Last week when I was on safari in Africa…

I know, I know, I am already past the expiration date of that phrase. Last week I was actually back teaching at KA. But, you know, while the shelf life of that phrase was short, it was a fun phrase to toss around.

In the last blog entry I focused on the adventures seeing the animals on the safari. While I have been to Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World, the San Diego Zoo, the Bronx Zoo and the Cincinnati Zoo, and have seen Tarzan films, there, of course, is nothing quite like seeing the magnificent wildlife parks in Kenya. In one park we walked through the park (there were no predatory animals there) and I was just a couple feet away from the giraffes and zebras. It was thrilling.

In this blog entry I want to focus on some of the stories and experiences from the more human side of what I discovered in Kenya. No doubt, the most unusual encounter with Kenyans on the trip came on Day 5 when we visited a village of the Masai tribe. This tribe is well-known outside of Kenya because they are a tribe that has welcomed tourists for a long time, showing off dances, tribal rituals, their homes, and offering their crafts for sale. This tribe is also well-known for their exceptional height, and brightly colored blankets with which they adorn themselves. The Masai is that quintessential tourist delight and dilemma—we wish to see something “native” and “primitive” but then we are “shocked” by some of their habits (they love to drink cow’s blood, they cut out their ear lobes and stretch them, the women construct their homes out of dung and mud, they send their teen-age boys out in the bush country to live alone and become self-sufficient). Whenever we travel abroad, we long to see something that seems to have missed the train of western civilization, but then, of course, we want them to speak English so we can ask them questions about their lack of flush-toilets. In the end, we got what we wanted, and paid for: oooooh, watch them do a war dance!; ahhhhh, step inside their incredibly dark and dank homes which are maybe 5 feet tall; hmmmm…those brightly colored fabrics are so festive; yikes, watch them herd zebras and elephants. And yet, several things made us laugh and scratch our heads: all of the teen-agers wore knock-off designer watches, a few had cell phones, one young man had a NY Yankees ballcap on, and finally, as Zeina bought a nice amount of merchandise at their crafts, a Masai young man gave her his e-mail address so she could buy more merchandise on-line. Good heavens!

So after the dances, and jumping demonstrations (the Masai are known for unusual jumping as they leap into the air, knees never bending, and ascending about four feet in the air), and visits to family huts, we were escorted around the corner and introduced to maybe 30 separate family-run booths offering carved masks, carved animals figures, and beaded bracelets. For being pretty primitive, they revel in a high-pressure form of capitalism. They haggle. I don’t like to haggle. I like to know the price, and then determine if I should spend money at that establishment. The way Kenyans typically operate is they give you a basket, encourage you to fill it with all your desired gifties, and then commences the haggling over the price. They said the price of my goody basket was 9800 Kenyan shillings (about $160). I said, “Here is the price I will pay—2500 shillings and no more[about $40].” They thought that was my low-ball offer. No, that was what I wanted to pay! Zeina said, “Oh dear, that’s not how the game works. You should have offered 1000 shillings and then you would end up at 2500 shillings.” Here is how good Zeina is: she said to one of the men, “Here is how the game works—you say it’s 10,000, and then I say 1000, and you move to 7,000, I move to 1,500, you say 5000, I say 1,800, you say 4000, now I offer 2,000, you counter with 3,000, I walk away, you call me back, you say, what will you pay, I say 2,500, you suggest 2,700, and then we agree to 2,500.” Those expert salesmen had met their match in Zeina. She robbed them of the game and explained the whole charade to them. She got her merchandise for what she wanted.

I tried, and got my loot for 2,700—not bad for a pasty-faced non-haggler.

Admittedly, I didn’t have much prior knowledge about the history of Kenya. In fact, what I remembered most about Kenya was that Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, is the site of the American Embassy bombing in 1998. I remember wondering when the news story broke about the bombing, I wondered if then-President Bill Clinton had fabricated the story since this was at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. That year the brilliant satirical movie Wag the Dog had come out and probably made many wonder if such tragedies might be staged simply to divert our attention. But then being in Nairobi, seeing the bunker that is the American Embassy now, made the tragedy much more real and searing than witnessing something on the evening news. Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for this bombing that killed 12 Americans and 200 Kenyans. It is still a fresh wound for the Kenyans.

Politically, Kenya was called British East Africa for about 85 years until it gained its independence in 1963. The richest and most populous of the East African colonies, Kenya was also the last to achieve independence. The British just didn’t want to give up the revenue of the lucrative coffee and tea plantations. Just so everyone knows, Kenya is bordered by Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, and Tanzania.

Tourists! Bombs! American Embassy! What other excitement might there be??

A thumbnail sketch of recent history: Beginning about 700 trading networks lit fire across the Indian Ocean between the Arabs, Phoenicians, Indians and Chinese. Then the European explorer Vasco daGama rounded the tip of Africa in 1498, and soon the Europeans discovered East Africa. The Portuguese built Fort Jesus in the 1500s to protect themselves from the Arab traders, and they held on to Kenya until 1729. For 150 years Arab dynasties wrestled over East Africa. In the 1880s Britain took Kenya, and created large farmlands, growing the tea and coffee that made East Africa so much a jewel in a crown. In the 1920s several tribes began to resist colonial rule, and demand land ownership rights and education. In the 1950s the Mau Mau revolt sparked the British Army to crackdown. In these years roughly 63 Englishmen were killed and about 11,000 Africans (a new came out in the last two months arguing that the British crackdown qualifies as a genocide). Finally, in December 1963 Kenya earned independence and installed Jomo Kenyatta as the first president. Thousands of Europeans left Kenya.

