Cultural differences and life this week

Hello everyone,

This week, I finally got to start doing the tree restoration research that I’d been hoping about since I got here! The short story is, about 20 years ago a lady named Ann Robertson planted a whole bunch of tree seedlings in an area that had been completely cleared. She watered and recorded data on them until 1997, when she ran out of time and funding. She has since passed the project on to A Rocha, who’ve been waiting a while for a volunteer who was interested, like me! But I couldn’t start until after the rainy season, the thought being that the trees would grow enough then to make the original data inaccurate.

So on Tuesday I went in with another volunteer, and a man named Matthias, who was part of the original planting. We marked out all of the original plots... which was surprisingly easy considering that they hadn’t been marked out for a decade! We then did a sample plot where we inventoried the trees, which can be a bit of a daunting task! It’s starting to look like quite a nice forest in there, which is pretty cool when you think that it was mainly maize shambas (small farms) a few years ago.

Though there has been a bit of tree poaching and disturbance, the reforested area is really beautiful and I’m really enjoying spending some time there. It’s in the town of Gede, about 10 or 15 km from Mwamba, and I’ve been taking the matatu buses to get there from the center. Its 40 Kenyan shillings each way... or about 44 cents Canadian. Not too bad really!

Other than that, I also got to build a tippy tap this week! Water conservation and proper hygiene are both urgent issues in the surrounding communities, and of course it’s hard for them to coexist properly. There are a bunch of ASSETS students coming to stay at Mwamba for summer camps in a few weeks, and our outhouse was in need of a hand washing station! Tippy taps are an example of some appropriate technology that has been promoted in rural Kenya.

(Please ignore the cheesy grin!)

Another thing we’ve been doing is some presentations at Turtle Bay Beach Club (a fancy but wonderfully eco-conscious resort near here) about ASSETS and some of the species that A Rocha works to protect in Arabuko-Sokoke forest. It’s been an interesting experience, as we always take the other volunteers with us, and sometimes they make up about 80% of our audience! This last week was really good though, some people seemed quite interested and we hope they will choose to sponsor an ASSETS student through secondary school. Check out the blog: assets.wildlifedirect.org

Lately, Dave has been working on a bunch of different things around the center. One of them is making some trail numbers for the points of interest on our nature trail here around the center. He sure is a talented guy!

Tomorrow, I’m meeting again with Ann Robertson to sort through some of her original documents on the project, which will mean going into Malindi. Hopefully we’ll find some useful things! The real hope is that we’ll finish in time that I can go snorkeling with the others later!

We finished the bird cage, made mainly of re-purposed materials. Here is a photo of our handiwork:

Here are a few cultural differences I’ve been musing on this week... there are many more of course, and I always think about blogging them and forget by the time I get home!

Colour! The fabric used for ladies clothing here is so colourful and vibrantly patterned! The main outfit involves two kangas, rectangles of cloth with patterns and sayings on them, one worn sarong-style and the other as a head wrap or shawl (over top of a skirt and top or dress). Kikois, which are also colourful rectangular things, are worn by men sarong-style and as beach cover-ups by tourists!

Greetings... Greetings are very important here, and every interaction is prefaced with a hearty handshake and a “how are you?” or “habariako?” The ironic thing is, there is no real acceptable response except “ensuri” or “fine/very fine”... you can talk about being sick or a relative being unwell after you say you are fine, but you can’t deliver the bad news straight away!

(There are a few supermarkets, but most food is sold in open-air markets in the towns)

Lots about birds...

This last week has been one full of transitions, as we have had many guests come and go and five new volunteers arrive at Mwamba! We now have Kate and Gabe (from Nairobi and Tennessee), Helene (from Lebanon) and Jenny and Dan (from the UK). We are just starting to get to know each other, and I am looking forward to working with everyone for the next while. It was a busy week, but Henry and Belinda being back at work means I have gotten to do much more outdoor work, which makes me quite happy!

Some of the highlights in this last week or two were bird ringing on our own nature trail, and making a bigger bird cage for one of our rehabilitation project birds (funny story to come on this one). Bird ringing was really fun as we caught some very pretty kingfishers... two different kinds: two Pygmy Kingfishers and a Mangrove Kingfisher! I really like them; they are kind of comical in how big their head is relative to the body, and so pretty with metallic blue and purple feathers!

(Mangrove Kingfisher)

As far as bird rehabilitation goes, we had Bella (a Tern) and Oscar (a masked Booby) living in a fairly small cage, while we fed and exercised them. We decided that they needed more wing room, and as we had many volunteers and helpful guests this week we embarked on a bird cage building project.

