Sorry to break into what is turning into a pretty alright travelogue, but I’ve just got to share.
Do you know who Robert Bly is? Have you ever heard him speak? Few times in my life have I heard lines so moving and hilariously dark that I couldn’t remember (barely) at all. Honestly, usually I can pick out at least one of those vague metaphors meant to stir your spirit, to uplift or lie low the burdens of your heart, on your chest; the weight set comfortably across your shoulders and body. Nary once.

Tonight, Bly spoke for about an hour and a half, reading excerpts from a few of his books, and reading them well at that. Bly has an amazing gravity, supported by stoic eye contact, which was turned in my direction more than once. This happened often at what I felt like were critical moments, though this is equally his job as it is my perception (and perhaps a flattered ego). This, this is what people communicate with other for, that weighty, fleeting moment of sheer direction and focus, that glimpse into a world perhaps not so different from out own.

To accentuate these well stirred fires, I have been thinking a lot about writing, about what it means, the motivations and mechanisms behind the aguilar linkage of words and (often incoherent) ideas. These motivations seem to historically stretch from the romance of being immortalized to simple love of the words themselves as singular, well, words, for lack of an inspired articulation. However, it is the sharing of these words that gives meaning (of course, the order counts for something too). Anyways, here I am, late on a thursday night, again at school past 10pm, with a little bit of the sauce in my stomach from some great shared beers earlier, having listened to a ‘rock star’ of the poetry world, and cranking away on physics homework due at midnight (the very serious bane of appx. 30 students lives at the moment, though I feel like most have already finished….). What can one do but parry a bit?

Jam, fresh from the pot
dripping in sticky bits,
a sweet burning sensation
on open wounds, rifts of flesh
torn by the days work.

Numbers, cruising through
cuticles of the brain.
Push them back, lest
they grow too long.

Water spills over the edge
of an overflown sink, wondering
why no one moves to turn the over-size
paddles of a hospital faucet

and so form breaks down,
shattering into bits that splinter into our skin
sinking deep before blood wells like ideas,
running straight down and off the tips of hanging fingers.

Maybe I’m no good, but who says I ever was?
And maybe you’re not good, but honestly, that ain’t bad
until you’ve been asked sincerely to leave
But no one ever does, not around here.

And when the jokes are over,
and no one has stood;
none have left but one
but he has left for good.

Ian, RIP bud.

It isn’t much, but it’s a stab

-Peter

ps, I just found a picture framing a portion of the Burlington area phone book in my physics text. Creepy, it had a portion of a Lee Zachary’s and New England Wing ad, respectively. Page 952, Wolfson & Pasachoff’s Physics (with modern Physics), for the morbidly curious.

It’s odd how cinema has defined so much of Africa for me, and how many times I find myself thinking “whoa, just like in the movies”. It’s not a mental reaction that I particularly enjoy. I know this happens because film and television are the only opportunity I (and maybe you) have had to visit distant places and experience life outside our daily life. But I’m concerned about how deep the reaction is, and what weird echoes it makes in my experiences here.

Hell’s Gate National Park in Kenya, about two hours from Nairobi was the first place I stopped, several weeks ago. This is one of the only parks that allows visitors to walk, through scrub and brush and past gazelles. My companion for this portion of the trip was a Canadian bloke with a mutual concern about traveling on foot through the known habitat of carnivores. Early in the morning, as the sun began to beat down ferociously, we noticed the trees moving in the distance. No – not trees. Giraffes. High stepping and graceful. My first thought? “It’s just like Jurassic Park”

Which it was, I’m sure. The CGI brontosauruses rippling, lumbering movements were certainly copied from these animals. So now you know what these animals look like too, film creating that bridge for us.

Later in the week, I enjoyed the hospitality of several volunteer researchers in Kakamega National Forest Reserve. Working for Columbia University, they are tracking the behavior of blue monkeys and enjoying long hours entering data (and not nuzzling with primates, I was disappointed to learn. So much for my vision of Gorillas in the Mist).  That was some much-appreciated pasta, thanks guys.
Then, on the Kenya/Uganda border, I spent several days visiting an NGO whose primary aim is to identify which types of development interventions are effective. It was fascinating and encouraging to see some very dedicated, clear-thinking people involved in development. You can read more about the approach that they use (which is important and will be something I think about through school) here. The cinematic link: traveling with a program officer on his round of interviews through the Kenyan countryside, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had entered a scene from The Gods Must Be Crazy, even though that film took place in the Kalahari far from Kenya.

