Zebras, Naivasha, Ugali, and the Rift Valley

 Over the past week a lot has happened and, until now, I haven’t had a chance to post anything.  After my last post we left Nairobi for the town Naivasha in the Rift Valley.  On the ninety minute bus ride I especially enjoyed the view when descending down into the valley.  Due to the current dry season (I’m assuming) most of the grass is brown and doesn’t hold the earth well.  Red brown dirt comes up into the air and tints everything you look at from a distance (of course everything you look at from close up in Nairobi is tainted by the dark brown of pollution).  From a viewing location complete with what vendors assured us to be authentic Masai artwork, we could see the wide and pan-flat bed of the valley.  The valley was brown dotted by green.  We drove down the two lane highway passing slow moving trucks carrying produce until we hit the valley bed.

Once in the valley the green dots revealed themselves as  trees.   The trees fascinated me because they seemed entirely ordinary despite being unlike any trees I had seen in the United States.  The trees aren’t tall, though, they hold their branches and leaves high up relative to their proportions.  The leaved area of the forms short, wide triangles, unlike the bushy , round tops of most western trees.  The trees feel ordinary because they looked exactly like the trees you see in the tv shows on African animals.  When you’re watching the tv they feel exotic and different but when you’re looking at them up close they look ordinary.  By the same token western trees, buildings, and people look bizarre and out of place here.

From where we entered the valley to the town of Naivasha we saw a few Zebras (which Kenyans as well as brits pronounce as ze-bras instead of zee-bras).  Naivasha is next to the entrance to Hell’s Gate National Park (which I really want to visit!) a large lake (called lake Naivasha), and also a bunch of flower farms.  The town itself has mostly unpaved, padded down dirt roads, although there are a few larger paved roads all of which are individually referred to by residents as “highway”.  For me walking through Naivasha’s streets was a heartening experience.  Every few blocks a crowd kids (usually ranging from age 4 to 11) would surround me and say “How are you?!”  When I answered “good, how are you?!” they respond “how are you?!”  Apparently their grasp of English was as broad as my grasp of Swahili.  The kids on the older end of the spectrum talked fluently in English about soccer and US culture.

Despite being a working class town Naivasha lacked poverty and had a vibrant and colorful market.  The lack of poverty surprised me because the main source of employment, flower farms, set up company villages and supposedly pay some of their workers only 100 shillings a day (80 shillings to the dollar).  In other words many of the residents are poor by US standards but seem to live full and happy lives regardless.  I’ll talk more about this topic in later posts.  I heard about the wages of the flower farmers from a news story pointed out by Sasha (she takes good pictures: ) about a protest by the workers against the low wages (I think it happened September 4^th).

We got back to Nairobi Thursday night and since then we’ve been learning how to use Matatus, to navigate the odd streets of Nairobi, and to cook fun Kenyan food like Ugali (ok not so much fun—you just cook and mix maize meal with water until it feels like hot play-do).  Today we visited Kibera, the largest informal settlement in Nairobi, and I will try to write another post on that either tonight or tomorrow night.  Ok, that’s it for now.