(Oscar)

(Dave and Albert taking Oscar for a swim)

Wouldn’t you just know it, the same day we half-built the thing, Oscar flies better than he has since we took him in and completely disappeared yesterday! Dave and Gabe went looking for him on the beach Saturday morning with no success. But we saw him swooping around the beach over the weekend, and yesterday were told by some kite surfers about a big bird they had been feeding (!). So we went out, and sure enough it was Oscar. With some expert pillowcase wrangling by Dave, Helene and I we collected him up and brought him back for a bit more food before we release him again. He feeds out on the coral gardens, which are a few hundred meters from the beach. We are thinking that though he has regained a lot of strength, he didn’t have enough to fish enough. Hopefully it’s not that he is now dependant on us! The cage is now completed, and we hope that he’s enjoying the new home!

Dave and I also helped paint the entrance “banda” (structure) at Mida Creek with a lot of the other volunteers, where there is a boardwalk that was built by A Rocha to raise funds for ASSETS. It’s a cool structure, but always needs a lot of maintenance... so we may spend more time there soon.

For the rest of this week, I am not sure what all I will be doing, but I think that there will be more GIS learning... I’ve been learning to use the ArcGIS software package since our last GIS-savvy volunteer left, though I’ve yet to have an actual project for it! It came with a helpful 20-chapter guide, and I’m about half way through it. I’ll also be taking some time to help in the kitchen, and hopefully go to the Farming Gods Way plot at Gede with Dave.

I’ve also been thinking of home a little more, as I registered for my courses and applied for some scholarships this week. Looks like it will be another busy year, but I am looking forward to the courses J It’s hard to believe that we are halfway through our time here already! I’m glad we still have so much time left though; it feels like there is so much more we’d like to do!

Take care everyone, and feel free to email me whenever, I like getting news of home!

Canada Day in Kenya

Happy Canada Day Everyone! Not that we’re likely to be doing much celebrating here, I'm afraid...

Things have been interesting at Mwamba in the last couple of weeks. Dave and I are just transitioning out of our guest-house manager roles, as Henry and Belinda returned two days ago. It has been a great learning experience, but very tiring in other ways, so I am quite happy to hand it all back! We have had a lot of guests, and met a lot of cool people from all over the UK and Europe, New Zealand, the US... it made me realize how isolated Canada is, in some ways. We are just so far from everywhere in Europe/Asia/Africa!

When we were doing hospitality things, our days were fairly varied: I’d check bookings emails in the morning and afternoon and keep the guest bookings folder organized, we’d stay in the main office to answer phones and field guest inquiries, as well as booking any snorkelling or public transit they would like. We were also responsible for communicating to the kitchen and housekeeping staff how many people were going to be there, which rooms needed to be cleaned, and what kind of food specifications the guests might have. Also, when there were a lot of people coming and going, we were often taking turns to help change the rooms as well! During this time, we were still trying to keep other projects on the go, like the conservation agriculture/nature trail stuff for Dave, and the computer functionality/blogging stuff for me. For not having known we would be doing the guest house managing until we got here, I think it went quite well, and I have learned a lot. But it will be nice to have more time to focus on other things now.

We helped in a massive beach cleanup last Friday. It spanned 10km, and there was 3025 kg of trash collected! I wrote a blog post about it for A Rocha here: arochakenya.wildlifedirect.org

(A Rocha Kenya and Dongokondu school's trash pile)

Nat and Laura, the previous long-term volunteers, have both left in the last week, which marks kind of the end of an era for Dave and I, as they have been here since we got here. Now we are the “experienced” ones! We have five new volunteers arriving for the month of July, so we will be meeting more new people shortly! Its hard to believe that we are half done our time here already.

(Nat exercising one of our rescue birds)

We have adjusted a lot to the temperature here, though it is still quite hilarious (to us) that when it is night-time and there is a bit of a breeze, the Kenyans here will be piling on sweaters just when we are finally comfortable! Coming from a range of -40 to +30 at home, the difference between +25 and +30 just isn’t that big! Oh, and realizing that I say “plus” any temperature, when here its not even in the vocabulary to have any “minus” temperatures, is also kind of funny.

We are having our morning chai now (tea steeped in milk, quite yummy), and then it will be on to planning for all the new volunteers arriving afterwards. We have had ideas for a few work projects, like setting up a trash bin by the beach so people can collect junk if they want to, but were not really able to go anywhere with them until Henry returned and we had a bit more manpower.

Enjoy the fireworks for us everyone!