News Worthy?

Remember when you were little and didn’t want to finish your broccoli? And your parents told you to eat up because there were starving children in Africa?

Calvin is a very good example of the non-broccoli-eating child

I remember one evening, this happened to my older brother, Danny (who was probably about 8 at the time), and he cheekily replied “Well then, we should put this in a box and mail it to them, because I don’t want it.”

Now that I’m in Africa, I am surprised to find that my friends use the same logic to make me finish the greens or ugali. They pull out the “There are starving children…” phrase, except now, instead of being all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, the starving children are here.

So even though I am now here in Africa, where those starving children who would have loved to eat my broccoli live, it is still a sort of farce, a pretense to get your child, or your college-aged co-worker, to clean her plate. All those starving children still seem far away and in the corner of the mind, even in the minds of many Kenyans.

Take a recent copy of the Daily Nation as an example. This newspaper, along with The Standard, are the top news sources in Kenya and very widely read. The front page had the following headlines: TSC Chiefs Losing Jobs in a Huge School Shake-Up, The US Won’t Release Dossier on Mwau, and Borrowers to Pay More as Rates Shoot Up.

I had to flip all the way to page 10 to find a quarter-page article titled Crisis: 10million Face Hunger in East Africa’s Worst Drought. Ten million people. That is 1428 Princeton Universities worth of people. Grad and undergrad. Imagine fourteen thousand twenty-eight Princeton Universities where students which don't have Forbes Brunch or Mathey barbeques or Wawa or even clean water to drink. We complain about the dining hall serving waffles and chicken again while ten million people in East Africa go to sleep with empty stomachs.

Eastern Africa is facing the driest period since 1950-1951. Successive rains have failed, which has resulting in failed harvests, dying livestock and dying livelihoods. Large parts of Northern Kenya and Somalia are in the “emergency category,” one phase before famine. In some parts of Northern Kenya, one in three children is malnourished. Families who can eat one meal per day are the lucky ones.  And even with all the hunger in the Northern country, thousands of people are fleeing into Kenya from Somalia for hunger-related reasons. The population of Dadaab refugee camp on the border of Kenya and Somali rose by 18,000 people in just two weeks and now has a population over 380,000, even though it was intended to have a capacity of just 90,000, less than a quarter of its current capacity.

Map from World Concern Humanitarian Aid
detailing the extent of the food crisis in East Africa

It is not just the farmers and pastoralists in drought-stricken areas who are feeling the hunger pangs. In the past twelve months, food prices have risen 22.5%. Just a few weeks ago, there were unga (flour) demonstrations, as people took to the streets to demand this staple food be subsidized. Families can only afford enough unga for one meal per day and children go to hungry, scrounging around for mangos on the way school to fill their stomachs. Teachers have commented that hunger is negatively affecting their students’ performance and they worry over what will happen when mangos go out of season.

Yet here in the business class of Mombasa, this suffering seems far away. Sure, my co-worker, Jane, will click her tongue and mutter “so sad” as pictures of cattle which have starved to death and hungry children flicker across the screen, but the topic quickly passes as the news switches to MPs not paying their taxes.

If I had been in the US, it is unlikely I would have heard anything about these terrible droughts and starvation conditions. Though this may partly be due to my lack of any proper news source when I am away from my news-devouring roommate, Tara (who is amazingly writing for Times Magazine this summer), it is also a sad result of the regularity of this story. Even here in Kenya, or perhaps, especially here in Kenya, hunger and starvation don’t make the front page because they are so habitual. It is not news or a breaking story; it is life. And it is a part of life which seems to be is out of the control of the everyday Kenyan. Articles reporting on the hunger crisis mention the UN and foreign NGOs, like UK-based Save the Children, as sources of foreign aid which need to step up their act and save people. The problem of feeding their people may be beyond the scope of Kenyan government’s ability. Yet if they do not seem to make the effort to save their people and to put this news on the front page, how will the rest of the world respond? When starvation doesn’t make the headlines or make citizens take action when it is just kilometers away, how will we ever attain what is beginning to seem like an impossible dream of ending world hunger?

