Long trips always feel like an ideal time to do a blog entry. Currently, I am travelling alone with a 7-hour layover in Paris (Charles de Gaulle airport). I am en route to Dulles, where I will be met by my in-laws, who will take me to Baltimore. This is normally only a trip that we do in the summer, and the reason I am going during this season is to help my parents make a significant move. After over 60 years in Maryland (I am not counting the dozen or more years they spent overseas), they have decided to move to Dallas, where my brother Jonathan lives and has a 'grandparent suite' available in his house. They are making a proactive decision, as nonagenarians, to move in with family as they will begin to need more assistance with things like shopping, driving, etc.
My role will be to help with the final end of the move, although most of the packing has already been done, and movers are scheduled for pick up this week. I am also organizing a farewell event at their church for friends and colleagues (from Hopkins) to have a chance to say goodbye. I will then fly with them to Dallas to help them settle in. (Hopefully, we won't have any travel disruption between Baltimore and Dallas next week due to flight cancellations.) I will leave from Dallas to return to Nairobi a few days after I drop them off. I have not seen my brother's place in Dallas as he only moved there this summer.
That is the view ahead, as I wait here in the airport. I do want to give an update on the past few weeks since our big October events (hosting the East Africa Rep meetings and learning tour). Since that time, there is, mercifully, not too much to report on the work front. We have been able to have some time in the office to catch up on reporting, grant disbursements, etc. We also regularly manage small issues that come up with our volunteers, such as re-housing one of them whose homestay was not working well. Of much bigger concern was the shocking election violence after the Tanzanian elections!
The Tanzania election violence caught all of us off guard. We have placed two one-year volunteers there (in Arusha), and we had no security concerns because Tanzania is so peaceful and stable. (Thanks to its founding father, Julius Nyerere.) This stability was shattered in the most recent elections, where the ruling CCM party basically shut out, through arrests and imprisonment, all opposition party candidates. The popular backlash after the elections was extensive and chaotic. The response by the government. was to call out the army and black out all communications (internet, phone, etc.) No one knows how many people died in the riots, but estimates are between several hundred and several thousand. This has never happened before in Tanzania, which was an exemplar of different faith and ethnic groups living harmoniously.
We lost contact with our volunteers for several days. There had been a curfew in the city where they were, and they laid low with their host families for about 4 days before returning to work and regular activities. At this point, the violence has subsided (the govt. is blaming the violence on external countries), but people are shaken and traumatized to see the change in attitude from the government as it has become more authoritarian.
Sometimes it feels like our job is more about managing crises than supporting partners in their projects. It is economically a tough year, as well as we realize MCC's budgets are flat, and we need to pare down our work and make hard choices about which projects and partners we can support this year. With other big donors like USAID and other bilateral partners also decreasing foreign aid, we can see the crunch people are experiencing.
Despite this, we have had some really nice family events the past two weeks. One thing we have all enjoyed doing is singing, and Rebecca, David, and I have done some recordings of us doing some bluegrass trios with banjo, guitar, and David's awesome voice. I am also happy to say he is being given some opportunities in his choir to do some special parts for upcoming concerts. Rebecca and I continue to rehearse with our community choir and are looking forward to some Christmas performances.
We do keep in touch regularly with Oren, and we are glad he will be coming to visit at Christmas. I will not see him during this trip since he is at Goshen College, near Chicago, and I will be in Baltimore and Dallas. His reports about college life have made us appreciate the wisdom he had in transferring. He is much happier there and is excelling in his accounting major.
The most significant event of the past two weeks was a camping adventure that Rebecca, David, and I undertook on a recent long weekend. Rebecca had received a recommendation to go to the Aberdares, a mountain range a few hours north of Nairobi. We booked a campsite there and talked to our neighbors, the Ungers, about going up with us to camp and to take a long day hike up Mt. Setima, the 2nd highest peak in Kenya.
They agreed, and we set out on a midday Sunday after church. Unfortunately, they forgot some documents and had to turn back to get them, so we did not caravan, but proceeded ahead of them. Things went well until we got to the base of the escarpment, where we had to climb (by car) up on a steep, washed-out switchback. We had a 4-wheel Land Cruiser that struggled to make it up, and we realized that the Ungers' car would not make it. We called them and told them they should not try, and they agreed.
