Day 6 (9/11)
So this morning, I missed the nature walk, going to bed after 12 and waking up at 6 doesn’t work out for many days in a row. But there is another one tomorrow and for sure I’m going. I heard they saw some Baboons and monkeys fighting. I forgot to mention that yesterday we saw the Baboon that tries to steal food from the kitchen bolting across the soccer field. He is huge, haha but it was awesome. Last night at the bond fire the stars were incredible, they seem so close and so bright, and the coolest thing is we’ve never seen these stars before because it is the southern hemisphere. It almost looks like they touch the horizon, just like in the Lion King where it looks like they are never ending and run right into the ground. This morning while brushing my teeth I looked over to my right and Kilimanjaro was literally right there. It’s the first full day that we’ve been able to see it. When I tell you that it’s breathtaking, you can almost see the trees and how remarkably small the glacier has become. I’ll post pictures but they told us the glacier has shrunk 90% in the past 80 years, it looks like a little white cap on the very top compared to the pictures I’ve seen from years and years ago.
Today is September 11th. Eight years since the attacks and it’s a little strange not to be in America and see the flags flying and the general acknowledgement of what happened. Not that I expected it to be recognized here but I remember exactly where I was, how I found out, watching the news when I got home.
After lunch we went on a nature-walk/field-lecture with Okello, he is entertaining and completely hilarious. He was trying to stretch out his love handles, calls himself a chocolate Buddha, and wants us all to overflow his “cup of joy” picture that said in a semi-thick Swahili accent and lots of jiggling after he says things that are funny. Right in the beginning of the walk he was trying to show us how young and agile he is and went to go jump a small stream which we had to do a few times but he fell in haha. On the walk we learned about how farmers will illegally take the water from a stream or river and irrigate it to their farm. By the time a few people take the water it’s all gone when you get down river (especially in a 2 year drought like they are experiencing now). They also will trap zebras, gazelle, monkeys, and anything else that tries to take their crops. However in Kenya it’s illegal to harvest any and all wildlife…bush meat wipes out herds in just a few years when farmers come into the area. The area around the camp is gorgeous and I can only imagine what it looked like before the drought and before farmers came and cultivated areas, which eventually end up killing the resources found in the soil.
Today I learned that Sukari in Swahili means sugar! One of the giraffes at RWPZ is named that. And Kenya is her baby. Oh and elimu means elephant.
We do all our laundry by hand, or we can pay the local mamas 200 shillings (about $2.50) to do a load of our laundry. I was about to test out doing laundry by hand at about 4 pm today. Then I realized that it wouldn’t dry because the sun goes down around 6:30. And if I left it overnight the monkeys might come and take my laundry and I’d find it in a tree somewhere. Or even better the birds would poop on it while it was on the line, or even better bugs will nest in it and lay eggs. So long story short I have no attempted to do my laundry by hand yet, but I'll keep you all updated on the failure of hand laundry.
P.S. I can’t post any pictures until I come back, the internet is too slow here to upload pictures.
P.S.S. People aren’t joking when they say Kenyans are fast. All the staff at the camp are super fast. They were playing soccer with the kids today and they darted back and forth all over the place. It looked like they went about 100 meters in 4.5 seconds and they were just jogging.