Packing Advice for the Africa-Bound

So, as some of you may know, my family is coming out to visit me in Kenya in less than a month. Well, they are more coming to visit Kenya than visit me. Or maybe they are coming to pick me up. Because they know that I might not come back to the United States unless they come to take me away. Either way, I am excited to have my family come join me in Africa. When they come, we will go on safari to all the major Kenyan National Parks, including Masaii Mara, Tsavo and Amboseli. Their arrival will be accompanied by a transformation of my own. I will transform from the savvy practically-Kenyan working girl I’ve been for the past month and a half, proudly saying “Mimi si mtalii,” (I’m not a tourist) “I work here. With Mombasa Water Company” to the clearly-a-tourist-riding-around-in-a-safari-van-wearing-a-big-floppy-safari-hat mzungu. So it goes.

My whole family is coming out, which means a Sajewski-clan family trip the likes of which we haven’t had in a year or two. It is hard when we start growing up. Our summers and school breaks used to be filled with road trips across the United States (taken eight or ten at a time), exploring the wild, wild West, or flying away to find food and fine art in Italy. Now, with my older brother working and my college breaks that don’t coincide with anyone else’s breaks and the “little kids,” as I have always called them, growing up, it gets more tricky to find all six super Sajewskis together. I guess that’s life. But it will make me appreciate our safari this summer even more.

I’m sure that they are excited to come and see me too. In fact, my older brother, Danny, even asked me for packing advice. So here it is, although, warning, this might not apply to non-interning-in-Mombasa-with-Seureca college girls.

Do bring:

A good knife. Your apartment will have a very nice kitchen, but the knives will be terribly dull. And you need something sharp to cut your not-quite-ripe mangos.

Sunglasses, even though most of the times when you are squinting in the bright sunlight and really need sunglasses, you will have left them in your room.

Nutella. Sure, they sell Nutella and peanut butter and all other sorts of wonderful bread spreads in the Nakumatt, but it is nice to arrive late on a Tuesday night and gleefully pull out that jar of Nutella for a bedtime snack.

Multiple notebooks. Because, knowing you, you will want to take notes about everything. And Luisa from IIP will tell you to keep a journal, which you will faithfully keep for about 2 weeks and then sporadically write that you should be writing more. And you will need a notebook for writing all the Swahili you are learning. And another notebook to take into the field and take notes with.

Lots and Lots of Pens. Every day, when you go to the office, you will lose pens. They seem to walk off to your co-workers’ desks or simply disappear. And eventually, you will be down to only two pens, which you will desperately hold on to because, without them, you would be stranded in a sea of inkless-ness with a strong urge to write in all those notebooks you brought and an inability to do so.

A Sewing Kit. Not because you will sew on buttons, because that would be too practical. But because you will accidentally stumble into the Old Town fashion district and find beautiful sequined medallions and want to sew them onto that simple, boring black dress you bought at the market for 350 Kshs (about $3.75). And then, when it is complete, you will feel like a fashion designer and be really proud of yourself, even proud of the needle pricks in several of your fingers.

Vitamins, of the chewy gummy variety. You will be cooking for yourself. At the beginning of the week, after your weekend shopping, you will eat very well, with all sorts of fruits and vegetables and milk and healthy things to balance your meals. But by the end of the week, you will always run out of anything fresh and be left with just flour and rice. And you will eat ugali and rice and be very happy that you brought along a tub of vitamins to keep you healthy.

Fun Going-Out Clothes. Even if you don’t go searching for Mombasa nightlife, it will come and find you. And you should be prepared in a fun dress and sparkly shoes when it does.

Friends’ Phone Numbers. Because you will discover that it is almost as cheap to call home to the United States as to call other Safaricom numbers in Kenya. And you will want to talk to your parents sometimes. And your friends. And you will lose all the addresses they gave you to send them postcards, so you will have to call them or write in your blog post that you need their addresses again (hint: Give me your addresses. Even if you already did, I can’t find any of them I want to send you postcards.)

Do Not Bring:

Shoes you cannot walk around on dirt roads with. Otherwise, on your first day at the office, when you choose to wear your tortoise-shell pumps to look classy, you will have to walk a few kilometers over bumpy, rough, muddy dirt roads to go to lunch and get terrible blisters and have to smile through your teeth when your co-worker asks you if you are okay in those shoes, because you know she thinks you are ridiculous. And then you will never wear those shoes again.