Crossing into Uganda, I found myself ill and got checked for malaria. The test was negative, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t heavy with a viral infection. I recuperated at the calm Sipi falls in the north, and then in the chaos of the capital Kampala. Taking advantage of my downtime, I visited the local ultra-modern cineplex and watched The Last King of Scotland. A surreal experience, watching a film about the very place you are visiting.

The country, of course, is nothing like the events depicted in the film. I did find myself looking for parallels as I traveled in the next week to Murcheson Falls National Park in the northwest. They are there (the parallels): rolling green hills, bumpy red dirt roads, poor health care. However, there was more. The people I met were unfailingly warm and intelligent, eager for conversation and well informed. The education system must be fairly strong, and based on the relative condition of the towns and roads, I’d say the government is more organized than in Kenya. All of these observations flesh out the impressions first given by the film; in fact, I probably wouldn’t have looked so hard for positive aspects if I had not watched Forrest Whitaker foaming at the mouth.

The highlight of Uganda was hitchhiking with a British family for a game drive, getting the chance to take in elephants and other fauna from the air conditioned environs of a hired car. Camping in the bush is also quite the experience, and dawn over the Nile would take some time to pay tribute to adequately.

I hesitated a few days before plunging down Uganda’s western flank. I have a number of activities and options available, but I decided to put these on hold and make a visit to Rwanda. In contrast to either Kenya or Uganda, I know a bit about the history of this place thanks to Philip Gourevitch’s difficult but well-written book about the genocide. That said, I am interested to see how my experience plays out, with Hotel Rwanda flickering in the back of my head.

I’m not sure if I am glad that I have film to contrast my real life travels with. Certainly it’s better to get some idea of what a place is like than to know nothing of it. But how many of these films perpetuate a simplistic or purely negative perspective about this area? This is certainly one of the chief complaints I hear from younger local people – what non-Africans know about the continent is that it is plagued by disease, famine, and civil war. Where are the positive images? The answer can’t be that there are none.

Will have a bit more to say about Rwanda after I’ve wrapped my head around the place. Any comments or suggestions or questions, let me know! I’m in a writing mood.

China may have a new property law – what might that mean? According to the Times and other commentators, this is part of an epic struggle between the rightists and leftists in the upper echelons of the CCP. In 2004, the Chinese constitution was changed to state that private property is “not to be encroached upon”, but this is hard to reconcile with other clauses which state that “all land belongs to the state”. (Xinhua via eNorth)

This law doesn’t address that directly, but apparently attempts to side step the issue by offering expanded compensation for land expropriation. This is really the key issue, because rural people have been left behind in China’s development, and the Party is now placing increasing emphasis on showing that it cares (primarily through Wen Jiabao’s statements). “Mass incidents” (riots) have become commonplace in the last few years, with the government itself openly acknowledging that

nearly 200,000 hectares of rural land are taken from farmers every year for industrial purposes, and more than 65 percent of “massive incidents”, or petitions and protests that involve a large group of people, in rural areas are attributed to land expropriation. (Xinhua, March 9, 2007)

The new law proposes to expand and standardize compensation farmers will receive for the loss of their land, but apparently remains mute about who really owns the land. In the part of Inner Mongolia where I do my field work, herding families all have “50-year” leases on their land. These leases give usage rights, and the right to some construction on the land, but are far from ownership. Furthermore, the system of apportioning land between families means that at any moment the local government can re-assign a chunk of land to someone else. This provides a serious disincentive to be a good steward; after all, you don’t even know how long you’ll have it! Here is where I find I have some conservative leanings: private property is likely a good thing for the environment.

p.s.
The Economist put it’s own spin on these event – their tone, as ever, crowing about the imminent demise of Communism and belittling all attempts by the CPC to improve the country as desperate last gasps. A minor note: you may want to think twice about believing what they write, since they mis-translate the literal meaning of the Chinese Communist Party 中国共产党: 产 (chan) here means “production”, not “property”, so the literal translation is the “Producing-Together Party”, not the “Public-Property Party”.

