oh well, at least I'm productive. I'm sure it's a temporary bump and one that a cold Mosi will alleviate.

Thoughts on the Run

OK, it's been a busy day so I have no time to write anything in detail - so just a couple random notes. First off, I know it's a combination of the fact that we're still pretty close to the equator and we're moving into fall here in Zambia, but the fact that it's completely dark a couple minutes after 6:00 p.m. is just bizarre. On the positive side, the weather is extraordinary - mainly in the low 70's and very sunny (this is a nice break since it is supposed to be sizzling back in VT). Secondly, I received a very pleasant surprise today. My good friend Michael Wainaina - or just Wainaina, it takes Kenyans a long time to share their first name with anyone (I guess it's sort of like when everyone just calls me Scudder, except that is explained by the fact that I have no friends) - from Kenyatta University is here at the eLearning Conference. Wainaina is the one who introduced me to the lovely west African saying, "my people are quiet," which is spoken in response to "How are you doing?" It means that everything is OK.

Trapped in Kenya, temporarily

As always seem to be the case anymore, I'm going to have to try and get caught up on the travel blog. I've left Africa and have returned, albeit to far northwestern Africa in Morocco (more on that later). My time in sub-Saharan Africa was very positive, although with it's usual Scudder-related disasters. I ended up being trapped in Kenya for a few days. I popped in to the Nairobi airport for my flight to Cape Town on South African Airways and was denied entrance to the flight because my temporary passport (the one left over from the Great Unpleasantness in Cairo) didn't have enough blank pages so the airline wouldn't let me on. Maybe the most amazing thing about the encounter was that I didn't end up in a Kenyan prison - essentially, I could have handled it much better than I did. I think I was mainly angry because it brought back the whole passport theft in Cairo - it's like the gift that just kept on giving. Anyway, I had to leave the airport, make it back to Kenyatta University, and arrange to make it to the US Embassy the next day to get another temporary passport. The lady who denied me access to the South African flight told me that it really wasn't that big of a deal and that the embassy would just put extra pages in my passport - I tried to explain to her that while I'm unfamiliar with diplomatic statecraft I was pretty certain that they wouldn't, in fact, add extra pages to a temporary passpost - that sort of defeats the point of a temporary passport.

Now, getting a new passport caused a bit of a planning problem. I could have made arrangements to just get on the next flight for the same time the next afternoon, but that presupposed that I'd be able to get my new passport at the embassy in around two hours and still make it to the airport on time. It would have been impossible to leave the embassy, make it all the way back to Kenyatta to pick up my suitcases, and then make it to the airport. So, the only option would have been to leave all my worldly possessions with a driver that I had met the day before and depend upon him to wait for several hours outside the embassy for me. It all seemed a bit iffy so I just postponed my flight until the weekend, which caused me to miss my time in Cape Town (which really annoyed me because that was the part I was looking forward to most of all). Now, typically, after having done that, the whole thing worked perfectly. Traffic in Nairobi is incredibly bad so I had arranged for the driver to come out to Kenyatta around 6:00 in the morning (this is the same driver that I had just met the day before at the airport) so I could get to the airport hopefully by 8:00 (they have reduced hours if you're an American citizen, although many hours if you want to become an American citizen, which is interesting in and of itself - anyway, there were only a couple hours in the morning and then a couple hours later in the afternoon, so if the passport wasn't done in the morning the afternoon time slot would have made catching the afternoon flight a moot point anyway). Well, the driver actually arrived early and then took off on this insane drive through every shortcut known or unknown to man, and we actually made it to the embassy early, which gave me time to go next door to have my passport photo taken before preceeding into the embassy.

As it turned out I was the first American citizen in the embassy and they took care of me very quickly. Well, not very quickly, of course. The big snafu was that I had to fit out the form to get a new passport and the woman gave me a red pen, which I thought was odd, but figured that maybe it was a new policy. So, I filled out the entire form and gave it back to her, only to be met by this quizzical look and the obvious question - why did I fill it out in red? I explained that she had actually given me the red pen, which then made her feel pretty foolish. I didn't say much, although I did suggest that maybe it would be a good plan to throw all the red pens away. So, I had to fill out the form again, and then left it with her. She told me to come back around 11:00, which was actually after the official citizen time slot had ended at 10:00. She said not to worry and to just tell the guards at the gate to call her and tell her I was there and that they would let me back at the unofficial hour. It seemed unlikely, but I didn't have much of a choice. As I was filling out the form it occured to me that the US Embassy in Nairobi was actually very nice, and then it dawned on me why it looked so new - it is new, the old one was blown up a couple years ago. Oh, and it was September 11th, which made the whole thing just a bit more odd.