That floppy hat which your mom stole from your little brother so you could wear it out in the field. You will never wear it because it is a little too small and makes you feel silly. Plus, it doesn’t match your business clothes which are what you happen to wear into the field. And your co-workers will ask you “Where is your kip?” which you will eventually realize means “hat” and you will just reply that you didn’t bring a kip because you don’t want to break out the floppy safari hat.

Clothes that get wrinkled. Because, even though you were advised to hang up your business clothes as soon as you get back from work, you will inevitably fall back on your old ways and end up with a bed covered with a heap of clothes. And they will all get wrinkled. And your wearable-wardrobe will gradually decrease as clothes get too wrinkly for even you to wear, despite the fact you always promise to iron your clothes tomorrow.

Take Caution When Bringing:

A Ukulele. You will really enjoy having your ukulele with you. You will learn all sorts of new songs and finally get down the whole strumming-pattern-changing-chords-humming/singing-a-melody thing. But everyone who sees you carrying around your ukulele case will assume that you are a “musician.” And despite your protests that you are just learning and you can’t really sing, they will make you take it out and play them a song. And you will have no choice but to comply with their demands. And your face will turn bright red as you pick out the notes to “Here Comes the Sun” and then sheepishly put away your ukulele and run away. 

So that is my packing advice. I warned you it may not be very useful to everyone. But if you ever find yourself in my dusty (and wisely not high-heeled) shoes, this advice will come in very handy.  

"I don't know if it is Halloween or Princeton Parents' Weekend!"

It is nice being in a country where orange and black don't automatically mean Halloween. When I go out in my school-inspired favourite combination of colours, I get no odd stares or children coming up to me asking "Trick or Treat," confused by my choice of clothing and thinking gleefully that somehow their favourite holiday for consuming mass amounts of candy has come early. Today, I am wearing all orange and black and no one has batted an eye. Indeed, orange and black is very popular here. Just on the way to work this morning, I spotted at least five people wearing completely Princeton Pride (orange and black) outfits. It was wonderful. Now, of course, they may not realize that they are repping for Princeton, but I acknowledge it for them.

In general, people dress very colourfully here. Even the women selling mangos on the street wear brightly coloured kangas, which are patterned lengths of fabric in all sorts of colours, from purple and yellow to electric green and orange and are tied around the waist and worn as long skirts. (I will put up pictures soon!) Every morning, driving to work, I go kanga shopping. I look out the window at all the women walking by, some with babies slung across their back with a kanga, some carrying baskets upon their heads, and I choose which kangas I like best. This weekend, I'm going to Kongawea, a open-air market in Mombasa which sells everything from watermelon to used shoes from America, to buy a kanga or two of my own.


P.S. Some of you may be wondering why I have adopted British spelling. My boss here is British and has ensured that all the computers, including my new laptop, are programmed to use British English spelling, rather than American English spelling. I've had letters I've written handed back to me to correct because I wrote "program" instead of "programme." So it seems I have more than just Swahili to learn; I have to learn English too.

Different Differences

            One of the upshots to living and working here for several months is that I find out a lot about the cultural differences between Kenyan and American culture that I wouldn’t if I was just passing through. You can experience foreign foods, languages, fashions, and living arrangements from the background familiarity of your home by going out to eat, taking a language class, or surfing pictures online. But the more time I spend here the more I’m coming to realize that there’s a whole other set of less obvious cultural differences that you only begin to recognize when they manifest unexpectedly as you go about your regular errands, or pop up over the course of otherwise unremarkable conversations. In no particularly logical sequence, here’s a few anecdotes from the past five weeks that might help you see what I mean.

#1) I was out in the field with Kathleen and the Kenyan research assistant from our lab, waiting for the clouds to go away so that we could measure the photosynthetic capacity of sunlight passing though acacia trees of different heights. (Predictably, they never did leave and I was blessed with the opportunity to spend a bonus make-up day among my favorite plants). The topic of conversation was dating. Now, I’m far from an expert on Kenyan dating and marriage customs, and my understanding is that customs vary widely between different Kenyan tribes and between different geographic locations. I do know, though, that polygamy is legal in Kenya, and that while arranged marriages are less common now than they used to be, they still exist, and dowries are not uncommon in some areas.

