First Impressions

Culture-Shock

Wow talk about diving into Africa head-first!  Today was the real deal, from start to end.  There's no buffer zone.  When you arrive in Kenya, you experience Kenya immediately.

I arrived in Nairobi shortly after 6AM this morning.  The Nairobi Airport has been damaged extensively by a major fire, so we were unloaded onto the tarmac and bussed to a warehouse for customs processing and baggage.  It was a bit chaotic, but I got the luggage and headed out into Africa for the first time.

My Dad, Rob Saik (a long-time friend of my Dad's, an agricultural systems expert, and a all-round good guy), and our driver Charles picked me up in short order and we immediately embarked on a six-hour drive north toward the Shaba National Reserve.  As we were leaving the airport, Africa happened to me.  It was a little overwhelming to take in: scores of impeccably dressed folks walking along the muddy, trash-filled ditch or scrambling out of the back of a dump truck used for mass transit before starting the regular construction shift.  Women washing clothing in a small puddle by the road. Three grown men to a 250cc motorbike, carrying sixteen-foot lengths of conduit dragging on the road behind.  Kids waving and shouting at the white dudes in the van.  Produce sold from buckets by the side of the highway.  Half-finished brick structures everywhere - propped up with rough-hewn sticks.  Workers in flip-flops chipping away at the asphalt with a pick-axe - no pylons or signs to divert traffic.  Beautiful, bright fabrics on women carrying their loads on their heads.  Everywhere you look, there is action - life - your pupils dilate trying to bring in the information and your brain works overtime in a vain attempt to process.  Classic culture shock.


Peddlers

Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica - the western hemisphere has nothing on the peddlers in Africa.  I thought they were aggressive in Cuba.  Ha!  The tactics they use here are on a whole new level.  Cuban shopkeepers should apprentice in Africa.  First of all, people here are extremely affectionate.  They introduce themselves with a wide smile.  Shaking your hand vigorously, they ask about you, your wife, your kids.  They want a relationship before they try to part you with some of your money.  They also share with you their life-story, and almost everybody mentions "the community".  "The money from the sale of these beautiful hand-made necklaces will benefit the community."  "The community shares in the proceeds from this."  Seriously, one guy could cry on command.  I can usually hold my own with aggressive sales - but I can see I'm going to have to up my game.

We had to stop to pay a soldier where a spike-belt was laid across the road.  A perfect opportunity for some road-sales entrepreneurship.  The van was surrounded.  Luckily, my Dad knew these folks and began handing out Carpet Colour Centre ballpoint pens.  It backfired.  We were instantly inundated by reaching hands - everybody wanted a pen.  Charles started driving away with people - including Dad, half hanging out the door of the van.

Even funnier - poor Rob negotiated a trinket salesman down to 20 US dollars for a giraffe statuette, only to be offered the same statuette further down the road in exchange for one of the Carpet Colour Centre pens.  Either CCC ballpoint pens are treasured in Kenya, or Rob got severely ripped off.  We had a good laugh about it anyway.


Equator

We stopped along the highway where it crosses the equator.  For ten bucks, we could audit a road-side science course by "Professor Mackenzie".  It was truly amazing.  In the northern hemisphere - literally 20 steps north - water swirls clockwise down a drain.  A few feet away, in the southern hemisphere (that backward, Australian-like landscape where nothing makes sense), it swirled counter-clockwise.  And standing right on the equator: that's right, no swirl.


Agriculture

Soon, we began to encounter huge, modern farm operations.  The fields of wheat and barley, and greenhouses of flowers, were a puzzling juxtaposition with the small hand-tooled plots we had been passing, until we learned of their origin.  When the British left Kenya in 1963, many corporations signed 99-year leases for vast swaths of land with the newly-formed Kenyan government.  These are the British farms.  Rob was impressed by the technology used: GPS-guided combines significantly increase yields.  All I knew is that the area looked remarkably like my neighbourhood in Alberta.  What a wild contrast: as we passed the huge farms, we saw Kenyan farmers cultivating the soil of the ditches - the area between the highway and the fence, public land - with pick axes and plows and oxen.



Shaba Nature Reserve

As we travelled north, the terrain became more and more dry.  The trees grew short and scrubby, and the ground became sandy, punctuated here and there with huge rock formations.  Ramshackle buildings were replaced by twig and grass huts.  No crops to speak of - just a few small herds of goats or sheep feeding on the sparse population.  People have lived here this way for thousands of years.  Fairly close to one of our projects, a school in a community called Daaba where we've helped construct dorms for the resident teachers, is a wildlife reserve, basically a national park, where we are staying tonight. Groups of baboons roam the compound, and crocodiles inhabit the river right outside the rooms.  An oasis in the scrubland, it will be our home for only two days.  Tomorrow we will go on an early morning safari before heading to the school to prepare for a free clinic that A Better World will be hosting next month.  We need to make sure that everything is prepared for the doctors and dentists before they arrive so that they can focus on their job.  We will also be taking measurements on the school and dorm buildings in an effort to begin to develop a set of specifications for all future buildings with A Better World.

**Pictures are forthcoming.  Wifi inadequate right now.