Anyway, I went next door to a very nice coffee shop and had a couple very good cafe lattes and some cheese cake and just sent emails back and forth on my Blackberry. It was one of those experiences that you can't quite convince yourself is actually happening because it was just a little too surreal. At 11:00 I walked back to the embassy, told the gates to call the woman, and, sure enough, they let me in and my new temporary passport was waiting for me. Utterly painless and quick. So, then I had to go find my driver. Sure enough, he had waited for me outside the entire time. So, theoretically anyway, I could have actually done all of that, made my second afternoon flight time, and included my trip to Cape Town. Of course, the skeptic would say that if I had actually left all my worldly possessions with the taxi driver that there would have been a smaller chance that he would have still been waiting for me outside. However, I think he would have because he was a great guy.

One last weird thing about an utterly weird day. When I walked out of the embassy to find my driver I couldn't track him down right away. So, I checked my Blackberry to see if he had called me - we had swapped phone numbers before I entered the diplomatic maze and entered his phone number into my phone. Sure enough, the phone showed that I had missed a call from him. I called back the number and some woman answered who had never heard of my driver - nor had she the second time I called. Anyway, I found my driver and told him the story. He said that I had entered the wrong number into my Blackberry in the first place. He failed to grasp my point that it completely defied logic that I would get a phone call out of the blue from a person I didn't know who had the same number that I had allegedly entered incorrectly.

Anyway, I made it back to Kenyatta and was able to use the extra days to build on the momentum of several good meetings so it turned out OK in the end.

A Kenyan Ghost Story

As is often the case in Kenya, internet connectivity was a bit of an issue so I'll try and get caught up. My time in Kenya has been very successful on the Global Module front, with the requisite number of Scudder-related travel adventures. I spent the time at Kenyatta University, one of our main international partners, and I feel we're making great strides there. I've managed to pick out several departments (sociology, literature and history) to act as "homes" or "incubators" for the Global Modules as we continue to grow. I'm working on a grant with some folks at North Carolina A&T University that would bring some much needed computers to Kenyatta.

I spent the time at the Conference Centre at Kenyatta, which is a pretty nice place - and there were actually some folks there this time (unlike last time when the only other person was a professor from England who was a vegan, which the meat-loving Kenyans couldn't begin to understand). Unfortunately, the internet usually seemed to be down at the business center and a couple different nights the electricity was down in the Conference Centre itself (which was made even more annoying by the fact that it was on in the rest of the campus). What made it even stranger was that sometimes the electricity would work in one outlet and not anyplace else, which led to me almost scaring myself to death one night. I had come back from a day full of visits and was greeted with the information that the electricity was out - and that the backup generator was acting up - and that the repair folks had decided this was a wonderful time to go on strike. So, I had dinner by myself in the dining hall - the crowd that had been there earlier had now cleared out. However, the crew that worked the dining hall could not have been kinder and took great care of me - whipping me up my own meal - which I downed with a bottle of Fanta, which apparently is the national drink of Kenya. I always asked for a Coke and they would always stare at me sadly and encourage me to get a Fanta instead. Armed with candles and matches I went back to my room - and setting up the mosquito netting in the darkenss was another adventure and I almost suffered the total humiliation of hanging myself in the mosquito netting (and thus providing proof positive of the total idiocy of all Americans). I sat down at my desk, with the television behind me, to write in my travel journal in the total darkness of my room - and, for that matter, the entire Conference Centre. At a certain point I suddenly heard a woman's voice behind me - and just about jumped out of my skin when I turned around and saw nothing behind me. And then the television blinked on. Apparently the only outlet in the entire Conference Centre which had decided to work was the one attached to my television. The next morning I told the story to the morning crew and they thought it was very funny and joked that I must have been visited by a jin (obviously drawn from the Arabic jinn) - but then they more seriously stated that jin were more common on the coast in Mombasa.