            Even knowing these things, though, it was still startling when our research assistant couldn’t seem to understand why Americans consider it “cheating” to date more than one person at a time. He thought that it was quite reasonable to have three girlfriends at once, and told us openly that he had personally had 35 girlfriends over the course of his 40-some years—though his wife, he admitted, only knew about 15 of them. He was neither boasting nor confessing. In his community, his behavior was quite normal…for men, that is. The double standard came into sharp relief when we asked him how, given his opinions on relationships, he would feel if he came home to find his wife with another man. Chuckling, he matter-of-factly responded, “I’d kill him.”

#2) In Nanyuki (the largest town within reasonable driving distance of Mpala) fellow Princetern Alex Kasdin, one of her supervisors, Nancy, and I found ourselves being tailed by a teenager asking for food or money. 

Part of my Princeton crew, being tailed by a beggar in Nanyuki

           The kid stuck with us even after we shouted at him to go away, so we ducked into a local produce store to try and lose him. As Nancy headed through the door, though, I yelled as I saw the kid grab her Nalgene out of the side of her backpack. The kid tried to take off, but didn’t get more than a few meters before at least five local passers-by grabbed and began to beat him. One of the locals retrieved the water bottle and gave it back to Nancy, while many others gathered around and told us how sorry they were for the whole incident.

            I heard from several people that these examples of “mob justice” are common in Kenya. In a country that counts tourism as its second-largest foreign export (after tea), locals want foreigners to feel safe in their towns and cities. One person told me that mobs have even been known to beat thieves to death. I’m not sure that that really makes me feel safer, but I won’t deny that it felt nice to have so many strangers on our side.

#3) A short one, relayed to me by Princeton senior thesis student Bianca Reo (who, you might recall, is capable of doing pull-ups with African children on her back). Bianca was driving around Mpala with her research assistant, who is in his early twenties, when, she told me, “he asked whether blacks and whites go to the same schools and live in the same states in America.”

#4) Neither of the research assistants I’ve mentioned in this post have gone to college, so while I wasn’t expecting them, I could at least understand how each of them came to develop their worldviews. Our lab tech, John, though, is a university-educated ecologist considering a long-term career in academia, so the conversation I had with him a few days ago was particularly unanticipated for me. While we were both puttering around the lab, John idly asked me whether I thought I would get married in a church or in a civil ceremony. “Well,” I replied, “since I’m Jewish, I figure I’ll probably get married in a synagogue.” At first, John didn’t understand what I was saying—he thought I was saying something about being Israeli, which he knows I’m not. After I explained the difference between being an Israeli citizen and practicing Judaism (a word which John was unfamiliar with), John, a Christian, asked me to explain the difference between Judaism and Christianity. He was surprised when I told him that Jews don’t consider Jesus to be part of their religion, and was totally unfamiliar with the terms Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. In fact, John told me, he thought that Judaism was basically extinct—having never before met a Jewish person, he figured that Jews had all converted to Christianity. After I assured him that this was not the case, he observed, “I learned something new today.” So, I suppose, did I.

            I don’t mean to portray Kenyans as ignorant or naïve, or to portray their culture in a negative light. Almost all of the Kenyans I’ve met so far are wonderfully friendly and caring people, and even those research assistants and staff members who never even graduated from high school are far more knowledgeable about the local history and environment than the majority of college graduates in the United States. Furthermore, there are plenty of Kenyans both here and in the rest of the country who are perfectly knowledgeable about world affairs, cultures, and customs. I simply intend to try to illustrate how much we assume that people from other cultures know about ours. After all, if we were as familiar with rural Kenyan culture as we would expect Kenyans to be with American, no part of this blog post would seem remarkable at all.

Your Kenyan TV Guide

Being on the equator means 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness. Everyday. All year long. 6:30 to 6:30. The Swahili way of telling time is actually based on this twelve-hour schedule. 7am is saa moja, hour one, since it is the first hour of daylight. Similarly, 7pm is also saa moja, hour one after sunset.

As Jane mentions in her list-loving blog post, darkness by 7pm also means that I am home-bound by 7pm, or taking a taxi. It makes the nights pretty long when I have to head back from walking around the beach and settle down in the apartment before 6:30 to avoid being out after dark. So I have had to find ways to amuse myself on the long Kenyan nights.

