Are you tired of baby elephants yet?

Because I'm not!  Hear that Anthony???

Usually when you go see the baby elephants you're with a bunch of people behind a rope and only get to pet the elephants if they come to the rope.  But a friend of mine here had some clients in town and had arranged for them (plus some lucky friends) to have a private afternoon session with the baby elephants.  There were only 10 of us there, and we were allowed to just be in the middle of them while they had their afternoon bottles and played.

Are YOU my mother?

We're stickin' together.

Excuse me baby elephant, you have a little milk on your chin.

One of our HQ people (a friend of mine) was in town, so she got quite the treat.

And then of course a quick visit to the blind rhino Maxwell, at the risk of "loosing" a finger (they were too tight anyway?)

Aaaaaand the warthogs.  Obvi.

Love those guys.

Everything is Oscar Kilo

I've been offline for the last week because I've been at what can only be described as Hostile Environment Security Summer Camp.  It's for NGO workers who are stationed in or travel on a regular basis to Somalia. 

It had all the things you usually find at summer camp.

A ropes course for team-building:

Tents and a campfire:

 

Hiking (in this case, up to the top of the hill where there was rumored to be cell phone signal to download my emails and call my boss because the office couldn't possibly survive without me...):

 

Friendly, free-roaming pets:

Beautiful landscape:

Warthogs (okay, so Camp McDowell didn't exactly have those...):

Oh, and you know, your garden variety fake ambushes, illegal checkpoints, road traffic accidents, and kidnappings.

Just kidding!  The only real casualties were my notebook and sweatshirt, both lost in the (fake) ambush the second day of training, and my shins from a round of (fake) gunfire, because even though my mind said, "Hey, this is fake!" my Type A personality said, "Whatever, fake!  We're going to WIN THIS even though it isn't a competition!  We're going to be the valedictorian of fake fire fights!" and then made me hit the ground and crawl on my stomach through the bush while wearing capri pants, which left array of bleeding thorn scratches on my poor shins.  One day I'll learn...

Side note:  I tried to explain to our lovely housekeeper Ruth that it was fake blood she was washing out of my sweatshirt, but I don't think the conversation went very well.  I think she's been avoiding me since I got back.

After four days of paranoia about the next (fake) attack and no interaction with the outside world, I was quite happy to climb up out of the Rift Valley at sunset and head back to Nairobi....

 

And, BONUS!  I finally memorized the phonetic alphabet and mastered VHF radios!

Sometimes I really wonder why I couldn't just find a normal job.

Whenever something safety or security related happens, my organization's staff are required to fill out a standard incident reporting form.  I got home yesterday, exhausted from two days of a ministry of health planning meeting (more on that later) and found an incident report in my inbox from one of our nutrition teams in Somaliland.  Since these are rarely a good sign, I was slighly apprehensive as I opened, only to find...this:

Apparently our nutrition team was in a very small village, packing up after a day of mobile outreach.  All of a sudden, a woman whose young twins were enrolled in our nutrition program for children with severe malnutrition walked up and hit one of our nutrition team members in the head twice with an iron bar.  The team member was taken to the regional hospital and treated, and was well enough to go to the police station to give a statement that evening. 

Her being injured isn't particularly funny, but the reason is: apparently, the woman who hit our team member did so because the team member had bitten her when they were small children together in the village and she "could not get time to revenge for all this time and that was her golden opportunity to take action" (straight from the report).  Really?  REALLY?  It has to have been at least 10 years ago.  Unbelievable. 

I will say that, in my experience, the Somali culture (huge generalization, but a not inaccurate one nonetheless) really takes grudge holding to a whole new level, and it makes working here very challenging.  People remember what you or your organization have done for years after it's done and hold you accountable.  It's one of the reasons inter-clan violence is so common--every slight is remembered and retaliated against.  To me, it's frustrating, partly because I don't totally understand the dynamics and it all seems very petty to me, and partly because it prevents a lot from being done or moving forward, as we saw when our vehicle was hijacked as retaliation a few months ago.  Everything you do and plan has to take into account really complex clan relationships.  You have to balance what clan you've rented a vehicle from with other things you need if you are traveling to multiple clan areas.  You have to put the perfect clan balance on nutrition teams, based on where they are serving.  It takes a tremendous amount of time and effort, with significant consequences for doing it wrong, and, as an outsider, it is extremely nerve-wracking for me to try to balance a desire to provide widespread, comprehensive, high quality programs with these realities. 