Happier Days in Eldoret

OK, yesterday I posted on the violence in Eldoret and other parts of Kenya, but things were actually very pleasant when I was there in November. We had run a Global Module with a professor by the name of Naomi Shitemi a couple years ago and I finally had the opportunity to actually travel to Moi University to have more substantial discussions about expanding their participation. Unfortunatey, Naomi was out of town and left me in the competent hands of Gilbert Nduru who heads up the Geography Department. Ironically, as soon as the semester was over Gilbert was heading out of the country to spend a semester teaching at Indiana University in my home state of Indiana (and he actually called me out of the blue a few weeks ago from IU). Moi University itself is located about an hour's drive outside of Eldoret - it would probably be a shorter drive except the roads are spectacularly bad. That didn't stop Gilbert from driving like a mad man, and it took some real muscles to force the car around some amazing potholes. It didn't help that many of the local villages along the way had decided to create their own unofficial speed bumps made out of packed earth. The countryside was pretty, and looked like a cross between Vermont and Indiana - Eldoret is big cheese country.

Moi had even more technological limitations than Kenyatta, and in some ways it was worse because the fiber optic line had not reached Eldoret (it was being laid at Kenyatta when I was there). Gilbert was using online for his laptop through his cell phone. It brought home once again the potential for running GMs through m-Learning - something else to explore. The meetings went well, and I talked to the Dean of Arts & Sciences, several faculty members, and hundreds of students. Even more so than with Kenyatta, this is a case where this visit is more developmental - and I think the potential is definitely here, although certainly tracking down some grant-funding to help with their technological needs is going to have to be a necessity. Gilbert did manage to put together a Geography lab with pretty good Internet access, so I think we can eventually start by running GMs housed in Geography classes.

I had one of those amazing moments that you can't get out of your mind when driving back to Eldoret from Moi late one afternoon. The sky was spectacular with huge, boiling clouds (which erupted later) - I was staring out the window at the scenery and the occasional villages, Gilbert was grinding around potholes, and Eunice, who heads up Philosophy & Religion, was sitting in the back quiety humming along to a gospel song on a tape. Very peaceful.

I've included some pictures. You have a distant shot of the main administrative building, one of Gilbert in front of their nice library, the main road through campus, and one of the restaurants on campus (I had the bananas).

Violence in Kenya

Fortunately, I left Kenya in early November before any of the post-election violence. I lifted this picture from the CNN website. It's of that horrific event in Eldoret in northern Kenya where fifty people were burned alive as they were seeking refuge in a church. Most of the violence in Eldoret was directed against members of the Kikuyu tribe, which makes up a little over a fifth of the population. The Kikuyu had backed Mwai Kibaki in the contested presidental election. The Luo, who make up around thirteen percent of the population, had backed Raila Odinga. Eldoret was my last stop on my Middle East and Africa trip and I had gone there to visit Moi University. Looking back, one of the things that I find most jarring about the entire experience was my Kenyan friends absolute certainty that there would be violence. At the time I was supposed to push on to Uganda and I had asked my Kenyan contacts their opinion on travel to their neighbor to the west. They said that it was would fine because Uganda had had their election last year so the violence was over, and it was also OK in Kenya because they had not their election yet so it was too early for their violence. It was as if there was never a doubt that violence would follow the election - so you just planned around it. To be fair, they were all shocked by the severity of the violence, but they were also planning around some unrest.

Reflections on Africa

Again, I'm, at long last, trying to fill in some of the spaces from last year's travels - especially before the next round starts this summer and then fall. One of the things that I wondered about before arriving in Africa was how open a subject HIV/AIDS would be. Obviously, it's difficult to get completely accurate figures on these things, but it's estimated that just under 7% of the adult population in Kenya is has HIV/AIDS. It's a terrible figure, although certainly much smaller than what you would see in Swaziland (almost 39%), Botswana (just over 37%) or South Africa (just over 21%). I visited two universities in Kenya, Kenyatta and Moi, and they didn't shy away from addressing the issue. One of the first signs you see when entering Kenyatta University - and one of the biggest on campus - deals with HIV/AIDS. When I visited Moi University in Eldoret in northern Kenya there were actually free condom dispensers in the hallways (and one wonders how much of a firestorm it would cause in American universities just to put up pay dispensers).