I am still working on my Swahili and Kenyan cooking and I've been tuning up my ukulele skills (song recommendations are always appreciated).  But after dinner is cooked, I sit down in front on TV to consume my attempt at a Kenyan meal.

I know, I know, you wouldn't think that I should be watching TV. You are in Kenya, Elizabeth, and your Swahili skills are still abysmal. You should be studying. And, my mom is saying, didn't I send you with at least a few good books? You haven't even gotten up to the exciting part of Out of Africa yet! Yes, yes this is all true. However, you can also learn a lot about a country's culture through its TV programs. Take the US, for example. We love seeing doctors with drama and solving gory crime-scene mysteries, watching high schoolers learn important lessons through song and scandal and cat fights on "reality" TV.

Kenya likes gospel music, news and soap operas, mostly of the Mexican telenovela variety.

Although I get a few international channels (much more than I had expected), including my faves FashionTV and Style (just kidding) and NatGeoWild (the best!), I often fall back on the national Kenyan channels, including NTV, KTN, e.tvAfrica, and Citizen TV.

I now have the nightly TV schedule down-pat.

7pm: News on every channel, in Swahili. Usually, they are all covering the same stories. So if you miss the story on one channel, or want more details, just flip to the other channel. Also fun to learn, the main sports they follow are football (of the non-American, or "soccer" variety) and RUGBY! Woo rugby woo!!!

Oh Jose Miguel. So dreamy. Apparently.

8pm: Soap opera time. Each channel has its own, but my favorite is Soy Tu Duena. So much drama. Valentina is the noble, beautiful and strong protagonist, who runs a hacienda on her own and is whose only weakness is her love for the sought-after Jose Miguel. After some confusion, they break up, which causes great distress to both. But they joyfully reunite while sitting watch at the hospital bed of young Troy, a little boy who is in a coma. But then they break up again when Valentina has worries over what Jose Miguel has done with her evil harlot cousin, Ivana. There are side stories between the maid and delivery boy and Valentina's friend and the local store ower.  Leonor, Jose Miguel's conniving mother, and Rosendo, the evil former foreman of Valentina's hacienda, are the clear villains.

A wonderful and comforting thing about Mexican telenovelas is that you always know exactly who are the villains and who are the heroes. And even better, despite any interluding love affairs, you know that in the end, true love will prevail.

9pm: News in English. I understand this version a little better. However, even though all the reporters speak in English, a lot of the interviews are still in Swahili. Another opportunity to learn, right? My favorite is NTV tonight. One news story which has been really interesting to follow has been the Independence Day celebrations for the newly-created South Sudan. And since South Sudan doesn't really have any sort of economy beyond subsistence farming and is just coming off a long civil war, it should be interesting to continue to follow the development of this brand new country.

She spells her name the same way my mom does. Interesting coincidence. 

10pm: Teresa. So scandalous. Teresa is very seductive, but also a good catholic girl (of course). And she's going to marry Arturo for his money, even though she really loves Mariano. And then her friend had an affair with Arturo's business partner, Ruben and is now going to have his baby and also ends up being the nurse for his daughter, Aida, after she goes into shock when her fiance dies. And that's just in the first thirty minutes. It is so juicy.

Teresa plays with men's hearts all to achieve her greedy goals of wealth and power.
I bet her lipstick is called Vicious Trollop.

There are also a number of Kenyan soap operas, including Demigods, which is really good, and even American soap operas, like The Young and the Restless.

These soap operas are so juicy, it makes me wonder why I never got into them before. Maybe it's because they weren't on prime time in the US. Or maybe because I don't speak Spanish and here all the telenovelas feature wonderfully amusing voice overs. Or maybe it's because I don't have a TV at college. Whatever the reason, Valentina and her hacienda and Teresa and her intrigues are something that I wasn't expecting to find in Kenya and will probably miss when I leave.

Commercials also tell a lot about a country. A frequent theme in commercials here are problems we don't even consider in the US, like malaria and typhoid. Mortein Doom has a variety of amusing commercials featuring mosquitoes with jet-packs bent on spreading malaria.