I'll never really be able to grasp it, but I am making progress in acknowledging it exists and learning that everything will be 500 times more complex than I had anticipated, and allowing for that in planning.  That's a start, right?

At least I understand these guys:

Eat, nap, love.  Animals are the best.

Zurich

On my way home from Nairobi last November, right before Thanksgiving, I flew through Zurich.  I've been to Geneva and Bern but not Zurich and figured out that my layover was just enough time to take the tram into town and do a bit of wandering.  A few hours in a new city with absolutely no agenda, nothing to accomplish, and only the roughest idea of where to start is one of my favorite things in the world, and that's exactly what I had in Zurich.

I had glanced at a map before I got on the Nairobi-Zurich flight and knew that heading towards the lake and old part of town was probably my best bet.  My flight landed at about 6 am, so it was very early and still dark.  The tram into the central rail station was easy to catch at the airport and takes you through lovely leafy neighborhoods and past the University of Zurich.  It was cold and clear and people were bundled up and the morning rush was on.  I love cities in the morning.

 Even though it was almost 8:30 am by this point, the sun was really just coming up.  I'm always surprised in Europe in winter at how short the days are.

From the lake, an inlet runs in through old town, with ancient buildings lining both sides...and a circus, of course.

 

When I got too cold (coming from Nairobi, I didn't have anything remotely warm with me) and a little hungry, I went into this little cafe in Old Town for salted caramel hot chocolate and a croissant and to read for a little while.

 Another hour of wandering and I was back on a tram to the airport to go home....

As a side note, when I'm somewhere where I am distinctly "different" ie from elsewhere, I have no problem whipping out my camera and taking loads of pictures.  But when I'm somewhere where I blend in a bit more (or a lot more, in the case of Zurich) I find myself much more reluctant to take pictures, as if I might be mistaken for a local and don't want to be seen as a tourist.  I have to make myself pull out my camera and take pictures in these places!

Nguruman Escarpment Hiking Adventures

The weekend before I left to come back to the US for six weeks to wrap up my old job, I wanted one last good African adventure to tide me over through some boring DC weeks  (just kidding.  kind of.)  I went with two friends, one who really wanted to go hiking.  While trying to find something off the beaten path, we stumbled on the yet-unadvertised Sampu Lodge along the Nguruman Escarpment in southern Kenya near the Tanzania border, in the Shompole Nature Reserve.  The lodge is run by Masaai and all revenue goes into the community, one of a number of attempts in Kenya to compensate the Masaai for turning their cattle grazing land into protected wildlife reserves and integrating them into this new economy and the tourist dollars to be had (though Masaai prize cattle beyond essentially all else, and I've never particularly gotten the feeling the tourist dollar will ever trump that).  It's a complex relationship, of course, but that's the gist of it. 

One of the attractions of the lodge was that to get to it you drive past (and actually across) Lake Magadi, which we curious to see.   It's a saline, alkaline lake, fed by saline hot springs.  The water is a dense sodium carbonate brine which precipitates into a mineral called trona that forms a crust on top of the lake.  In places, the layer is 40 m thick. 

On the eastern shore of the lake, there's the Magadi Soda Factory, which produces soda ash from the trona.  Soda ash is apparently a high-demand industrial commodity used for everything from glass production to reducing acidity of chlorine in municipal pools to making German pretzels to taxidermy.  The factory is in the middle of nowhere and a rather bizarre and bleak company town has sprung up around it.

After that, it's a beautiful drive, if a little rough sometimes (and mostly definitely almost double the hour or so they had told us it would be).

The lodge itself is basic, safari tents and self-catering.  The people who run the camp are still in the early phases of learning how to manage the camp and maybe aren't getting as much support as they need.  They're friendly and trying hard, though, and the setting is unbeatable, with views over the plains and directly overlooking a watering hole.  We heard lions roaring in the bushes around the camp all night.

We went for two hikes up the escarpment, one in the evening and a longer one early the next morning.

 

The only bad moment in the whole weekend was that while we were roasting marshmallows around the campfire (and listening to lions roar in the bushes nearby) I dropped a glob of fiery marshmallow onto my wrist and got a hideous burn.  I like to think of the scar as a little something to remember a great trip by?