bye bye Lewa...

--> Sunrise from Mt. Kenya

So this is my last day at Lewa. it has been an amazing time here, I wish I had the time to post what I have done in the last couple weeks but there is just not enough time. The last 10 weeks have flown by in the blink of an eye, it feels like it was only yesterday that I was sitting in this exact same spot filled with wonder of how my next two months would unfold.

For the next couple of weeks I am going to be backpacking around East Africa. Tonight I am taking a night bus to Jinja, Uganda where there is some of the best whitewater rafting in the world. From there the plan is to go to Kampala then Kigali, Rwanda. But who knows where this trip will take me. All I can say is that I am very excited to be on the next leg of my adventure, but very sad to leave Lewa, especially all of the amazing friends I have made here. I will have to make plans to come back to Africa and i am sure I will be spending many weekends in Toronto with the other interns from here.

Anyways I will try and keep in touch, if anybody wants to phone me my number is +254700930441 but i will have to change numbers along the way in the different countries. I hope everyone is enjoying summer and I hope that I will be able to post soon

Slight change of plans - a weekend at Elias' house

So instead of climbing Mount Kenya last weekend, we changed it to this weekend and for good fortune because I had the unique experience of staying at a local Kenyan's house.

On friday Sandra, Sean, James and I did a 30 km bush walk with 2 rangers, Nkori and Jacob. it was a real challenge, at first I really underestimated how hard it would be and I didn't bring food or water, what was I thinking? I guess I hadn't been out for so long before and I am used to working in the office or workshop, James and Sandra saved me by giving me bread and water. Anyways it was a real adventure, we were out for 7 and a half hours and we walked almost to the North end of Lewa and looped back. We were walking through many different ecosystems, Savannah, a tropical valley and a mountainous area. I couldn't imagine doing that every day like the rangers do, my legs hurt all weekend.

After the big adventure I met up with Elias, who is an electrician at Lewa and we met the first week I was at Lewa. He had been asking me to go to his house for a long time and I finally found a time to go. So we took the Matatu (public transit) to his village called Nkubu (http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=Nkubu&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl), about 1 hour ride southeast of Lewa.

You take a 45 minute drive from Lewa to Meru then about a 20 minute ride to Nkubu market. Really cool place, got to his house and it was pitch black, we had gone to the supermarket on the way and bought food, snacks, beer, wine and some meat right off the cow. Then got to Elias’, it is a small place and I was uncomfortable at first, but I really warmed up to it. We ate a really good meal of Ugali and a vegetable/beef stew. Soo good. Then some tea, then walked to his fathers/brothers place (crazy walk through the hills) and watched some soccer with his family and some of their friends.

Elias' family have are farmers and he showed me around his farm, his banana trees, coffee plants, mangos, papayas, yams, sweet potatoes, avocado, cassava, sugar cane and bees nests.

In the morning I ate breakfast back at elias’, eggs and bread and pb, tea, bananas. Then met his bro named Dennis and went to the “bamboo family resort” as they call it, which is a waterfall by the river that they own. We drank beers by the falls, took a bunch of pictures, picked and roasted some yams, then forded the river to go to get some miraa (small stems from a tree which you chew and it feels kind of like drinking coffee, it is very popular around here) from their neighbours.

Elias has 3 kids, Anna who is 18 months old, Megan who is in grade 3 and then Sylvester who is in grade 5 (they are about 12 and 14 years old). They are very good kids, very smart and study hard especially in English. Then we went back to the house, had a lie down and a really big meal of mokimo, which is a traditional Kenyan dish, it is very good and they gave me huge portions. Every meal except breakfast is taken outside in the front yard, cows are nearby in their pens and chickens are running around. Elias is trying to build a house but doesn’t have the money to finish it, he has been building for 2 years and he reckons he can have it finished in one year.

The family atmosphere there was amazing, so many brothers and sisters, kids, all hanging out together, helping eachother out, farming together. In the morning woke up, ate sweet potatoes, tea and oranges with Dennis for breakfast then went for a big adventure with dennis and elias. We walked down the valley, past some pineapple plantation, then down to the water, to a hydro project. They didn’t really know where they were going, we were just exploring, I was probably the only foreigner to go to these places in a long time. I fell in the water trying to get to the waterfall so i ended up going swimming in these big falls, they thought i was crazy.

On Sundays after church in Kenya, many people like to enjoy home made beer. Many home made beers haha. It is made with sugar cane, honey, and it is fermented with a certain type of bark, really good. After lunch we said goodbye to everyone and headed back to Lewa. Before getting on the bus we went to a bar with the family and some of their friends, it was really fun.

Anyways this is a bit of a long post but I wanted to describe this amazing experience. It gave me some different perspectives on life and the African people. I definitely recommend doing something like this if the opportunity arises. Now I am back at Lewa, working on the recycling project and planning my next few weeks here.

CANADA DAY

Polle sana (sorry) for the delay between posts, I have had a really busy couple of weeks.

I thought I would start with talking about what I have been doing volunteer-wise. So another intern and I did an "energy audit" on the lodges at Lewa and came to realize that one of the biggest problems here is waste disposal. At the lodges, trash is thrown into open pits and burned periodically. The end goal of my project will be to initiate a plastic recycling program at Lewa. The missing pieces of the puzzle are that many people arent motivated to separate plastics because it is just easier to throw it in a pit and that there are few recycling facilities outside Nairobi and none near Lewa.
The ideal solution would be to find a project in the nearby area that recycles plastic and would pay for it. There are some students from Harvard University working in Nanyuki to start a recycling program called the SAFI project and I have been in contact with them, we are working together to find a solution. For now it is necessary to educate people about recycling and work to find/start a place that can use the plastic. The other problem is my time here is quickly coming to a close! It has gone by so fast.

Last weekend was the Lewa marathon and we were busy all week putting up banners (never want to see another again) and doing random jobs to get ready for the event. Seeing all of the runners made me want to run a marathon or at least a half. What took us 4 days to set up was taken down in about 4 hours! A lot of work for a one day event. Then this week I have been organizing all of the plastic bottles used at the marathon (so many). Some workers, James and I went dump-pit diving for a day to recover some of the bottles that were mixed in with the other garbage and came out with 7 barrels (thats dedication). James ended up with juicy feet because there wasn't enough rubber boots for everyone, poor guy. When everything was collected we crushed all of the bottles by hand and put them in barrels. That took a couple days. A guy from Nairobi will come next week to pick up all of the bottles and pay 10 Kenyan shillings per kilogram (about 12 cents per kilo) and I think we have about 100 kilos, so we will make about 12 dollars or 1000 KSH, which seems small in Canada but is fairly significant over here. A used motorcycle here costs about 3000 shillings, which is 40 dollars Canadian.

This weekend James and I are climbing Mount Kenya! I am really stoked, we organized everything today and we are leaving tomorrow. At first we were going to attempt to do it solo but were convinced to get a guide. It will be 2 days to the top camp and then one day summit (3am start) and all the way back to Lewa. It is supposed to be really cold, around -10 at the summit with wind and some snow/rain, pretty crazy considering how close Mt. Kenya is to the equator.

Anyways happy Canada day! I hope everyone in Victoria ends up at the waterfront, enjoy some Molson Canadian for me.