Tune into Kenyan TV between 4 and 6pm or any time on Sunday, and gospel music is the rule. Which is a weird combination of large gospel choirs swaying back and forth and holding their hands up to the heaven and people walking around cities rapping about God. More on the seeming paradoxes of gospel music to come.


P.S. Blogging is so fun that this post is super long. Thanks for reading, if you got all the way to the end. Also, it distracted me from my cooking. Which resulted in over-cooked (read "burnt") ugali. So it seems my prowess as a Kenyan cook is still a work in progress. However, I did discover that "over cooking" ugali is a great way to make tortilla chips. Win. It is like one of those accidental moments of brilliance.

If Device Is Right

      After spending a while learning our way around the Caylor lab and bouncing between miscellaneous short-term tasks, my two fellow Princeton interns (Princeterns?) and I were each assigned an individual project to focus on for the rest of the summer. As I have possibly mentioned before, the Caylor lab group is working on modeling the hydrologic cycle of the dry savannah ecosystem, an endeavor that requires collecting data on several different subsets of the ecosystem. So for the next two months, Alice will be collecting data on vegetation, Kathleen will be collecting data on rainfall, and I will be collecting data on soil.

     

Alice (left) and Kathleen

       One of the major components of my project involves a lab experiment designed to investigate the way water percolates through sandy savannah soil. The plan is to fill six big plastic buckets with the savannah sand, pour water into the buckets, and then use a bunch of devices and sensors to track the water as it moves through the sand and out the drainage hole.

Sophisticated science in action

       I, with help from Kathleen and Alice, had a grand old time preparing buckets for the experiment. For a couple of weeks, our lab was alive with the busy and faintly dangerous sounds of three interns enthusiastically power drilling ports for probes, Exacto-knifing chunks of rubber to appropriate sizes for drain hole plugs, and hacking away at beams of old wood to make bucket stands. Remarkably and despite my best efforts, the first-aid kit was only required twice.

       For the past ten days or so, though, there’s been an activity lull as I’ve been waiting for all of the sand for my buckets to oven-dry. Since our oven capacity is limited, since all of the sand must spend at least 24 hours oven-drying, and since I have a crapload of sand to dry, this is taking a while.

       In the interim, I’ve been trying to understand devices. Professor Caylor seems to have a bit of a penchant for devices: soil moisture probes, infiltrometers, temperature sensors, isotope analyzers, water potential sensors, and so on.

      

            

A sampling of devices. Clockwise from top left: a datalogger, a Mini Disk Infiltrometer, the WP4 Water Potential Sensor, and an EnviroSense Soil Moisture Probe

       Where he gets them all, I don’t know. I like to imagine that somewhere there exists a device-buying bazaar where scores of tenured professors congregate, wending their ways among bubbling distillation columns, piles of gleaming glassware, and the flicker of a thousand Bunsen burners to haggle with small, crafty-eyed men over the prices of Dewpoint PotentiaMeters and Ground Penetrating Radar units.

Kind of like this

       Whatever their origins, a significant number of these devices get shipped to Mpala, and many of them have never been used. My job is to follow the step-by-step instructions to put them together, Ikea-style, and figure out what the heck they do. This is where the engineering classes I’ve taken so far at Princeton are paying off. Nearly every time I open a manual for a new device, I am astounded by how complicated, tedious, and confusing the material inside appears. “This is ridiculous,” I announce to myself. “I absolutely refuse to spend hours and hours rereading the same three paragraphs to try and decipher the impossibly obtuse scratchings of this clearly illiterate engineer.” But then my Princeton engineering conditioning kicks in and I find a way to Google and Wikipedia my way through it.

Case Study: My current device, the HYPROP

The HYPROP in action. Don't be fooled by its deceptively simple appearance.

       “The intended use of the HYPROP system is the measurement and determination of water retention characteristics and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity as a function of water tension or water content in a soil sample. “

       Answer: Use this device to find out how tightly different kinds of dirt hold on to water.

