Nov 6 - Exploring Machakos

Sunday was my first day with no planned agenda in more than two weeks. Luxury!  Our only idea was to go for an afternoon hike in the hills around Machakos.  We went for a lovely long walk through the rural parts of town. Everywhere we went, we attracted attention. How could we not? We are a group of 12 “Muzungus” (White people)!  We were greeted with handshakes, hugs and smiles. It was really humbling to be strangers in town and to be so nicely treated where ever we went.

Many kids came running out to see us and they got the biggest kick from shaking our hands and having their photos taken. Thanks to the digital cameras, we could show them pictures of themselves right away. Their reaction was hilarious – they’d shriek and scream and point at the screen and laugh real belly-laughs.  Although they were obviously very poor (most had old dirty clothes and no shoes) they were the happiest kids I have seen in awhile!

There was one little boy who stole my heart. He was wearing patched jeans and a red plaid shirt with a crocheted cap on his head. He was more solemn than the others and winning a smile from him was a real treat. He followed behind us at a distance for a few hundred meters, before becoming brave enough to shake hands and say Jambo.

Here he is with some of his friends.

There was another little boy who had a home-made toy. It was a hoop and stick toy with a twist. The hoop was a brake disc from a truck and his stick was a bent coat hanger. He was a wizard with his toy and ran circles around us with it. Several of us tried to see if we could get it to go, but none had much success.

We saw coffee and bananas and maize growing behind these shacks in small terraced plots all the way up and down the hillside – it was beautiful. Here is a picture of a coffee plant with it's white flowers, and behind is a banana tree with a load of fruit.  

All along the road were goats that had been tethered there by their owners. The goats were eating and bleating, and nibbling at the sparse grass around them.

 






We ended up downtown after our walk in the hills, and then we made our way back to the hotel. What a wonderful, eye-opening yet relaxing day!

Nov 5 - Lake Nakuru National Park

Saturday was an amazing day of a mini-safari at Lake Nakuru National Park. Nakuru is about a 4 hour drive from Machakos, so we set out early at 5:30 am.

With a stop for breakfast in Nairobi at 7 am, we got to the park about 10:30 am. Lake Nakuru National Park is mostly know for 2 things: Flamingos and Rhinos! It is a beautiful National Park, set at the base of some volcanic mountains. The central feature of the park is Lake Nakuru. It is a “soda lake” which means it is so salty only one breed of fish has adapted well enough to live in it. The landscape around the lake is mostly forest and at one point we came across the most beautiful waterfall. A real difference from the savanna of the Masai Mara park.

 

We saw loads of Buffalo. Check out this mean old bull – He was nasty looking and smelled worse!  He had obviously rolled in the mud. The flies loved it! He was swarming with them. Ugh!

 We saw herds of Waterbuck up close, as well as zebra, Impala etc.  This beautiful doe was just beside the road. Her shiny wet nose was quivering as she took in our smells.

Then we saw what we had come for: a Rhino! They are very shy since they were hunted almost to extinction, and it is very unusual to get close to one. So when this huge White Rhino came over close to our car, we all held our breath while he passed by. There are only about 40 in the park, so we were extremely lucky! It’s not hard to imagine a Triceratops dinosaur roaming the earth when you see them.

 

After the close encounter with the rhino we saw pelicans. MILLIONS of pelicans all together! I have never seen so many of them in such close quarters. We were really looking for flamingos, but they must have gone elsewhere, as we only saw about a dozen. They were lovely with incredible pink and black colouring. A far cry from the ones I’ve seen decorating peoples’ front lawns! Hahaha.

 As we were preparing to leave the park, we saw lots of baboons. The mothers with babies were the most fun to watch and they groomed and carried babies around as if we weren’t there. One huge male walked over to the car, and gave a big yawning display to show us all his fangs and warn us to keep moving.

For a last treat, the park had something special in store for us: A Suni! I bet you have never heard of one. (I never had). It is the smallest antelope in the world – sized somewhere between a cat and a medium sized dog. They are extremely rare and it popped out of the bush at the side of the road. We all said, “What IS it?” and we looked it up in our game book to find out what I just wrote.

I gather I am one of only very few people in world to have ever seen one! And so I will share it with you!

Nov 4 - Community Service Day at Daystar University

We had a great day volunteering at Daystar University on November 4th. IBM's CSC team arrived at 8:45 am and were warmly greeted by the Student body president and our host for the day, Jarom. After a brief tour of the beautiful campus grounds, we went to the Sciences Building where we spent most of the day.

As we walked through the campus, many of the billboards had advertisements for our team! Richard gave the IBM Centennial -100 years presentation and then I gave a presentation on Watson, Jeopardy, and then Looking for a job and how to prepare and behave in the interview process.  It seemed to go over well.