Nairobi

When I was visiting Kenyatta University I was around thirty kilometers outside of Nairobi. It was a little annoying (although I suspect also endearing) that the folks at Kenyatta did not want me to leave the campus for fear that I would get into trouble. However, because they were running a new fibre topic line the internet was completely messed up and I needed to get online so it didn't take long for me to ignore the warning and take off in search for an internet cafe. Later on Saturday, the day I arrived, I went walking down Thika Road back towards Nairobi because I heard there was an internet cafe down this dirt road. Suddenly the woman who ran the conference centre drove up with her daughter and scolded me (gently) for leaving. She had me get in her car and drove me to the internet cafe, which was actually located down a dirt road past a series of ramshackle tin roof shack stores. She volunteered to wait outside until I was finished. I told her that I was a big man and was OK. She smiled and replied, "Yes, but there is always someone bigger." I suspect their biggest concern was with pickpockets, which, to be fair, we have plenty of in the U.S. Anyway, she drove off and I then found out that the internet cafe had no connection so I had to walk back to campus with my tail between my legs.

However, I was not deterred. The next day Mungai, the head of the ICT department at the university (and a great guy) volunteered to drop me off in downtown Nairobi because he was passing through. He also gave me strict instructions on where I could walk - "Do not go beyond Moi Avenue on that side and do not go beyond Uhuru Highway on that side, and stay out of Uhuru Park." We then got into a big discussion about what taxis I could take back and if it would be advisable for me to take a matatu (the private vans that people use for getting around - they just wait until they fill up and then they take off like a bat out of hell - crazy, but cheap - a taxi from Nairobi out to Kenyatta would have been 1200 shillings while a matatu would have been 50 shillings). Finally, he just decided to pick me up on the way back through town, over my objections - and we agreed to meet in front of the Intercontinental Hotel in two and a half hours (although he said that was "Africa time" so it could be later, and after saying that he showed up right to the second). So, I actually had some time to walk around downtown by myself. Nairobi is a city of five million people, although it doesn't feel that big (at least on a Sunday - Nairobi traffic is insane and if you're caught in a Nairobi traffic jam it seems like the city has ten million). It ended up being a lovely walk although I was hit up on by half the grifters in Nairobi. My favorite was a guy by the name of John who tried to justify that he was not a grifter by carrying around a loaf of bread, as if he had just been shopping and ran into you. He worked me for an hour as we walked through downtown, just as an interested party, until he hit me up for a request for 3000 shillings to help bribe his son's tutor - he got 100 out of me because it had been an interesting conversation. When I shooed another one away later I was acused of being prejudiced. I ended up in Uhuru Park despite the warning and it was actually very lovely with a gazebo and lakes and food and it was packed. Eventually I moved to the back of the park and got in the middle of a religious revival meeting - it was all is Kiswahili, with the occasional "praise Jesus" thrown in for effect. Mungai showed up right on time and we went in search of a good cup of coffee and ended up at this insanely nice mall (complete with a water slide) next to the U.S. Embassy where we both had cafe mochas. An odd ending to a wonderfully odd day.

Africa

I've since left Jordan, blown through the United Arab Emirates, and am now at my second stop in Kenya. Sorry I've been so quiet - it's a combination of being really busy and also struggling with amazingly bad internet connectivity in Kenya. Guess I'll have to get caught up in bits and pieces. Right now I'm in Eldoret, Kenya, home of Moi University. I'm staying in the Eldoret equivalent of a luxury hotel ($40 a night, and for that I still get lousy internet connection, but it's the only hotel in town with even this - two computers in the lobby, one of which is continually in the hands of two Korean girls playing video games). My Kenyan contact was horrified that I was planning on spending this much a night - he had me reserved in a local place, pefectly clean and centrally located, although in a seedy part of town, for $10 a night. Before this I spent four days visiting Kenyatta University, which is right outside of Nairobi. I was one of two people staying at their brand new conference centre. The other was an Englishman named Peter who is a vegan, and the staff just didn't know what to make of him. On my last night there a couple professors took me to the Safari Park Club to eat and see the floor show. The floor show consisted of a bunch of dancers in "native" outfits doing dances to show tunes, not exactly what I was looking for. You sat at big tables and the waiters came around with massive slabs of beef on swords and they would cut pieces off right on to our plate. I had chicken, beef, pork, lamb - along with goat, camel, ostrich and crocodile. I ate until I hurt - now that the Kenyans understood.