I asked Daniel and John, our drivers for the safari, “What do Kenyans worry about?” They enjoyed thinking about their responses. They decided that the two biggest worries are “crime and health care.” They didn’t say it, but a new friend of mine here at KA, a young science teacher from Botswana said that in the last 10 years AIDS has become a major problem for Kenya—over 15% of the population now is HIV-positive. AIDS has cruelly affected the life expectancy of Kenyans—statistics reveal the life expectancy in Kenya to be only 48, when it is 77 in the US.

I did a little looking on-line and found a consensus that recent challenges for Kenya have included many of the same things seen throughout all of Africa: the legacy of oppressive colonial rule, the residue of hard-won fights for independence, tribal conflict, corruption, struggling economies (besides the devastating effects of AIDS).

I learned that polygamy exists in all social classes in Kenya, and the custom of inheriting the wife of a deceased brother’s wife is common. This has been seen as a source for the spreading of HIV spread since the widow of a man who died from HIV-AIDS is usually infected and may infect her new husband who in turn infects his other wives.

Moreover, many Kenyans earn about $1 a day and live without electricity and running water. In Nairobi (by the way, Nairobi isn’t referred to as “Nairobbery” for nothing—it is a hotbed of petty crime, I learned) about 50% of the 2 million+ population lives in shanties that are grindingly poor. But John and Daniel see hope on the horizon: there is a presidential election in December, and since in the last 10 years there have been more than one political party, there see hope for their damaged country. Both John and Daniel said a major source of comfort for Kenyans is religion. They were quite proud to relate that roughly 75% of Kenyans are Christian.

My favorite story from the trip involving humans and animals came during a routine, quiet meal at our camp site. We were finishing off the meal when all of a sudden two monkeys jumped down from the trees above our primitive al fresco dining hall. Before we knew, two monkeys grabbed a box of English biscuits. However, we all felt superior, and as I recall, started laughing at the monkeys: silly monkeys they grabbed an empty box! As we laughed, another monkey jumped down by one of the women’s tents. The monkey grabbed Natalie’s purse, and pulled out her passport, waving it at us. We ran to chase away the monkey by the tent—yes, we successfully got the monkey to drop the purse. As we turned back toward the dining table, we saw a monkey at the table, and he seemed to be laughing at us. In his hand were the cookies, the real cookies, and not the empty box. We looked like fools! Did the monkeys purposefully create a diversion, so they could grab the cookies, and make us look naïve and clueless? It certainly seemed to be a choreographed event, reminding us that we humans can be trapped in a ruse by animals!

After we left the camp we went to a lodge. It had bathrooms in the rooms—a sign of luxury in Kenya. We stayed in little cabins with names on the doors. The names were so bizarre. The names were clothing items, and toiletry articles. I stayed in Soapdish, another colleague stayed in T-Shirt, and one woman stayed in “Tootbrush.” They forgot the ‘h’ in tooth. Down the way was a cabin with the serious moniker, “Bra.” What were they thinking?

I mention the cabin names in part because on the trip Zeina decided our 7-member safari should all have names similar to the Seven Dwarves. One colleague we named “Drunky,” because of his favorite activity; his girlfriend had decided not to shower for a week, and we called her “Funky,”; another colleague also decided that the un-washed smell felt very “Africa” and we labeled him “Stinky.” One of our colleagues, a flamboyant young man earned the name “Fruity,” and the occupant of “Tootbrush” we endowed with the name, “Toot-y,” and Zeina, a resident of the posh suburb Abdoun, I christened “Douny” due to her upscale tastes; and Zeina called me “Snazzy.” I think it is because the only long-sleeve shirts I brought on the trip (necessary at night to fend off the mosquitoes!) were dress shirts.

Towards the end of our trip, after umpteen nature walks, we returned to Nairobi for two days. We went to a Giraffe Feeding Center. The giraffes ate out of my hand! Fruity actually kissed a giraffe named Daisy. But the really meaningful part was seeing the dozens and dozens of school-age children, about ages 5 and 6, and obviously from poor schools, and watching them thrill to the animals at this park. Seeing children on a trip to a foreign land is a must—seeing and sense what the future of a country is.

On the last day I did what I think constitutes a great vacation—I had a massage at a spa (best $30 spent on the whole trip) and a wonderful meal. We went to an Indian place, and the food had such flavor—and heat. The food on the trip was unsurprisingly bland, and so it was fun to have the taste buds tempted again.

Maybe the best part of the trip happened upon the return to KA. After landing at the airport in Amman, I hoped I might feel like I was “home.” I did not, but that first day back, last Sunday, I was so excited to see my students again in class. They seemed happy as well to be back after the break. You can’t really fake that genuine excitement. It was a delightful sign that these students here just two months had touched my heart in the ways that are so psychically important for teachers.

The safari was a thrill, but that return to the classroom with these young charges of mine was the most moving part of the Break.