       To set up the HYPROP, you first have to remove the dissolved gas from several different water samples using a system of hand-operated vacuum syringes and tubes. The water must be left to degas for a minimum of two hours, but preferably longer. The manufacturers recommend a full day. Then you have to screw the two Tensiometer shafts into the base, but do NOT touch the ceramic tips with your fingers. Or let them dry out. Or let them come into contact with non-distilled water. Also, when you’re screwing in the Tensiometers, be aware of the pressure sensor inside the base: “It is very sensitive and must never be touched! It can be destroyed even by slightest contact.” Now saturate your soil sample for a minimum of 24 hours. And then put the whole thing on a digital balance connected to a computer by a cable, but be careful, because “even a breeze can move a dangling cable causing variance in the measurement.” Finally, let the HYPROP sit for a week to take measurements until it is fully air-dried, but make sure to check the data-logging software constantly, because it tends to go buggy and suddenly stop collecting measurements.

       And then you know what you get from this whole process? One sample.

       I’m plugging through on my own, but I miss my Princeton engineering team. You know who you are.

SIDE NOTE: The secretary bird is a large, mostly terrestrial raptor endemic to sub-Saharan Africa. It is the only raptor to hunt prey on foot, which it kills either by striking with its beak or trampling with its feet. It is by far my favorite African animal, and I wanted to share the great picture I got of one a little while back:

Blending In With the Locals

It has now been one month since I left home. By this point, I would have expected to be fluent in Swahili (Kiswahili as they call it here) and have been completely adapted to life as a Kenyan. Unfortunately (or maybe, as to be expected), even after one month, I still can't blend in with the real Kenyans. But I am making progress. For one thing, my skin has become slightly darker. Amazingly, this is not the aftermath of a killer sunburn, which I have been lucky enough to escape up to this point, but actually tanning/the re-population of my skin with freckles.

Unlike Andrew, I have never needed a special formula to get my freckles. Just sun.
And I've never tried to erase my freckles using lemon juice, like another of my childhood-book friends.

Despite my freckles and summer tan, people still call me mzungu, or white person, wherever I go.

I am also learning to cook a variety of traditional Kenyan dishes. One of my co-workers, Peter, says my efforts are good enough that I am worthy to go to his village and cook for his mom. Which basically means that I'm well on my way to becoming a good Kenyan wife. However, my parents' one condition for sending me to Kenya was that I don't meet a nice young Kenyan man and stay in Kenya forever. So don't worry everyone, I'm coming home eventually. But that doesn't mean I'll stop trying to be a good Kenyan cook. So far, I have learned to make ugali, chapati, and mcheche, as well as other general dishes.

Ugali is one of the staple foods in Kenya and is really simple to make:

Known as ugali to the Kenyans, I've also heard it referred to as polenta or corn mush, or as my boss calls it, white paste, which he says is identical in consistency to wall paper paste left out overnight. Needless to say, he does not enjoy ugali. I however do.

Boil some water. The amount depends on how much ugali you want. I've seen people measure 1 cup of water for 2 people, but Jane, my co-worker and ultimate authority on cooking Kenyan-style, says it's best to just eyeball it. Like all cooking here.

When the water is boiling, add ugali unga, which is maize flour. Again, eyeball it. It should get thick and not be at all soupy.

Kusonga the ugali using a muiko, a sort of flat wooden spoon which I'm sure at one point had a secondary purpose as a paddle to discipline children. Kusonga means to move or to mix, but it is more than just stirring the pot. You really have to work at it, especially as the ugali becomes more firm.

After the ugali is cooked, shape it up and put it on a plate. Serve hot, so when a new ugali-eater like me pulls off a piece with her hands, she has to play hot potato and toss the lump of ugali back and forth so it doesn't burn her hands.

One part of Kenyan mealtime which was very easy for me to adapt to is eating almost everything, including soup, with your hands. So I guess it is kind of convenient that I never became "civilized," despite all those years of Mom and Dad telling me that no one will accept me if I keep behaving like a heathen and eating with my hands. Or maybe I really was meant to be Kenyan.


P.S. Thank you everyone for your concern regarding my previous post. I am doing alright and currently experiencing working with the Kenyan postal service to get a package with things my mom sent me. So really, this is just allowing me to experience all different parts of Kenya that I wouldn't experience otherwise. It has also exposed me to the expert advice my friends/family have for "blending in with the locals," who are apparently all pirates. How had I not noticed?
Ponti: Have you ever considered an eye patch/wooden leg?
Aunt Karen: Maybe some cool face tats or a nose ring!