Our family made it up to the campsite by late afternoon. It was far more rustic than we expected, and looked like it had been quickly assembled for our arrival. There was a seat with a bucket under it for a toilet, and a banda (small covered structure with only two pieces of tin roofing on it) where they had built us a fire. We set up our tents and started to make dinner. We found our camp stove was not working, so we had to cook everything on an open fire.
The guards who set up the fire left for the night at 7pm. We asked about wild animals, and they said the buffalo and elephants would not approach our campsite since we had a fire going. (not too much comfort, as we planned to go to bed at some point). But we did pass the night without incident.
One thing we noticed is that the path into the campsite was deep mud that could only be traversed in 4-wheel drive. The campsite ground was pretty soft and damp as well.
The next morning, we picked up a ranger/guide (armed for protection from wildlife) and drove to the trailhead of the Setima trail. The round trip was about 20 km. What we did not expect was that the entire trail was like a stream bed; even on the steep parts, it was a flowing stream. We did our best to keep our boots out of the deep parts while walking up, but it took a lot of effort and more looking down than looking around at the scenery. Nonetheless, the scenery was quite beautiful and reminded me of Kilimanjaro, with gigantic lobelia trees growing like some extraterrestrial flora.
About halfway up the trail, we came to a huge craggy wall called Dragon's Teeth. It was very picturesque and had a great echo. David sang a tune from the dwarves in The Lord of the Rings (Song of Durin) that had quite an eerie sound echoing off the walls of the rock face.
We continued on for a very long way. It was actually much further than we expected, and there were many 'false' peeks before you see the real one in the distance. By the time we were about 30 minutes away, we realized we were nearly out of time to walk before the necessary turnaround time. David ran ahead and got to the summit easily, and I followed a bit later behind. During the second part of the hike, the weather was turning, and we knew there would be a risk of afternoon rain in this short rainy season.
By the time I got to the summit, it was sleeting heavily, and we immediately began descending since the weather up there was getting bad, and we knew we had a 3-hour hike back. Long story short, it rained most of the way back down. Rebecca and David, who had 'waterproof' coats on, were drenched to the bone. I did better in my raincoat, which held up. All of us had completely drenched boots, though, as we threw caution to the wind on the descent and just hustled down the middle of the path. In some places I stepped, the water was over a foot deep and easily went into the tops of my boots.
The trip down seemed to take forever, and the whole hike was about 10 hours for us total by the time we got back to the car. We drove back in the rain, and it was still raining heavily at our campsite. We could not really go into our tents. Fortunately, the guards started a fire for us, and we were able to sit by it for quite a while and let things dry. We ate dinner and took off wet stuff around the fire. The rain slowed to a drizzle, and Rebecca and I slept in our tent, but David opted to sleep in the Land Cruiser. We slept well, had a good breakfast the next day, which fortunately was not raining, and headed back down late morning. As we expected, the rain from the night before made the trip down even more muddy and treacherous. We did eventually get down the escarpment and made our way back to Nairobi.
We debriefed with the Ungers a few days later and talked about how difficult the hike was. We concluded it was the adverse weather that made it so bad. Kurtis had ascended in the dry season, and it was nothing like what we described. It was not a bog. (I compared the whole walk to the scene where Atreyu's horse drowns in The Neverending Story--for those who are above Gen Z).
Other highlights of the week included David's birthday, which, at his request, was celebrated in a subdued way, with a dinner at Bang Bang, our favorite Thai restaurant. On the weekend, he also went bowling with several of his friends from school. So he did have some fun. Among his presents was a new putter, so I am hoping we can go golfing again in the near future.
Last weekend, I took an overnight on a Men's retreat that was organized by our church. I went for the first time last year so I was not the 'new guy' this time. It is good to get to know men at the church better. The retreat was at Brackenhurst, which is a beautiful facility that our family has been to in the past. A very restful place for a retreat.
The only other thing worth mentioning was several swim meets that David has been participating in as part of the swim team. So that is the news from Kenya.
Postscript:
I started this blog en route to Baltimore but have since arrived. One of the things I came here to do was to organize a farewell event for my parents. We did this on Sunday in the afternoon and held it at a large room in their church. I was nervous about whether the word had effectively gotten out to all of their friends, given that I was doing it all by email and relying on spreading the word through word of mouth and cascading through close friends to distant ones. The event went off as well as I had hoped. There were about 70 people, all told, who came and dropped by. We had a little program midway through to give people a chance to talk about knowing them. My parents have been living in Maryland on and off for 60 years, so they know a lot of people. The decision to move to Texas with my brother is prudent, but they will be missed here.
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