A 10 hour ride south and east of Nairobi brings you to the port town of Mombasa. This is *the* major port for this part of the continent, serving not only Kenya, but Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. Jeffrey Sachs uses the poor state of the road to highlight the challenges facing developing countries in his book The End of Poverty. The terrible conditions make life tough out in the hinterlands, because the country can’t build up it’s export industry. My spine agrees. Serendipitously, I ran into someone who lent me a copy which I re-read while wandering this muggy hot portion of my trip. I have a lot to say about that, but maybe later. Too thinky.

Famous for it’s intersection of African, Arabic, and Asian culture, Mombasa does not disappoint for someone interested in these fantastic corners where commerce and culture get all smushed together. But for the backpacker in me, the town is a bit un-beautiful. The buildings, while featuring genuine Swahili architecture in the old quarter, are for the most part cement bunkers. The streets are a bit meaner than Nairobi, and the sex trade is in full… uh bloom. Unless you have a genuine interest in the socio-ethno-economic angle, the town is a sweaty and somewhat uncomfortable letdown.

All the way six hours north is Lamu, a quiet island accessible only by ferry. Nothing is more relaxing than walking to the endless white beach, then spending the evening chatting with the rasta boyz who captain the wooden dhow fishing boats. My guesthouse, like most in the town, had a rooftop sitting area, overlooking the old port buildings. A dose of reality: Somalia is not far away, and the large refugee settlements on the road are a reminder of how close and real the rest of Africa is to this oasis. A businessman riding next to me on the bus had been gone for a few months. He was upset to see so many plastic-and-timber shanties on the road to Lamu; “they steal and rob, I don’t like them”. Three competing bus companies rode caravan style, and we encountered roughly ten checkpoints in the last hundred kilometers.

So, I was dissuaded from circling north to a town called Garrissa, and then into central Kenya. Too dangerous, everyone said. Too many Somali bandits and refugees.

Instead, I backtracked and spent a week with some friends in Watamu. A smaller version of Mombasa, it is mainly a resort community for the aging Euro set. Kind of a suburb of the larger town Malindi, which has so many retired Italians that there is a large imported Italian goods grocery store. Germans and Dutch, in paunchy, elderly droves also crowd the beaches. A waxing moon, more sand and sun, and some nice company. One highlight was a day visiting nearby Gedi, which feature the ruins of an as-yet unidentified Omani Arabic group that settled here in the 15th century. A friend introduced me to several Japanese artists who were living in an adjacent village, studying a local drum technique. After the mzee (elderly man) who leads the village passes away, his son will be the only person who knows this local art.

A couple of random threads I am following/thinking about: as always, tourist watching is interesting. Yeah, I have a bit of time on my hands. It is disheartening to see the overwhelming degree to which people use each other, the locals using the rich mzungu (foreigners), and the mzungu using right back. I’m interested in what it would take to make the idea of traveling vs. touring more widespread. Second, the lack of religious tension is refreshing. Similar to what I liked about Nepal, and what I have heard about Burma. One of my favorite moments was hanging out with Emmanual, a Christian, and Abdul, a Moslem, sipping on local coffee in some alley in Mombasa. Definitely a thesis in here somewhere (maybe: Cohabitation: the social and spatial dimensions of mutually accepted spiritual perspectives. Once you know the code words, academia is easy). Third, there aren’t very many old people here. Just looked up the life expectancy rate here: 47. Yikes. Fourth, it is about four times more expensive to call a local phone here than it is to call the US. Que pasa – everyone says corruption, but how does that work exactly. Beer is also unhappily very expensive. Last, I’m tracking the local disc scene wherever I go. Glad to see the sport growing (and happy to have a few chances to keep my throws from rusting over)!

Now back in Nairobi, putting together a plan for a trip west to Uganda. Hoping to spend more time on one of my goals – exploring the local NGO scene.

Sorry, the connection is too slow for pics. Kwa heri (adios)