Henriette presented on her career path and what it's like to work for IBM. Finally, Lotem did an amazing presentation. Nov 4th is the anniversary of when PM Rabin was assassinated in Israel. He reviewed the circumstances of his murder and then we had group discussions on democracy. Alot of the conversation in the group I was in was related to the upcoming elections of 2012 in Kenya.  Hearing the opinions of the youth in Kenya was amazing - they are optimistic, yet fully aware of the corruption in the election process. Jarom lost two of his teenage friends to the post-election violence in 2007. I can't imagine how that feels. We take our democracy in Canada and our election processes too much for granted.

We then had a great lunch hosted by the University, and headed back to the room for Speed Mentoring. 

We wrapped up the day about 5 pm and had some photos taken on campus. Bahram and I were photographed for the school newspaper!

We were each given a key chain each as a thank you gift from the students. Very inspiring day all in all!

Nov 1-3 - Interviews

Where do the days go? The last three days have been a whirlwind of interviews for our project. As part of IBM's Issues-based consulting model, we did alot of research in Week 1 and came up with some hypotheses. The next step was to put together a survey questionnaire and go out in the world of stakeholders to conduct interviews to test out our hypotheses. 

• On Tuesday we interviewed senior management, professors and students at various universities. We were based at the University of Nairobi. 
• I love being on campus - the energy, the atmosphere - there is just so much going on! Our first interview was conducted at the UoN FABLAB. Follow the link to learn more about it. In the FabLab thered were lots of inventions underway, lying around on the counters and floors - you could just FEEL the innovative atmosphere.
• On Wednesday we interviewed a few more staff and students from Kenyan universities, but because they were out of town we did our surveys by conference calls instead of face to face. The phone network was a challenge throughout the day and our phone lines kept getting cut off. The same for the power and lights in our hotel! 
• On Thursday we interviewed staff and students from various Research Institutes and colleges (Called TIVETS here). We learned about innovations being done in Agriculture, Medicine, Fisheries etc. Very cool stuff is being worked on in this country!

In terms of our MoHEST project on Innovations - great news - every one of our hypotheses was totally validated in each and every interview. Consistent answers across the board is a Consultant's best dream dome true. It makes the report so much more easy to write!

All three days were 15-18 hour days including the very lengthy commute to Nairobi. (See my blog entry from Oct 31st for details on traffic jams and pollution in Nairobi).

Tomorrow (Friday), the whole CSC team Kenya 4 will go and do a Community Service Day in Machakos at Daystar University.  Also, we're making team plans for the weekend. 

So stay tuned - more blogging to come!

Oct 31 - Happy Halloween!

Halloween is not celebrated in Kenya, so I wish all of you at home in Canada, a very scary and

Happy Halloween!!

At dinner, I shared some foil-wrapped chocolate pumpkins with the team to celebrate the occasion. 

Today we finally met the Permanent Secretary Professor Kiamba at MoHEST. He is a very personable man and the meeting was very productive.He had previously been unavailable to meet with us, because he was traveling internationally. He fully supports our approach to the project and we felt really good afterwards. On another note, Dr. Nyangate who was on our team has been reassigned to another project, so we will not be seeing him again in the near future. We are still working with two staff from his office on a daily basis though.

Have I mentioned the traffic in Nairobi?  
Oh la la! 
We left Machakos at 5:30 a.m. in order to get to our meeting at 8:30 a.m. Yes, that's right - three hours to drive 70 kms! And guess what? We arrived 15 minutes late! Luckily, Professor Kiamba was on "Africa time" and the meeting didn't start until  9:30. In addition to the total congestion, the cars and trucks have no emissions requirements. They belch noxious fumes and black smoke. None of the cars use air-conditioning so we drive with all the windows open and breathe the fumes all the way! Yuck!


 
We spent the afternoon working in Machakos, which is lovely and green and the air quality is much better!




Tomorrow we start our interviews to talk about "innovations" at several Kenya universities and colleges. Looking forward to it!

Oct 28 - 30 - On Safari in the Masai Mara

After settling into Machakos, we worked very hard for 2 days with our client, the MInistry of Higher Education, Science & Technology. (MoHEST) Then came the reward.... Friday we went on safari!!! 

We drove from Machakos to a National Park called Masai Mara in the south west part of Kenya. It was the inspiration for the Disney movie The Lion King. The trip was looong and the road was pretty rough, but after 9 hours of travel we arrived in our camp just outside the park. The safari company was great - dinner was waiting after they showed us to our tents. 

Now I don't know about you but I love sleeping in a tent in the rain. The sound of the raindrops, and this time coupled with the sounds of the African night. Birds, hyenas, elephants, cows, it was a symphony!

Early Saturday morning we started our safari when we entered into the Masai Mara park. It was immediately apparent that this place is like nowhere else on earth. We saw so many animals and so close up to our van it was incredible. The highlight for day one came about an hour into our drive, when we came around a corner and there was a huge herd of ELEPHANTS!  There must have been about 15 of them. After watching for a few minutes we were thrilled to see that there was a pride of lions (about 8 of them including a large male)

in the brush where the elephants were headed. The elephants were clearly disturbed by the lions and wanted them gone. They stamped, and trumpeted, and crashed around.... it was quite a sight. 





The lions retreated just enough to avoid being trampled but weren't ready to completely give way. After some more noise-making by the elephant family, the lions had enough and moved on! 







We saw so many animals it would be ridiculous to name them all. There is alot of talk in the park about seeing "The Big Five" Elephants, Rhinos, Buffalo, Lions, and Leopards. We saw all but the elusive Rhino. 

We went right up to a pair of cheetah brothers basking in the sun - I felt I could reach out and touch them. 









We also saw the leopard in a tree. I have never seen such camouflage. If you weren't looking for it, you would never have spotted it. We saw literally hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and we stopped for a walk at the Mara River where the wildebeest cross in the great migration. 

We didn't see any actually trying to make the crossing, but we saw the big fat crocs waiting for them in the river! And I was totally unprepared for the graveyard of bleached white bones along the banks of the river. It was a scary sight to see such a killing field. Here I am standing beside the Mara River with a hippo watching me on the near shore and a croc is on the far shore by the rock. There were several big fat hippos in the water too, staring at us and daring us to swim. No thank you!!! 

 

Later in the day we came across another family of elephants, and they were accompanied by a huge bull elephant. He was almost twice the size of the others. He saw us and slowly moved towards our jeep, snorting and fanning his huge ears. When he came about 25 feet from us, our driver slowly backed our car away from him. He kept coming towards us and we moved again. 
I was trembling and was quite happy to put more space between us. The elephant was very polite about it, but he wanted us to know who was boss and that we needed to give him room. What a day! we headed back to camp and all went to our tents early and slept well. I didn't even hear the elephants walk through camp that night!

On Sunday we went back into the park and saw many more animals. The highlight of Sunday morning was watching a lion family moving down a hill. There were 3 lionesses - two were obviously "experienced" from their scratches and scars, and one was in her prime. A shiver ran through me when she walked right in front of our jeep and looked up at us. Her eyes locked on mine and she silently spoke volumes to me in the few seconds before she moved on. I'll never forget her. She told me that I was just lucky that today she didn't feel like killing me, but she wanted me to know she could.......

Accompanying  the three female lions, were a rough and tumble set of seven cubs. They looked just under a year old, and were practicing their pouncing and rolling over with each other all the way down the hill. Right near us at the bottom of the hill was a fallen tree log. All ten lions stopped and sharpened their claws on the log - all at the same time. When you see those massive paws with inches of sharp, unsheathed nails, you really understand why they are considered royalty. The powerful lioness I was just telling you about took the job of nail-sharpening much more seriously than the others. Whew!  

On our way home, we stopped at a Masai village just outside the park. 

We were given a  nice welcome by singing and then the men sang and held a jumping contest for us. They were so tall and slender, and they could jump like gazelles! We went on a tour of the family's compound and went into a manyatta (small round low hut, made of sticks and held together by cow dung). Our Masai guide gave us lots of information about how his people live, and it was fascinating.  As an example, his father had nine wives and he is one of 38 children. All the Masai in his family either were barefoot or wore sandals made out of tire treads. Ingenious footwear!

On the way back to Machakos, we climbed out of the Great Rift Valley and because the sun was shining, the view took my breath away. 

The origins of man came from here! What a weekend!

Talk to you soon. I have to rest up tonight for a big week with the client.

Oct 26 - Machakos!

Jambo from Machakos!

Today was a very full day but a very fun one too. Today was the day we left Nairobi and moved to the town of Machakos. Because we weren't leaving Nairobi until 11 am, a few of us decided to sneak in an early morning visit to the Giraffe Centre in the outskirts of Nairobi.

Here are a couple  of photos!

Isn't she beautiful? Her name is Daisy.

After the Giraffe Centre visit, we hit the road to Machakos. It was a 2 hour drive to go about 75 kms.

Wonderful views of the African country side... I saw lots of Masai herding their cows and goats at the edge of the highway.There were lots of Matatus on the road - they are these vans (mini buses) loaded with people and the roof is loaded with all their belongings.

There is quite a lot of police / soldiers / security everywhere because of the heightened threat of terrorism from the Somalian terrorist group Al Shabaab. In the past two nights there were two separate incidents in Nairobi of hand grenades being thrown into public places. We are all fine, but we are told we are safe in Machakos.

The first official meeting we had when we arrived was meeting the Machakos District Commissioner Kobia. It was like meeting the Premier of Ontario. He was about an hour late for our scheduled meeting (Africa time.... again) and then he sat with us for about an hour.

Tomorrow the Client (MoHEST)  arrives in Machakos to work with us for the week. Busy heads down work time begins.....until we leave on safari on Friday! It will be our reward  for a VERY busy week. But the work is so different and so interesting and so rewarding....I wouldn't trade for anything. Any of you who have ever thought about doing something like the CSC, I encourage you to do it!!!

Kwaheri!

Jenn